Mt St. Helens -- that's one AWESOME volcano

[CatWoman]

I watched a Discovery Channel special which showed the mountain exploding, blowing a huge hole out of its side.

Now the damn thing is grumbling again.

That's one MEAN volcano.

[Parche]

1. ASH HOLE

I still remember when i was a kid, and the mountain blew
and we had ash all over the yard
i still have a sample somewhere!!!

[NV Whino]

2. I missed the first blow

But I was in Seattle for the second, milder one --about a month later, I think. We all sat at an outdoor cafe and watched the cloud from Seattle. (The plane flew over the volcano coming into Seattle, it was amazing.)

[swag]

3. It is so cool

The hikes around the west-side visitor's center are just amazing, and the landscape around the east-side, well it's just still lunar and forbidding.

There are some underground lava tubes south of there, one of them called "Ape Cave", a very intense mile-long hike over boulders and up sheer walls (all the while holding a gas lantern).

And beautiful green hiking areas with spectacular scenes to the south of the mountain.

I was at the University of Montana in Missoula when it blew. Whole town was covered in ash, and school closed down for a week. Eeriest sky I ever did see.

[mrbassman03]

4. Damn mountain!

I guess it gives us stuff to talk about in Geology though...

[DrWeird]

5. I still remember it.

Woke up about 9 AM and it was still dark as night outside.

I was mad at my mom because she wouldn't let me go out and play in the gray "snow."

[CatWoman]

7. They showed how the ash blacked out the sun

it was so eery..........

darkness for miles around, and cars, everything covered in ash.

[DrWeird]

12. I don't know if they showed the infamous footage...

but there was one man who was too close to the eruption. His car got stuck or something and he had to hike down the road five or six miles. This was in complete darkness, no flashlight, couple of feet of ash, and he was slowly choking to death on the stuff. But he had a video camera with him and a microphone. He narrated the whole nail-biting hike out of there and you can here him talking with himself as to whether or not he's going to make it or die horribly. It was a bit like the Blair Witch Project, only real.

[CatWoman]

13. Yes, that guy was part of the documentary

Mindblowing!!!

[Tom Kitten]

6. I remember it

I never thought I'd see a volcano erupt, let alone one I had been looking at for ten years previously. Twice the ash fell on Portland, and that was a really lousy summer
.

[swag]

18. Count Floyd, is that the Oneanta Gorge?

That second shot?

[Tom Kitten]

24. Yes it is!

It's my current signature picture...It's one of my favorite places on earth! There are flowers in there you can find no where else...I took the pics there on a rainy day hence the foggy quality...Here is another I took a little further out...The mystique of this place just seems to draw me in...



The Columbia Gorge is one of my favorite places...
Here's another little picture...I'm sure you know this place!



I like to take photographs and I'm scanning them onto my computer, eventually I'd like to make some sort of web site...perhaps over the winter when my work enters the slow season!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Darn, if I still lived in Portland, I could see it out my kitchen window

Oh, well.

I had good reasons for leaving.

[politicat]

9. Was the ash good for the soil at least?

The silver lining on that cloud?

Pcat

[CatWoman]

10. You'd have to ask one of the others in this thread who live in that area

but they did note the lush vegetation growing -- especially in the areas where the lava scorched everything to bits.

Those fallen trees looked like toothpicks.

[DrWeird]

14. Yes, it was.

At first people thought the ash would destroy all the crops. But it turned out to be mildly beneficial. People in eastern Washington got several feet of the stuff and had a horrible time digging out. But after a few weeks you wouldn't have noticed anything happened unless you looked at the mountain itself.

If you drive up I-5 from Portland to Seattle you might notice these huge mounds near the side of the road at one particular point. That's where the snow plows clearing the freeway dumped all the stuff.

[slutticus]

11. I used to live near Mt. Hood...

..when I was little.

I was always afraid that it would erupt too...it's only a matter of time.

