A friend of mine was taking care of a dilatometer on the bulge of Mt Saint Helens. After the mountain blew his boss asked him if he thought they could find it and salvage it. One of out junior scientist has Johnston Ridge Observatory named after him. He was on it when the mountain blew and his last words were something like "there it goes". He was in an area deemed to be safe but it was not. They planted a tree at the Menlo Park USGS campus in his honor and later cut it down to make way for a new building. I spent a couple of days near Sprit Lake a few years after the eruption installing a bore hole acelometerr array. Often the mountain would be in clouds and we would have ash raining down on us. The only way out was directly toward the caldera and then across the front of it to get out of the danger zone. The accelometer we placed at a depth of 100 feet failed shortly after we installed it due to being cooked by the heat.
