[PLUG-TALK] Happy Mt St Helens day to all who celebrate!

[Russell Senior]

I was kind of distracted today, due to the Clinic, but I thought I 
should acknowledge that today was the 45th anniversary of the big 
eruption at Mt St Helens.

I'm interested to hear people's memories of the event, if you have them.

As for myself, I was just graduating high school that year, and had 
recently landed a job as a "Station Master" at the Washington Park & Zoo 
Railway, as it was then known and operated. I recall the excitement 
about the volcanic activity as it started that March and the uncertainty 
about what it all meant. I recall a group of my classmates and I driving 
up to Pittock Mansion that spring and seeing the east side of the St 
Helens cone black with ash, while the west side was still pristine white.

The day of the eruption, I was on duty at the Zoo station. I am pretty 
sure I heard the reports before I left for work, probably starting at 
10am. We'd heard no sound of the blast in Cedar Hills, near 217 and 
US26.  Ridership on the train that day was pretty light, as I recall, 
and I spent most of the day listening to the news on the radio in our 
ticket booth. The engineers were going down to the Washington Park 
station, overlooking the Rose Test Gardens, and would also bring back 
reports. Late in the day, as work was slowing down, I rode down on one 
of the trains and watched for the 5 minute stopover what I recall as a 
towering column of ash ascending above the mountain and blowing off to 
the ENE. Pretty freaking amazing.

The very next Sunday, May 25th, there was another eruption, only this 
time the ash was blowing towards Portland. I was back at the Zoo station 
and I spent the time between trains collecting the air-fall ash off of 
smooth surfaces. Maybe a measuring cup-worth, which I still have in a 
sealed glass jar. It is super-fine powder.

A few weeks later we got another shot of ash at night time, and I recall 
aiming a light up into the sky and seeing it all rain down. I think it 
rained shortly after and it all became a muddy, gritty mess.

Later that summer, July, I think, I was hanging out with a friend or two 
near what was then Cedar Hills Elementary School (now a rec center at 
Cedar Hills Blvd and Parkway) during a little league game and watched 
another gigantic tower of ash ascend to 70 thousand feet or something, 
visible even over the west hills, and very stark against the vivid blue 
summer sky.

In 1990, 10 years later, some of my cousins and an uncle and I climbed 
to the rim on the south side, on the Monitor Ridge route. We'd tried in 
the spring on snow, but the weather wasn't good, so we turned back. We 
finished the job in late summer, I think Labor Day weekend. The weather 
was better then, but it was still a little cloudy and scrambling over 
the boulders and then the last 1000 feet or so of loose sand was a bit 
of a slog.

There is an excellent program broadcast by KPTV for the 10th 
anniversary, produced by Lars Larson, available now on youtube:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00wzeeKTz5w

-- 
Russell