On This Day in History

I was still living in California, farming citrus and working for a farm chemical supply house in the spring of 1980 when Mt. St. Helens blew it’s top, but ten years later I was living up in Washington State working with orchardists there growing apples, pears and cherries. I had married by that time and my wife and I lived in a little town south of Yakima known as Zillah. We were the proud parents of a one year old daughter and decided it would be fun to take her and go camping near St. Helens. The second day we were there we took a drive to the south toward the mountain. Working our way up a heavily wooded draw the road finally crested the south end of it and we were suddenly confronted with downed timber that ran for probably 30-40 miles, all the way up to the slopes of the mountain. Every tree had been laid out on the ground pointing in the same direction (north).

Literally millions of huge pine and fir trees looked like blown down toothpicks. It was almost like a giant hand had been waved across them from the south to the north. It was unbelievable. The shock wave caused by the eruption was said to have traveled at better than 200 MPH and whoosh, blew everything in its way down. Then came the ash cloud. The volcanic ash rose thousands of feet into the air and eventually circled the globe. The power of nature is hard to comprehend.

So here it was, ten years later and we received a special 10th year anniversary section in the Yakima Herald-Examiner that told many stories about that fateful day, May 18, 1980.

I’ll recount one of the more horrific stories here.

A young married couple from Spokane Washington both enjoyed being amateur geologists and for her husband’s birthday, the wife surprised him by chartering a pilot out of Yakima to take them up on Sunday morning, May 18th, and make one circumference around Mt. St. Helens which had been in all the news for the last several months since the old volcano was showing signs of coming back to life. There were flurries of earthquakes emanating from the mountain causing geologists to rush up there and set up instruments. Speculation was running rampant concerning the possibility of an eruption.

So here was this married couple, giddy about taking a close look at the newsmaker, along with their hired pilot, flying along on this pristine Pacific Northwest morning approaching Mt. St. Helens in a Cessna 172. The couple’s enthusiasm over being there, happily pointing out various things around and about the mountain to each other caught the interest of the pilot who was intently listening and following what was being said. He was hooked and wanted to hear more so when he completed the first fly-around he told them that for no additional charge, he would take them for a second circumference of St. Helens…

The little plane was just turning back to the south after crossing above the north side of the mountain when the couple excitedly noticed landslides across the north face.

Suddenly the mountain seemed to fall in on itself and then came an explosion of such magnitude that it blew a cubic mile of earth and rock sky high. The couple screamed that they had to get away or be engulfed by the shock wave that was sure to come. The pilot had enough sense about him to first put the plane into a straight down full-power dive to pick up as much air speed as possible. He then pulled out level and ran as hard and fast as the little plane could go to the south. If he had simply gone to full throttle, the wave would have caught them, but his maneuver was later confirmed to have saved them from sure death.

At the time the newspaper report was written in 1990, ten years after the eruption, neither of the two amateur geologists had been back up in an airplane of any sort and neither would understandably talk about what had happened…

There were many other stories. Old Harry Truman, the man that wouldn’t leave his home on Spirit Lake and died in the eruption comes immediately to mind. The effects of the heavy ash fall, Yakima and Moses Lake went dark in mid-day with street lights running. Hysteria took over in many locations. People, scared that there was poison gas in the ash cloud surrounding them, hunkered down and expected to die...

Volcanic Ash in Moses Lake Washington

As a monument, the National Park Service left all of the burned out vehicles to sit where they were parked next to the road on that day and erected a vista point where, from 20 miles away, visitors can look right into the north side crater. The plant life has slowly returned to the area and along with it came the animals to repopulate it. The mountain has since had many earthquakes and has even emitted smoke and ash on occasion, but nothing to compare to what happened on this day, 30 years ago…

Mt. St. Helens Eruption video with a personal account by a Yakima television reporter.