Randall's Blog

I was living in Spokane WA on May 18th 1980. We had been hearing about Mount St Helens for a while but the news that Sunday was ominous. Ash was coming our way and we didn't know what to expect. All the really incredible damage took place close to the mountain. Many people were warned away in the weeks before the big blast so it could have been worse. Indeed, the ash we got was minimal but even in Spokane it was pretty dramatic. The sky turned quite dark and street lights came on as the ash started to fall late in the morning.

The mountain exploded early in the morning and the ash took several hours to arrive in Spokane so we had some time to prepare. I covered my beloved beetle, Felix.

The sky did lighten a bit and I even went out to collect some ash (which I still have).

Local officials really had no idea how to react. People had all kinds of crazy ideas about what the ash would do. In the end it was not that bad where we were. Some places got a lot more and that could take down gutters and cause other damage. It was heavy - it's volcanic glass, very finely pulverized.

In the summer of 1998 I visited the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument and that was pretty cool. It's still really barren around the mountain. In the foreground below there was a pretty hefty tree, snapped off like a matchstick by the force of the blast.