Port Tack to Adventure: Mt. St. Helen

In 1980 I was Working at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory (now called Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) About 100 miles east of Mt St Helen. From our vantage we could see the rolling dark thick clouds of ash rolling toward us. The scene is like in the movie Triple X when Van Diesel sets off the avalanche to destroy the control center. The dark clouds coming toward us from Mt St Helen looked like the rolling snow down the mountainside, only they were black and dark grey instead of white. It was an amazing sight. We only got about ½ inch of ash in Richland, Washington because the winds were blowing toward the Northeast at that time. Towns like the city of Yakama were buried in the stuff. The devastation occurred on the mountain side and on crystal lake.

The whole scene is dramatized in the movie Dante’s Peak with Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton. The countryside around Mt. St Helen is the same is the movie (although the movie was shot in Idaho) and the movie show lava flows that I don’t think occurred in Mt St Helen, everything else is similar including the pyroclastic flow, a fast-moving current of hot gas and rock which reaches speeds 450 mph. The gas can reach temperatures of about 1,830 °F. Pyroclastic flows normally hug the ground and travel downhill, or spread laterally under gravity. They are a common and devastating result of explosive volcanic eruptions like Mt St Helen or Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Adrian and I went to Mt St Helen yesterday and hiked up to Windy Point, a small peak in front of the crater that was left after he top 1/3 of the mountain was blown off. The devastation is still there after 33 years. The following are pictures of how Mt St Helen looked before, during and after the explosion. And, How it looks today when we visited the site.

We would have liked to have gotten closer but we did not have time and we did not have special permission (not that they would have given it to us) to hike up to the crater.

View in 1980