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

We got a fairly signifant amount of ash in NW Montana. Enough to shut down logging for a week or two. It dulled the hell out of your chain.

I know that the ash fallout reached Manitoba -- big time!

The day was as hot as the hubs of Hades. I had a particularly miserable day because I'd forgotten my water bottle back in the truck and I was doing waterfowl inventories a LONG way from the truck.

That, combined with the fine ash covering everything mean that by the end of the day my eyes felt like they had been sandpapered.

I drank gallons of water when i got back to the truck, but I must have been extremely dehydrated because it took two more days to get over my headache, and my eyes took about the same time to feel normal.

(I suppose it took a day or so after Mount St. Helens blew for the ash to reach Manitoba.

I won't forget that day.

John

I don't think we took any pictures of the ash that hit our area, 1/8" or so IIRC. Damned film! Maybe because it was so minor compared to all the other impact that the eruption caused.

Huge blacktail. Almost looks like a muley.

I was roaming around out west that summer so I swung by to check it out in July. The very fine volcanic ash hung in the air longer and traveled farther. It was like talcum about 200 miles out. The trucks on the interstate kicked up clouds of it as they drove along. The heavier ash fell closer in. It was like very gritty sand.

We camped at a small, private campground about 60 miles from there. It was owned by an old man who had lived there all his life. He had originally opened the campground to cater to fishermen who would arrive for the annual Salmon run. A large stream passed through the campground. We were the only people there. The old fellow invited us into his nearby house, fixed us coffee, and showed us some photo albums with pics taken many years before. They showed men lined up alongside the campground stream catching Salmon. The Salmon run had long been a big event in his life.

He was fairly down about the whole situation. He was an outdoorsy type and the area surrounding Mt St Helens had been his stomping ground for his entire life,..and it was pretty much completely destroyed.

The stream in the campground was dead. It had been blocked by the eruption quite a ways upstream.

Very interesting, very friendly old fellow.

Ya quite a bitta ash, remember it being pretty dark, wearing handkerchiefs around our mouths, then later the masks like folks are wearing now. Hunted and fished around it quite a bit over the years, pretty amazing to see the transformation over the years

Harry Truman...volcano denier

Maybe not so much a denier.

But like today, he didn’t want to the nanny state telling him how to live his life.

I doubt that he thought it was going to explode like it did. Nobody did.

was a 16 yr old junior in high school.

I got out of school 3 weeks early....and spend most of it in the house driving my mom crazy. The ash made a big mess.

That deer has a helluva rack for May. Probably taken in September.

Incredibly beautiful scene though.

Andesitic composite stratocones can get bottled up like a prisoner with blue balls.

Get that crusty c um plug in there and BOOM, you got a jailbreak

I was in Yakima, Wa. when it went off. Lots of ash, complete blackout for the day.

I was in Pullman and I remember it getting completely dark in the afternoon and the street lights coming on.

Harry Truman---"that mountain ain't going anywhere, and neither am I"
RIP Harry.

My dad was piloting an L-1011 over St. Helen's just as it was blowing. I was 18 at the time, and when he got home I remember getting the full account.

We went to the Trans Am race in Portland in early June. Lots of ash - I'm sure the engines took a beating. I still remember Ken Wu the news person who was on television at the time. He got a lot of air time. We lived in Salem at the time and the ash did a number on our gutters.

I remember the sunsets—spectacular and then the winter that followed—-40 below for like 5 straight months.