Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire This day in 1980..

..may have looked like this. The next day.. not so much.
Mount Saint Helens and Spirit Lake.

Urban legend has it that Judman has that bucks noggin hanging in his garage..

Been that long already?

Living "in the shadow" so to speak, of two active ones, I worry a bit about them at times.

Valsdad, yep I can see two from my house.

Forty years? Me an' Mount St Helens both looked better forty years back.

Remember it well, even though only 10 at the time.

Being a Pa hick kid, it was like it was in another country.
Sad to see, but it didn't affect us. Only later did I understand
the enormity of it.

The view today

Yep, I had a lot more on top 40 years ago too

Barely remember it Dan, was 5 at the time.

Jud
Were you guys in the ash fallout zone? We got it way the heck down here

Pretty smashing blacktail in that pic

Wow...... I remember that. Doesn't seem like 40 years ago, though. I remember the stories about getting everyone out of whatever size "danger zone" they had determined and one real old guy wouldn't leave. He ran an inn or hotel or something not too far from there. Had been there most of his life. He wound up as one of the dead. Then there was the famous picture taken from a different mountain top many miles away. Just as the thing blew. With a girl in the foreground of the picture falling over backwards from the shock of witnessing the entire mountain top blow off.

I recall the TV news, they thought that smoke curing out was a curiosity. Before the blast.

A wee bit of a shockwave..

I had hunted a number of places inside the shockwave zone... pretty amazing.

Was on Moses Lake shooting carp with a bow when it went.

I was going to wait until tomorrow to celebrate. May 18th 1980, it was Sunday though. LOL

I was in western Oregon. We could see the ash plume under the cloud layer. Dad drove us up to a place the Mountain is visible from. TV footage live was intense, especially the flow down the Toutle River.

A big event in our lives.

I was working at a grain elevator on the Willamette river in Portland when it blew. Had a very good view of it. Also had about 1/2” ash on my place in Gresham.
That was quite an event.
And some chap named Harry Truman refused to heed the warnings and rode out the eruption. He’s buried somewhere in the ash, mud and logs.

RIP David Johnston.

I remember it well. I was 9 years old at the time and grandpa and I were outside waiting for grandma and everyone else to get ready for church. I heard a faint “Boom” and then the news broke in confirming that the mountain had blown. I remember thinking that Harry Truman, the man that refused to leave his Spirit Lake cabin despite the inevitability of the eruption, was dead. I admired the old man’s resolve and orneriness even though it guaranteed his death and I remember saying a quick prayer for him and the others near ground zero. The winds took the majority of the ash in the opposite direction from our location so we were in no immediate danger but it sure was something spectacular to a 9 year old. By the weeks end (maybe sooner) we had a light dusting of ash on our cars but nothing like those to the southeast of us suffered. Jars of volcanic ash became the currency with which young boys used to barter and trade for baseball cards and bubblegum.

A couple months later my grandparents and I took off for our annual 2-3 week summer vacation. Driving through the area of the Toutle River I was in awe of the raw destruction and ugliness that was wrought on such a beautiful area. The years that followed and continue to follow have given science a glimpse at how fast Mother Nature can repair itself. It’s shown how resilient Mother Nature is and how adaptable the flora and fauna are in the face of such total and complete destruction.

a few weeks later at 20 packer ave , Troy NY 12180 phone (518)-283-xxxx , i noticed green/yellow fine powder on leaves. I told everyone this is coming from the eruption but none believed me.