On May 18, 1980, I saw the eruption.
Today is Volcano Day. 30 years ago today Mt. St. Helens exploded, causing death and destruction like we have never seen in the Pacific Northwest.
At the moment it happened I was on the Oregon side of the Columbia River at Prescott Beach County Park near the mouth of the Kalama River. We were fishing in a small boat. I had my back to the mountain, and missed the eruption, but a friend of mine pointed, speechless, and I turned around. I saw a huge plume of ash boiling into the sky. It rose and rose until it was out of site– some 80,000 plus feet into the air. I realized that soft “thump” sound we had heard a few minutes before was the north side of the mountain blowing out.
We were scared. Would a lava/mud flow rush down the Kalama and flood the Columbia? We decided to end the fishing trip and go back to Portland. We also immediately thought of Harry Truman. Poor guy. He had to be gone. Luckily for us, we were southwest of the mountain, so the ash never came our way. But I had friends climbing Mt. Adams that day, the ash cloud passed over them as they clung to the glacier near the summit. Now, they were scared. Everyone was OK, though.
And that is my Volcano Day memory.
What’s yours?
I was driving a small truck eastbound on I-80N in Oregon which is now I-84. I was traveling with my brother and we left Portland early that morning at about dawn. We were listening to music from the
cassette tape player and sometime past Hood River I said, “Wow, it is really raining up north”, as it appeared that thunder clouds were everywhere. When we pulled over for gas in Umatilla, the attendant
asked where we were headed. “Spokane”, we replied. “You’ll never get there”, he said, “Mount St. Helen’s just blew”. Just before we pulled out, a Pick-up/Camper pulled in quickly, and what looked like
dirty powdered snow fell forward off the top down to his hood. Our first glance that day at volcanic ash.
Being naive about these things, we continued onward over the Columbia and north to the Tri-Cities. We drove thru Kennewick in sunny bright weather, but just as we were leaving Pasco, the sky started to
get dim. By the time we reached the area that is now vineyards, it looked like an early night sky with snow falling. A State Trooper stopped us and turned us around. We found one of the last rooms at a motel
above Columbia Park back in Kennewick and spent the night, thinking maybe Sunday we could continue again. Of course we headed back to Portland instead. Funny thing was, the ash never fell in Kennewick,
so we were just below the line of ash that covered Yakima and elsewhere.
The next time it blew, the winds had changed and sometime near 4th of July, I remember ash falling in Gearhart.