There's supposed to be a special on KING tonight at 7:30. Anyone going to watch that old footage? I still remember a lot of it. Especially the mudflows wiping out houses and bridges.

I mostly remember wearing a dust mask and doing killer jumps off ash heaps on my banana-seat bike.

What were you doing?

Riding my bike to TESC to play computer games.

Driving over Chinook pass coming back from camping. Closed down in front of us so we turned around and got stuck in the school for three days. Nice community as they fed us and brought everything you could think of for us to be comfortable.
Never forget that black cloud and my old man saying "that is one dark storm" A minute later it came over the radio that she blew. ten minutes after that it was like night. Ash falling everywhere.

In Yakima sitting in Sunday School wondering why the hell it got so dark, then driving home in a total fog of ash. Next day I recall a one arm man beating the tar out of his neighbor that was shoveling his ash into the one arm mans yard. Good stuff.

where i lived we did not get anything from the first blast. the wind blew the ash to us the second blast. never will forget the video from the news reporter trying to walk out and the hole of sun light getting smaller and smaller or the house floating up to the bridge and coming out as boards on the down river side. all the pictures did not do it justices you had to go and see the blast zone in person.

We were on our way up to my dad's cabin (Marble Mountain) which is about 5 miles south as the crow flies from St. Helens. We were some of the very few that got to enter the "Red Zone". Luckily, we had just made it out to about Amboy when the mountain blew that morning, makes a guy wonder if it would have blown an hour later considering that's how far we were from the mountain at the time... I probably wouldn't be here telling the story.

I still remember getting back up to the cabin and having 4-6" of ash covering everything! Tons of pumise of to 5" in diameter as well!

Keith

What I always find amazing is the fact that in under two minutes it went from the 5th highest mountian in Wa. to the 87th! Yikes!

That there is one mighty big ass explosion!!!

I was a Deputy Sheriff in Whitman County (Pullman). I got called in early because the mountain blew. We had to close off the roads going out of Colfax. I was stationed at the intersection of SR195 and SR.127. It was 3:00 in the afternoon, totally dark, and ash coming down like crazy. We tried wearing gas masks, but the filters plugged up too fast. We didn't know if that ash was going to kill us eventually - like asbestos. We ended up wearing those surgical masks, which didn't do much. It was tough convincing people to stay at the shelter in town. Most were good, some complete arses.

Later that night I had to make a blood run from Colfax to meet an Idaho State Trooper in Colton, a pretty long trip, but the ash was not as bad down South. I headed out and had to keep stopping to dump out my air filter, plus I couldn't see anything. Ended up making it almost to Pullman and the car crapped out all together. We had to do a shuttle between Idaho State Police, Pullman PD, and us.

I slept in the jail for about 4 days because travel was damn near impossible. We kept things closed for about 3 days. People were not too nice after being held up for a couple of days in a shelter, but we would have had some very serious problems with people stranded or worse, crashing into each other.

I won't forget it, that's for sure. I will never forget standing in that intersection completely covered in ash, thinking this is what the end of the world looks like; and worried that it was the end of our little piece of the world. We lost the engines in almost all of our patrol cars, worked 18 plus hours for a number of days. Thank God nothing serious in the way of crime happened.

I was living in yelm and driving to work in Tacoma and saw all the cars heading south on I 5 pulling over and thought what the hell when I got on the 38Th st over pass I then saw the biggest could i have ever seen .the second eruption i was at a girl friends in Edgewood another huge cloud. my brother took some pretty cool pics with his 35m on a tri pod off the top of his Van out off of Lawrence lake rd.

Was fishing for crappie off old the I 90 bridge at Moses Lake when we saw this huge cloud south of us. At first we all thought it was a thunderstorm. Then the wife came out and said “The mountain just blew." We went back to our camper and watched the most awesome thunder and lightning. I drank beer and read a book while the wife tried to catch an ash sample in a saucer on the hood of the truck. By 2:00 PM it was completely dark.
We were stuck at the park for three days. We spent the time at the ranger's house helping stranded motorist. We were taken out by convoy with water truck wetting down the ash for more than 30 miles. It was quite an adventure to say the least.
I walked to downtown Moses Lake the next day and it was strange. Not a soul out. Within 48 hours the Grant County sheriff had no operating vehicles. I remember the sheriff’s office coming on the radio and telling us that they could not respond. If we had a problem we should try to solve it.

Wow, killer stories here -- Vedder that's amazing!

I was 12, and living in CA at the time... I remember the news coverage, and getting a jelly jar full of ash sent to me by a relative who was in the area.

30 years... Feels like an INFINITELY long time ago.

fishing the barrier dam of the cowlitz. the alarm failed to go off at 6am. so we changed our mine on fishing the toutle... no lie. the crappy never reliable alarm didn't go off... again. so we stayed at the cowlitz.

Fishing off Ediz Hook with a co-worker. He said, "What's that noise?"
I said, "I don't know. Sounds like they are bombing Seattle."

It wasn't until late Sunday afternoon that I learned I was unfortunately wrong.

don't recall whether we caught fish.....but back then.....we always did

Brewer,
That's one of the best avatar's I've seen.Cool stuff,still remember being there and thinkin the "HAWKS" were gonna go down.Romo sittin on the turf crying was the best part.Good luck,
STRIKE ZONE

Here's another story I'll never forget.....

A friend of my dad's who operated logging equipment for Weyerhauser at the time was up Hound hunting spring bear that morning. I forget exactly where he was but it was up near the blast zone along the Toutle river area.

I'm not sure how many of you have hunted with hounds but the idea behind it is you chain your dogs up on the dog box in the back of the pickup and drive around waiting for them to "strike" a bear....

Apparently he had his dogs up on the box when the mountain blew. He was so close to the mountain that in the panic of the ash storm he raced like hell to get out of the mountains and in the process of doing so the heat from the eruption actually burnt the hair virtually off of them and the gas/ash/burns actually killed all but one of his dogs... Before he made it out of the mountains his Toyota pickup crapped out from the ash and he ended up walking out nearly 11 miles that day with a flashlight and spent 1/2 day in the hospital from all the stuff he was breathing as well. When he tells the story he still doesn't understand how he's alive to this day, he swore he was a walking dead man.....

Keith

Dave my brother in law was fishing Loon lake in Spokane at the time His story was very similar to yours said it got real dark and they made a be line for shore.the ash was starting to fall and it clogged the air filter on they rig before they made it back to town.Aim glad i didn't have to experience that kind of ash fall out,it blew the opposite direction.

30 Year Time Lapse of St Helens

Good thing. The Toutle wasn't open yet.

i think the toutle was open that day. some people i knew disappeared while fishing it. no trace ever found

Supposedly, there was a group of gawkers camped out on a ridge that got wiped out.

Their tents and remains were bulldozed over and it was hushed up.

There were quite a few people that were listed missing and never added to the total butcher's bill so the USFS and State Gov't wouldn't look worse than they already did.

Echoes of Fury by Frank Parchman is a good book on it.