Gonehuntin: You asked for it.
My older brother asked a favor of me - to move his large sailboat from Lake Pend Oreille in northern Idaho to his new moorage near his new residence in Tacoma, Washington.
Off we go on Saturday afternoon to meet the crane which was to lift his sailboat out of the water and onto his large rented ($125.00 a day!) boat trailer which was now attached to my first VarmintMobile.
At the crack of dawn Sunday morning we met the crane got the large sailboat loaded and headed west to Tacoma on I-90 - we didn't get far!
We had no idea (radios off) that Mt St Helens had blown.
The ash cloud was tremendous (60,000' high!) and coming at us - we thought it was an incredible thunderstorm. Soon the heavy ash was upon us and visibility was down to 25'.
We turn on the radio and find out the volcano had blown and I-90 was closed!
We crawl off the freeway in 6" of ash and again no visibility.
LUCKILY we had taken an exit in downtown Spokane and ended up in a parking lot of a hotel.
We park and try to use the hotels phones (this was before cell phones) - no luck, the ash had shut down the phone lines throughout the eastern part of the state (taxington).
The street signals quit working and it was to dangerous to drive anyway so we thought we would get a room at the hotel.
We got the last room (for one night - we were hoping) and it was the "Honeymoon Suite"!
No problem, for one night, we thought.
Food service was then shut down in the hotel and it was deemed to unsafe to walk to a restaurant. We were distraught thinking our families back in the Seattle area were dead! The ash in Spokane was now going on 10" deep - and heavy! Nothing was running - planes, trains, automobiles - nothing.
Well the bar was open in the daylight so we had a few warm beers - power was going on and off!
The hotel was FULL of hungry angry worried drunk people.
I was due back to my law enforcement job on Monday - not to be - on Wednesday still no phone service but word had gotten through that Seattle and Tacoma and our families were safe!
Thank God.
The hotel has now run out of liquor to go along with no food service!
The ladies bowling tournament teams had the WHOLE floor below ours rented out and they were becoming aggressively sexually active to any lone male in the hotel - many of them had been reduced to running around in their undergarments - only a few were worth engaging though.
On Thursday the ash was near 18" deep on the level and still no trains, planes or automobiles allowed to move!
On Friday the phone service came back and one of the bowling babes who had befriended us relayed how one of her teammates had "run" the roadblocks and headed straight north from Spokane toward Canada and then headed west on Highway 2 and made it to home to Bellingham, Washington from Spokane!
We were running up $300.00 a day (lot of money back then) in rents and room service, black market surgical masks etc - plus our works were not happy with we being AWOL.
Frustration had set in - BIG TIME.
Saturday morning at 0500 hours we made our breakout move!
I "borrowed" a silk pillowcase from our room and I tied it around my Ford F-250's oil bath air filter to try and keep the ash out of the engine. As we headed north and around the roadblocks we encountered MANY, MANY dozens of burned out abandoned vehicles who's engines had apparently over-heated - many vehicles were burned out - a few still on fire!
We plugged along in 4WD through the nearly knee deep ash.
Finally after 90 or 100 miles we started to come out of the deep volcanic ash!
Thank God.
I eventually was able to remove the silk pillowcase from my oil bath air filter - and we thanked our lucky stars that I had filled up the first VarmintMobile with gas while we were waiting for the crane at Lake Pend Oreille - no gas stations were pumping.
Our route took us way out of our normal route and once over Cascade Pass on Highway 2 we were amazed at the absolute lack of ash.
The boat was offloaded at Pt. Defiance Marina in Tacoma and exhausted, hungry, worried and out from under the daily rentals we went home and ate and crashed!
I do NOT want to be around another volcanic eruption EVER.
Sadly we later learned many people had been killed in that eruption and its aftermath.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy