Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire May 18, 1980 - Mt. St. Helens blows...

I was stationed at Ft Lewis/ Madigan AMC in 77 and 78, and left Washington in early 1979...

In the service, some of the guys from the barracks use to go out on a weekend hike and camping trip...

Mt St Helens was a popular place for us...

Was living in Minnesota when it blew.... of course we had fall out from it but not like the Pacific NW...

we use to hike/climb up the mountain on weekends down there, it was a relative easy hike...

after it blew it was hard to believe that the mountain was 1300 feet shorter than it was in 77 and 78.

We lived in Salem at the time and were outside washing our cars when it blew. Heard the boom and thought it was a sonic boom. I remember cleaning ash out of the gutter later on. It was quite the chore. Went to a Trans Am race in Portland about 3 weeks later and it was tough on everyone. Any time a car went off track big plumes of ash wafted over the track and the spectators. The cars were running max air filters as the ash was very abrasive.

i remember that whole summer was pretty hazy

Being a flatlander from Kansas, I found the various visitor centers around/at Mt St Helens to be very good in telling the history. Spent the day there a couple years ago with time to kill on a work trip.

I was out on a tractor loading silage when I saw the darkness to the west. Thought I was going to get rained on but when I started brushing sand off my pants I quickly figured out what was going on. We pretty much lucked out because the edge of the cloud was only a mile to the south.

And yeah, that stuff was hell on equipment for the rest of the summer.

It settled on all the hay that was ready to cut so we washed it off with the sprinklers but that didn't stop the plume of dust from raising up in front of the swather and chopper.

We have a fair number of volcanoes out our back door that should they blow will make St. Helens look like child’s play. Mt. Rainier is a serious threat but Glacier Peak which I look at almost daily from my place is the one that I worry about.

Yep. That was the end of first grade for me. School was canceled for the remainder of the year. Spent about the next month indoors.

About a month before I graduated High School. I remember it very clearly. Still seems like a recent current event to me, though, rather than a thing of history.

Spent the morning on Moses Lake shooting carp with bows... Upside down thunderheads came from the SW and the lights went out. I had to wait several days to get back to school in Ellensburg. Had to drive north on back roads. Went to western WA soon after and got stuck in a later blow near Port Townsend.

Is this you?
[img]https://preview.redd.it/eswsql4yma0...97d4fc1a6c93734371996e2a7357b119646da947[/img]

I wouldn’t complain too hard…

3, maybe 4 days later - the ash fell on us.
Building condos at Los Alamos, NM.
Sure screwed up the painters.

I was stationed at Ft. Lewis also then, B2/75. I was there '78-'81. Don't recall exactly what I was doing that weekend, but some of our dudes were in the south Ranier training area and had to cover up with panchos. It was a wild thing, for sure.

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

Wasn't in WA, but rather over in ID. I was finishing up my undergrad at the UofI and the morning was great. Clear and visibility unlimited, cool without being cold, and calm. A great day for spring bear hunting. I was out east of Moscow north of Troy and spotted a good bear a longish distance away at the edge of a natural meadow that was bordered by an older selective cut stand. There was a slight breeze from the SW so I carefully went up through the trees on the ENE side of the meadow. I was in no hurry and was enjoying the day. With my M99 .30-30, I needed to get within 100 yards, but this was going to be almost too easy. There was a big black cloud gathering on the western horizon, which is where Moscow's crappy weather came from, but the breeze hadn't increased, so I still had at least an hour before things got wet. I was about 175 yards away when the bear stood up stared around it and took off for parts unknown. I knew it wasn't me that spooked it and I looked around. That cloud had gotten closer, a lot closer, but there was still no wind. Then dust started coming out if the sky and it got darker and darker, fast. I didn't know what it was but I trust the much finer senses of animals better than my own, so I walked back to my truck. I never go anywhere in the bush without a flashlight, and I needed it.
My truck was an old '69 F150 -- the last year of the real work truck, so it had a manual choke and throttle, oil bath air cleaner, etc. But the radio was broken and had been for several years. I drove home wondering if the silly buggers had finally started tossing the big ones. Because of the oil bath air cleaner and other work adaptations, the truck didn't suffer at all.
RB

RIP Sir.

We went to the Johnston Ridge Observatory late 2018. Fabulous. I was in first year University in 1980, I majored in Geology and that's what I do. Not Volcanology.

Guide talking about the eruption lived Vancouver Wa and saw te eruptions in the '90's.

Was very sobering to stand at the edge of the hot zone and be so far from the volcano.

Enjoyed that story, RB.

We were in Seattle and my wife had just had our first born a week before, on mothers day. The day the volcano blew it was just another day and I didn't know about it until I turned on the news. The second eruption I watched out the back window of a Seattle city bus on my way home from school. How can it be 42 years later?

No pictures but I remember it quite well. Too bad it didn't explode the entire state to melt everything through Oregon and California. The Smart ones would have known to leave in the dumbasses would have embraced the environment

The ash was hell on saw chains 25 years later. Depending on where you were in northwest Oregon some areas got quite a bit and the shiit was in the bark and washed down to the base of the tree. The Maples seemed to be the worst.