[swag]

19. Where did you live? Welches?

Elsewhere?

The fumerole is still going?

[shingashong]

15. Yeah, I have been watching the news here

and they are talking about the seismic activity going on there lately!!!

[Tom Kitten]

16. True Stories

My sister went to college in Spokane...When school ended for the year my parents drove up there on a Saturday to get her. They were planning on spending the night, but my Dad's gall bladder was really bothering him. (He had it removed a week later.) So they drove up, picked her up, and drove back that same night, getting home about 3 am. The date was May 18, 1980.

In June I went to a Grateful Dead show at the Memorial Coliseum with some friends from out of town. When it was over we were hanging out in the parking lot waiting for most of the traffic to leave before we set out ourselves...It starting to sprinkle but there was a definite smell of sulphur in the air...I felt my hair because it didn't seem wet, and it was gritty! The mountain had erupted during the show and the ash cloud had drifted over Portland...When we heard at about what time it erupted someone figured out the Dead were playing "Fire On the Mountain" at the time!

Yes, the ash did provide lots of nutrients for the soil...especially in Eastern Washington, the ash blew around there for a few years

Cool site with lots of pictures...

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/SlideSet/ljt_slideset.html

[DrWeird]

17. It was such a beautiful mountain.

They used to call it the "Fuji of the West" because of its symmetry. It was once the most beautiful mountain in the Cascades, and that's saying a lot. Some of my earliest memories of the outdoors come from picnics up on the thing (in a lime green VW Camper, nonetheless).

It's still a striking sight, although for entirely different reasons.



Spirit Lake before:



After:

[Twillig]

25. Yes, St. Helens was one helluva good looking Mt.

Much better than the stocky Ranier and Adams.

'Course as an Oregonian I always liked Mt. Jefferson better.



Mt. Mcloughlin is a good one too...



Mt. Theilsen is hella cool. Looks like it went boom too. (Not that I know jack about geology etc. Reading the usgs info might help!)



Surely Californians dig Shasta the most.

[scottcsmith]

20. I lived in Vancouver, WA when St. Helens erupted

Vancouver is probably a couple of hours away from Mt. St. Helens. We got covered in ash. It was quite the sight to see.

[MisterP]

21. I remember a reporter being helicoptered to the site and was awed

at the devastation--no life left, gullied and eroded like Ethiopian farmland, destruction as far as the eye could see. The hadn't reached the mountain by far; it was a logged clear-cut!

[ironflange]

22. We got some ash in Calgary

But only a very thin sprinkling. You could see it on the cars.

In the summer of '03, we spent three weeks in Oregon & Washington visiting all the volcanoes we could. The winner? Crater Lake, it was absolutely overwhelming to see what happened to that mountain. St Helens was a mere firecracker compared to Mazama. We dug some big hunks of pumice out of a ditch near there, chances are that's where they came from. Also brought home some nice obsidian from the Medicine Lake area.

[Zero Division]

23. News on the grumbling: "Mount St. Helens Notice of Volcanic Unrest "

http://www.pnsn.org/NEWS/PRESS_RELEASES/MSH_09_2004.html

"Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has changed significantly during the past 24 hours and the changes make us believe that there is an increased likelihood of a hazardous event, which warrants release of this Notice of Volcanic Unrest. The swarm of very small, shallow earthquakes (less than Magnitude 1) that began on the morning of 23 September peaked about mid-day on 24 September and slowly declined through yesterday morning. However, since then the character of the swarm has changed to include more than ten larger earthquakes (Magnitude 2-2.8), the most in a 24-hr period since the eruption of October 1986."

A little :scared: for those who live nearby.

[Zomby Woof]

26. I went to the wreckage 10 years ago

Which was 14 years after it blew... and the devastation is not to be believed. Trees still leveled for miles and miles like so many cheap toothpicks.

Quite a sight. Glad I wasn't there when it happened.