Day 5, May 18, 1980

St Helens in the peaceful early morning of May 18, 1980

Sunday, May 18. First sun finds the mountain still drowsing. I have decided not to watch it today, a decision that soon will seem like the quintessence of ‘wisdom’.

7:00 am. I had my breakfast in the warm sunlight, enjoying the casual talk with my fellow climbers. Nobody, after days of waiting but no sign of eruption, anticipated that the volcano was going to fly into rages.

8:27 am. The alarm at the Coldwater Ridge Visitors' Centre went off all of a sudden. We were, quite naturally, thinking if it was a false alarm again like the one yesterday. However, things that follow proved to us that we were wrong, far too wrong...

8:30 am Ash and steam started to be ejected off the crater of Moutn St Helens.



“Hey guys, the warriors seem to start hurling again.”
While making fun of the legend of Mount St Helens, the voice was interrupted by a great shock underneath our feet.

The 5.0 magnitude earthquake did it. Like ten megatons of TNT were dropped onto the top of the mountain, the entire mountainside falls as the gases explode out with a roar, heard from as far as 200 miles away. The incredible blast rolls north, northwest, and northeast at aircraft speeds. In one continuous thunderous sweep, it scythes down giants of the forest, clear-cutting 200 square miles in all. Within three miles of the summit, the trees simply vanish—transported through the air to unknown distances.



Then comes the ash—fiery, hot, blanketing, suffocating—and a hail of boulders and ice. The multichrome, three-dimensional world of trees, hills, and sky becomes a monotone of powdery gray ash, heating downed logs and automobile tires till they smolder and blaze, blotting out horizons and perceptions of depth. Roiling in the wake, the abrasive, searing dust in mere minutes clouds over the same 200 square miles and beyond, falling on the earth by inches and then by feet.



The failed north wall of the mountain has become a massive sled of earth, crashing irresistibly downslope until it banks up against the steep far wall of the North Toutle Valley. This is the moment of burial for Harry Truman and his lodge, as well as for some twenty summer homes at a site called the Village, a mile down the valley.


The eruption's main force now nozzles upward, and the light-eating pillar of ash quickly carries to 30,000 feet, to 40,000, to 50,000, to 60,000... The top curls over and anvils out and flares and streams broadly eastward on the winds.



The shining Sunday morning turns forebodingly gray and to blackness in which a hand cannot be seen in front of an eye.



In the eerie gray and black, relieved only by jabs of lightning, filled with thunder and abrading winds, a thousand desperate acts of search and salvation are under way.

As soon as I can, I get the airborne for a better look, and recoil from accepting what I see.
The whole top of the mountain is gone.

Lofty, near-symmetrical Mount St. Helens is no more. Where it had towered, there now squats an ugly, flat-topped, truncated abomination. From its center rises a broad unremitting explosion of ash, turning blue-gray in the overspreading shadow of its ever widening cloud. In the far deepening gloom, orange lightning flashes like the flicking of serpents' tongues. From the foot of the awesome mountain there spreads a ground-veiling pall.




A summary on the eruption of St Helens, 1980

Watch the video of eruption: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgRnVhbfIKQ