Background
In early 1980 I began my career working for an electronic instrument maker in Beaverton, Oregon. That Spring, on March 27, 100 miles to the north, magma beneath Mt St. Helens began to move and steam emerged from the top of the mountain. Whether the mountain would erupt or grow quiet was a common topic of conversation on our local news and among my fellow engineers, but the activity continued on through April and early May.
In mid-May a friend of mine and I decided to go on a backpacking trip in Washington State to a trail along Ingalls Creek, about 160 miles to the northeast of Mt St Helens (see map below). Mt St Helens was still rumbling and steaming.
We both arrived at the trailhead in our own vehicles on Saturday morning, May 17 and hiked up the trail several miles where we made camp about 100 yards away from Ingalls Creek, which was swollen with snow melt; we could hear boulders rolling down the bed of the river, pushed along by the powerful current. We had our dinner, conversation and bedded down in our respective tents for the night.
An Aside on How I Unintentionally Unleashed a Doomsday Machine
In my tent, I had hung up one of my latest camping acquisitions – a small aluminum candle lantern, which was powered by a votive candle. In my mind this was an environmentally aware choice, avoiding the use of batteries.
The intent was to light the candle contained in this device to provide some light in the tent when darkness fell. Night fell and I lit the candle and secured the lantern to the small strap at the peak of the tent. The light it provided allowed me to arrange my sleeping pad and sleeping bag and to organize the gear that would spend the night in the tent. Then the time came to extinguish the lantern. It was at this point I realized what I had done.
The glass mantel around the candle that prevented it from being extinguished by a gust of wind, combined with the small ventilation and exhaust holes, rendered the lantern impervious to my attempts to blow out the candle. I reached up to grab it to take it down and remove the top and immediately realized that the candle had heated up the lantern to just shy of the melting point of aluminum. It was then that I also became concerned about the integrity of the top of my nylon tent which seemed to be sagging more than it had been earlier.
The lantern was an unstoppable doomsday machine – one that would consume everything around it unless I could stop it somehow.
I eventually found some gloves and socks that allowed me to take the lantern from its hanger whereupon I took it outside the tent, dismantled it and extinguished the candle with extreme prejudice. I never used it again, but kept it for many years as a twisted memento of the experience.
Night and Morning, The Next Day
With the doomsday machine rendered inert, I went to sleep to the sound of the boulders bouncing down the bed of the nearby creek.
My friend and I awoke early the following morning, Sunday, May 18, built a small campfire and discussed the doomsday machine from the prior evening. We then set about to cooking breakfast. As this was happening, we heard a distant “BOOM”. We looked at each other and noted that it had been some time since we had heard a sonic boom, and it seemed odd that one would happen since there were no air bases in the vicinity. We packed our gear and hiked back down to the trailhead where we had started the day before in order to head back to our respective homes.
We loaded our cars and started driving down the road to a small gas station to get some fuel. As we drove, I noticed the air was getting dustier and dustier. I thought to myself a storm must be blowing in and kicking up a bunch of dust prior to its imminent arrival. We pulled into the gas station and I made a remark about the impending storm and the dust to the attendant. He looked at me and asked incredulously if I hadn’t heard what happened.
It was at this point he told me that Mt St Helens had erupted at 8:32 AM that morning – just as we were having breakfast – in a massive lateral explosion, blowing 540 million tons of rock ash 18 miles up into the air and to the northeast – which was where we were! That was the “BOOM” we had heard!!
We filled our gas tanks and thought we might be able to outrun the cloud of ash by going north on highway 97 and then east on highway 2. My friend could then continue east and south to his home and I could go south to the Columbia River and then back west to Beaverton. This was not to be.
Holed up for the Night
We made it as far as Wenatchee, Washington where we pulled into the parking lot of the (now defunct) Eddie Mays Inn. As we assessed our situation, we determined that we should get a room there, otherwise we might find ourselves down the road sleeping in our cars in undesirable circumstances.
We spent that evening watching the news accounts of the eruption while periodically looking outside at the ash piling up on our cars. Eventually we called it a night and went to sleep.
We awoke the next morning to a grey world. The grey rock ash filled the air and covered everything on the earth. I went outside and scraped a bit of it off of my rear bumper into a plastic bag I had in the car. After breakfast, the ash seemed to be diminishing in the air so we each decided to try and make it back to our respective homes. My friend continued east while I went north and west on highway 2, eventually getting on Interstate 5 south near Seattle and then on to Portland, Oregon and home in Beaverton.
A Memento and a Look Forward
After arriving home, I took the ash I had gathered from my bumper and put it in a collectors jar, where it remains to this day.
The mountain continued cycles of eruptions for four years, eventually building a 1000-foot-high dome of lava in the blasted-away crater on the northeast side of the mountain.
Eleven years after the eruption, in the summer of 1991, I received a call from a good friend of mine who said he was planning to get a group together to climb to the top of Mt St Helens and he asked if I was interested! You bet I was!
It was on this climb that I became a member of an exclusive club. That will be the topic of my next blog post.