Explosions at Mount Saint Helens.
Mt. St Helens–thought to be dormant–shocked America when it exploded. It is an acidic volcano–the magma beneath is full of volatiles making it highly explosive.
See Also: A Dangerous Glacier Grows Inside Mount St. Helens’ Crater (2004)
H U G E California Earthquake coming this year.
Tell me I’m wrong?
Somethings afoot in western WA. We have almost daily quakes now. Enough that I got an app to track them and I’ve felt more than one or two in the past few months. 😬
You are not wrong, Monsieur LocoBlancoSaltine.
“We’re seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point”
^^^ Henry Waxman ^^^
We lived in Puyallup, WA then (we were both stationed at Madigan Army Medical Center). I was out walking our 7 month old son when it blew. It went on to blow a couple of more times over the next couple of months. The biggest problem for us was the ash.
WHEN I WAS A KID, I WOULD GO WATERSKIING ON SPIRIT LAKE (RELATIVES IN TOLEDO)..WE WOULD EAT AT THE SPIRIT LAKE LODGE. AND I REMEMBER A CRANKY OLD DUDE NAMED HARRY TRUMAN WHO WOULD COME BY OUR TABLE AND TELL ME TO FINISH MY FOOD..HE RAN THE PLACE..
..WHEN THE MOUNTAIN WAS ABOUT TO BLOW, HARRY REFUSED TO LEAVE, AND IS NOW BURIED WITH THE LODGE UNDER HUNDREDS OF FEET OF VOLCANO..
RIP HARRY
It would have been much worse if I hadn’t dug that relief vent.
By hand. With a shovel and pick-ax.
But saving the planet is just one of the things I repeatedly do …
I remember that day very well and the whole next week when we were all cooped up inside because of all the ash that had fallen and couldn’t go anywhere. Needless to say there were a lot of babies born 9 months later some of them named Ashley. It was a great week for my young wife and I pre kids, woo hoo.
I was but a lad when this happened, but I remember it well.
Several years later, I was in college, and had to take some very very specific job training. I can’t say what or where, as it would narrow my pseudonym down to a handful of people, even 30 years later. But it included some never released footage from Mt. St. Helens, taken by an unmanned camera that was later recovered. The camera was pointed at the mountain, looking up a dirt road, and the eruption was underway. A full size late 1960’s station wagon comes around the corner in to view, the driver frantic, careening wildly trying to drive 100 mph on a dirt road. The pyroclastic flow came up behind them, looking like a gray cloud, almost fog like… It touched the tail of the car and it was like it got hit by a truck going twice the speed. It tumbled like a toy and disappeared into the cloud, and the camera gets knocked down and the film stops. Hot as molten steel, and as dense as concrete. I was told the vehicle and occupants were never recovered.
Hiked the volcano after the fact from the Windy Ridge side. It was difficult to experience the absolute quietness. Walked through a pumice field that extended out of sight in every direction. Still have a piece of that pumice and a film canister of talcum-powdering ash in my desk. Walked the river bed afterwards. So odd to see only the peaks of houses sticking up from the hardened mud flow. Mother Nature is working at a scale way beyond our ability to control.
I can remember seeing Mt. St. Helens in all its glory (pre eruption) when I had a job working for the Columbia County Road dept. about 30 miles West of Portland in the Fall of 1971 and you could see the mountain clearly from across the Columbia River where I was working. It was a magnificent sight.
Cool photo.
That sucker is going to blow.
(I’m not talking about AOC or Obama either)
May 18, 1980, I was fishing in a boat in the middle of Lost Creek lake 270 miles from Mt. St. Helen, and heard the explosion. Didn’t know what it was until we got back to shore and turned on the radio.
My buddies and I went to San Juan Island to go SCUBA diving for a few days, and the second ash eruption occurred. We didn’t know if or when we were going to make it back south to Oregon. We did but there was a half inch of ash on I5 on the way.
Moved from Washington the year before it happened. There were always posters and post cards of Ranier(I could see it from where I lived) and St. Helens, and it was so weird looking at St. Helens with a gaping crater in the side.
But I guess the bitch is coming back!
@ Tony R FEBRUARY 19, 2021 AT 10:29 AM
I was 30 miles from the mountain when it erupted on Silver Lake in Cowlitz County on the west side of Waldon Island and had told my buddy the bulge seems to be getting noticeably larger. We had been fishing by Stan Fagerstrom’s dock https://www.bassfishinghof.com/inductee/stan-fagerstrom and then went over to the island to fish the west side and came out from behind the south end of Island and were looking at the mountain when it erupted.
We didn’t hear a damn thing, but relatives in Tacoma did and it was a tremendous blast. We spent about half an hour taking pictures and then went back to fishing the west side of the island and the fishing was very good after the eruption.
I guess we fished for about another 45 minutes when a Cowlitz County Sheriff boat came racing up and told us the mountain had erupted. We said we know we watched it go. He looked at us with a puzzled look on his face and told us we had to evacuate immediately. Why I ask and either you get your ass off this lake or you are going to be boarded and forcibly removed for your own safety.
So we reluctantly headed back to the resort and were going to have breakfast when he told us to pull our boat out, break down our tent, pack up our gear and hit the road.
We crossed the Toutle River Bridge on I-5 a few minutes before it was closed and a log jam took it out a half hour later.
There was a pretty good view of the eruption from the Nisqually delta on I-5 and a better view from Pendleton Ave at the N end of Gray Airfield on Ft Lewis where we stopped in to buy gasoline. We hung out there and watched and took more pictures.
I wanted to head up to Cispus in Gifford Pinchot National Forrest and hike up and get a better look after we got home but the roads were all closed.
I just turned 7 growing up just north of Seattle in Everett. My dad heard the explosion. We did have a small amount of accumulated ash in our area. The destruction in the immediate area was horrific. And she was supposed to be a saint….
Sat on my front porch and watched it blow sky high. First class entertainment.
What is really interesting is that while a tremendous explosion was heard as far away as British Columbia we really didn’t hear much of anything. The ash was an unmitigated nightmare in central WA. It was death on bearings and if it got past the intake air filter it would take out the rings and cylinder walls pronto.
We were too poor to have much in the way of vehicles back then and used a 69 Galaxie 500 for fishing and camping, it had a trunk you could put quite a bit in, and VW to go hunting because it was fairly off road capable.
So long as you kept the ash out of the crank case the VW was a fairly economical vehicle to go rockchuck shooting in ash covered central WA. They sold a set of pistons and jugs for not much money and we could tear it down in the morning and have it back on the road by mid afternoon.
We were able to get around central WA all spring by relying on the VW. W/o it it would not have been possible to do much shooting.
My brother went skateboarding as ash fell. We lived in Moxee City, Yakima, not far from Hanford.
JDHasty: Oil bath air cleaner was effective?
My future wife lived near Kenniwick at the time. They had to shovel ash off the roof to keep it from collapsing.
Look at all the amazing things that have happened in our lifetimes. The atomic bomb, the moon and Mars landings, the Tsunami, and a marxist takeover of America.
Either the Pacific Rim of Fire or the Dems will destroy the left coast.
Toss up which comes first.
The ash was horrendous.