"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Wow. Thirty years. The first place I went when I got out on the west coast in 1993 was Mount St. Helens.

1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens

I've driven all around the site and got as close as the tourists were allowed to get.

[cliffordu]

1. I sat on a lawn chair drinking beer in a NW portland parking lot

for the entire afternoon and watched the whole thing- it was astounding. I thought we were all going to die.......

[Angry Dragon]

2. Just curious

Did you face that with calm??

[cliffordu]

4. Drunk and laughing.

Really drunk and lots of hysterical laughter.


Then we barbecued and everything seemed like it was going to be fine.....

It's odd - in the subsequent days and weeks we thought that the ash would ALWAYS be with us - Portland got an inch or two over the next few weeks (IIRC)....and it covered EVERYTHING.....

Now, of course, you'd never know anything happened....But for that afternoon, I thought we were truly fucked.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. There was a famous short amateur film...

captured by a guy near St. Helens that got hit with the ash cloud. It's 15 minutes or so long, and mostly involves him trying to find his way back to his truck in pitch blackness, thinking there's a good chance he could die before he gets there.

I can't remember the name of it, and searching Youtube didn't help. It's one of those videos I'm surprised isn't more famous.

[Subdivisions]

6. Is this the video you're referring to HFPS?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njV9ski1gB4

It's not an amateur, but I remember it and it includes the pitch blackness you mentioned.

[lumberjack_jeff]

20. Yes, Dave Crockett. n/t

[uppityperson]

7. Gary Rosenquist did the still photos,not sure if did vid, know what you mean. Funny things...

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/msh/catastrophic.html
Funny thing. I was given a set of these as postcards last week from a relative (distant cousin or something) of his that is a family friend.

Another funny thing. Johnson Ridge should be named another name except he traded the day with a couple who wanted to go to a friend's wedding. The couple had a kid in school with my kid, they were chaperone's when my kid's class did a weekend campout at MtStHelens.

Third funny thing. I spent the evening waiting for sib who worked manning the gates for Forest Service to let us know hat survived.

[Neron616]

13. I know the one

At one point, he thinks he is dead and in Hell.

[BrklynLiberal]

5. The company I worked for had people out there at the time...It was scary as hell.

We were told some incredible stories when they got back to NYC

[Cleita]

8. The ashes actually blew as far and somewhat beyond Spokane into Idaho. n/t

[stuball111]

12. It reached as far as southern Alberta..

I could see the ash cloud as I drove south from Calgary. When I got home, my truck had about1/8th inch of dust on it!

[tuvor]

14. At least as far north as Edmonton

Not quite 1/8" of dust on our cars, but some ash definitely made its way there.

[stuball111]

16. That's at least 1000 miles away...

stuff was hell on cars..

[gratuitous]

9. Missed most of it, out of the prevailing winds

Attending college in McMinnville, 40 miles south and west of Portland. But I do recollect a thin dusting of ash, and thinking that it didn't seem fair that everyone had to get it off stuff right frickin' now. Then they did a little demonstration of how quickly that ash became concrete, even sucking the humidity out of the air, and it wasn't so unfair anymore.

The other thing I remember is that on the Friday before, the newspaper had a good, clear photo of Mt. St. Helens from the March 27 eruption. The mountain had been quite symmetrical, and the photo looked like a big bite had been taken out of the east side of the peak. I was in a hucka boring class on Friday afternoon, and absent-mindedly doodled the picture in the margin of my class notes. The following Monday (after the Sunday eruption), I looked at my notes, and realized that the previous profile of the mountain was no longer operable.

[lynne]

10. Hats off to Harry Truman -

- I was watching videos of him this morning about how he wasn't going to leave and was sure the eruption wouldn't reach him. His body was never found.

[jobendorfer]

11. climbers on Mt. Adams that morning

I've seen photos taken by some climbers that had reached the summit of Mt. Adams just before Mt St. Helens erupted.
Mt. Adams is approximately 60 miles east of Mount St. Helens, so it's a fair distance away.
The climbers reported that within a few minutes of the eruption, the air temperature rose 20-30 degrees.
Within half an hour, they were dead-reckoning down the south spur by compass because they were engulfed in ash.

J.

[neverforget]

15. I remember going outside and finding a very light layer of ash

on my bike seat. This was a few days after the eruption but I remember it vividly even though I was 9 living in Glendive, Mt.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

17. I was up in Bellingham, but my kid's family was in Elma, Wa.

My grandson says he remembered being mad at his mom because she wouldn't let him go out and play in the "snow."

[lumberjack_jeff]

21. Funny. I graduated Elma HS in 1980

It was supposed to be an outdoor graduation.

Change of plans. Cram into the gym.

On a lark, on May 16th a couple of friends and I piled into a VW bus on a camping trip down the Oregon coast. In those days, there were no reliable radio stations in that area. On the way home on the afternoon of May 18th it got dark and started raining mud. We had no way of knowing what the hell was going on, and sadly, the bus was not equipped with a windshield washer either. :scared:

We stopped in Astoria to call home and found out what was happening. We were one of the last cars to cross the Columbia river before they closed it. It seemed to me at the time that the entire river was one huge mobile log jam. Logs from shore to shore. :yoiks:

[Nay]

18. We were covered in ash in Ft. Benton, Montana. Had to keep

wiping it off the cars. Has it really been 30 years??? Damn, I'm old.

[SeattleGirl]

19. I was living in Eugene, OR and had just

gone outside to get the Sunday paper from the driveway when I heard what I thought was a sonic boom. A few minutes later, I found out that what I heard was St. Helens blowing her top