..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.

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.

I was in Spokane finishing my EMT course with a required day working in a hospital emergency room at Deaconess Hospital. We were busy with ER cases when I heard some people talking about the eruption. We finally got a break at 3 PM and I stepped outside to see what the fuss was about. It was black outside with the street lights on and ash falling through the light of the lamps. We finally were done at 11 PM and I had a morning shift at 8 AM the next day at WSU Fire Department in Pullman. We headed south out of Spokane and got as far as Rosalia before a Washington State Patrol Officer stopped us and told us that the roads were closed and to go the Rosalia High School Gym where we could sleep on the wrestling mats. We got about 4 hours of rest before light. I got up and looked out the window. It was clear and sunny and the ash had settled enough for good visibility. I woke up my buddy and we headed for Pullman on a back road to avoid the billowing dust clouds that would kick up from any passing vehicle. I made it to work on time but it was a long day.

We spent the next week using fire engines and fire hose washing the ash off the streets and roof tops of the campus. It was a hot week and Pullman ran out of beer by Wednesday.

I went there with the DOE/EG&G Aerial Measurements Group a few hours post eruption. Unbelievable devastation and a real gut check on the force of Mother Nature. The data acquired debunked the "scientific theory of Nuclear Winter"


mike r

I was thirty miles away in Sunnyside. We could see the edge of the cloud but that didn't keep us from being dumped on.
I can still see that big black cloud coming down.

I had to go north through a lot of cement-like dust to cross the river at Wenatchee to go back south to Ellensburg. Following week I went to the west side to avoid the dust and was planning on going back over Snoqualamie Pass. Mountain burped a bunch of ash and I had to go back to the north again to get back to school.

Lot of wailing and moaning about the impending agricultural disaster. Within a few months ash was hard to find and the crops were incredible...

Sun was partially blocked and we had ash in Utah.

Forty years ago today, my younger brother @20 years old had been dead for a week, and buried for about three days. Dad had fallen and broken a hip trying to locate the burial plot in a very rural cemetary, in the middle of an apple orchard, in the dark.

And I had come home from my Uncle's ranch to help with chores on Mom and Dad's farm and to care for the three little siblings aged 12, 10, and 9.

I remember clearly thinking about how Brother had missed all the commotion of the eruption. He wrapped the drivers door of a 71 Torino around a power pole at 11:30 PM of Mother's Day on his way to work graveyard shift milking cows at a large dairy, apparently asleep at the wheel.

So each year we get a bit of a reminder.

And we even got a little ash down here in the Boise Valley.

Was on a week long fishing and camping trip in the BWCA just south of Canadian border. I remember the ash in the sky and the weird sunsets and sunrises. Found out what happened after we left and got to a gas station to get ice for fish on drive home. Does not seem like 40 years ago.

Merely an occasional acquaintance for me. Met him through a friend who was a volcanology grad student at the UAF GI. David and my friend Doug were best friends from college days. David was best man at his wedding. A couple of very smart, fun guys.

Dave Johnston

I need to get myself a few cool stories together like....December 1st 1955, I was sitting on a bus in Montgomery Alabama....

Y'all just jealous 'cause the only thing y'all have exciting is some Tropical Storms and maybe the occasional tornado........

Not cool scheidt like we have out here in the West, like 6.9 earthquakes and volcanoes, and million acre wildfires, and 7 year droughts......................


and juniper firewood!

I remember my cousin Tammy being on top of me around that time...

I was stationed at Madigan AMC during 77 and 78 at Ft Lewis...

a group of us use to go out on the weekends in the summer and hike up in the mountains...
one of the easy climbs was Mt St. Helen's....had been up on St Helen's probably half dozen times..

Hard to think two years later, the top 1300 feet on the mountain top blew up and off the rest of the mountain..

Think it was 85 or 86went back out to Washington, went down to St Helen's to see what was still see-able..

Saw lots of vehicles that had been fried to a crisp...on top of all the forest carnage..

I remember that old Character who didn't want to leave.. hard to forget his name, being the same as one of the Presidents...
Sad to think what it must have been like for him, when the mountain killed him...

Amazing, blew the top off the SOB

I remember billowing dust clouds behind every car.

We went to Rosauers to get groceries the day of and all the college students were stocking up on beer for their volcano parties. I'm surprised it lasted until Wednesday.