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

Sat May 24 16:45:07 UTC 2025

I remember seeing the full eruption from I-5 we pulled over and watched it.  My father took pictures that are probably somewhere.

In the months following my fathers company bought 200 small glass vials and an employee who I think probably owned a farm or something, took them all home and filled them with ash, then gave the company 150 which they printed up labels for and sent out as curiosities to customers.  I still have one of those along with another glass jar mostly full of ash.  (the employee sold off the remaining 50)   I think it's hilarious that today you can still buy ash from the 1980 eruption on Ebay.

2 years prior to the eruption I went and stayed for 2 weeks in the "doctors cabin" at Spirit Lake with a friend of mine at the time.  I've got many memories of sitting on the dock of that cabin and looking straight out over the lake at the mountain.  I used to imagine a big opening in the side of the mountain with dwarves and a fire breathing dragon inside the mountain - those were the days when The Hobbit had gotten really popular and we were all reading it.  How ironic that this was what was actually there, deep in that mountain.

There were no phone lines into Spirit Lake it was too remote - but there was a radio station over at Harmony Falls resort.  However, many years earlier some enterprising person had setup a telephone network of...believe it or not...old hand-crank telephones.  There was one at the doctors cabin, one at Harmony Falls, one at the boy scout camp, the girl scout camp, and the parking lot connected to the highway that accessed the place.  They had laid the cables right across the lake, the cables were on the lake bottom of course.

What you did was when you arrived and parked, you would go to the telephone and hand crank it the number of times for whatever place you were going to and 30 minutes later a huge launch would show up on the lake and collect you and your stuff and take you to the resort.  All except the Boy Scouts, they had a different way, the launch would show up, collect their stuff, and the boys would then have to hike 6-7 miles around the lake to the camp.

Harmony Falls had a genset that kept power going to certain things they had there, including the 48v battery bank.  Everything else everywhere else on the lake was run off propane that was the first time I saw an actual working propane refrigerator.

The doctors cabin was so that if someone fell and broke a leg or whatever, they would call the doctor and the boat would show up and take him to the victim who he would stabilize until LifeFlight or an ambulance would show up to evac them.   Apparently there was a lottery that doctors in the NW could enter for one of these coveted vacation 2 weeks at the lake.  Besides the propane refrigerator, the cabin had a water heater and propane gaslights.  I don't know where the water came from, probably piped in from a spring.  It must have had a septic system and leachate field somewhere.

I remember how clear the lake water was.  The soil/earth was pretty much pumice rocks with a think layer of biomass on that.

I've only been back once in 1990.  It was basically a giant Christmas Tree desert.  I've seen pictures that show it's reforested itself, and apparently you can still hike to the lake, but everything I remember is 100 feet underground now.  And from that view, the mountain is more of a rubble pile.

Ted

-----Original Message-----
From: PLUG-talk <plug-talk-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org> On Behalf Of Russell Senior
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2025 10:20 PM
To: plug-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org
Subject: [PLUG-TALK] Happy Mt St Helens day to all who celebrate!

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
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