St Helens, 1980 (all large photos from USGS)
St Helens was named after Baron St Helens, who accompanied George Vancouver in his exploration of the Pacific Northwest in 1792. They became first Europeans to record a sighting of the volcano, and Vancouver named the mountain after his friend, superceding the native Cowlitz and Klickitat names of Lawetlat’la and Loowit. I suppose Vancouver was just being friendly, but of it also seems just plain appropriate to name a volcano after a guy who would go on to lose everything in a fire.
I visited Mt St Helens this summer, and it was my favorite stop of the trip. Johnston’s Ridge has a great view. The landscape is still relatively barren 30 years later, and you can still see a few fallen trunks dotting the hillsides, the smaller of which are hummocks (and there is such a thing as a “cryogenic hummock“). Small is a relative term though – hiking around them, you’d never guess what they were.
The blast of ash from the 1980 eruption moved at hundreds of miles per hour, for a moment perhaps faster than the speed of sound. Two people fishing in Green River 10 miles away had the presence of mind to dive into the river upon seeing the looming ash cloud, managing to survive (their friend was not so lucky). David Johnston, sitting on that ridge about 5 miles away, would’ve had 90 seconds to take in that (perhaps) silent, apocalyptic wall of ash coming at him before being engulfed in it. (The danger of walking up to a mountain.) He’d agreed to take over temporarily for Harry Glicken, who needed to attend an interview that day. Quite the Big Bopper/Waylon Jennings incident (of which I first learned during X-Files episode 3×04).
Photos of the aftermath are surreal. The landscape looks much more “normal” now, though it look some lakes years to return to a healthy aerobic ecosystem.
Doing some reading after the trip, I found a nice visual summary of the eruption as well as Scientific American’s comprehensive multi-page account. I also came upon this strange tidbit that’s a weird counterpoint to the Krakatoan shockwave:
Superheated flow material flashed water in Spirit Lake and North Fork Toutle River to steam, creating a larger, secondary explosion that was heard as far away as British Columbia, Montana, Idaho and Northern California. Yet many areas closer to the eruption (Portland, Oregon, for example) did not hear the blast. This so-called “quiet zone” extended radially a few tens of miles from the volcano and was created by the complex response of the eruption’s sound waves to differences in temperature and air motion of the atmospheric layers and, to a lesser extent, local topography.
This is confirmed by the account of 20 year old Michael Lienau, who was part of a film crew deposited in the midst of the wrecked landscape to shoot some aftermath footage. They also report the anomalous silent eruption:
A three-hour shoot soon became a three-day struggle for survival. We stumbled in hot ash—eventually in circles, our compass rendered useless by magnetism in the ash and our contour maps made meaningless on the altered slopes. We were terrified and now hopelessly lost, when a second eruption of Mount St. Helens shook the ground. The atmosphere was charged with electricity, but it was deathly quiet. The blast rocketed over our heads to be heard by people 200 miles away.
Michael Lienau
…Broken trees lay scattered around me, one of them making the shape of a cross. I heard an audible voice say, “Michael, look up to your left!” It scared me, because no one was near. Minutes later I saw the blades of a rescue helicopter rise over the hill exactly where the voice had told me to look. We were saved.
His post-eruption experience turned into a conversion moment. Lienau says, “The government made Mount St. Helens a monument, but to me, it’s a monument of what God did in my life.” (The danger of walking up to a mountain is that you might end up working for Pat Robertson and Billy Graham?)