The Day Mount Saint Helens Woke Up

At eight thirty-two in the morning on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, a magnitude five point one earthquake shook the north slope of Mount Saint Helens. A few seconds later, the entire north face of the mountain collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history. The collapse exposed the volcano's pressurized interior and triggered a lateral blast of superheated gas and rock that traveled outward at speeds of at least three hundred miles per hour, obliterating about two hundred thirty square miles of forest in minutes. Then the main eruption column rose eighty thousand feet into the atmosphere.

Fifty-seven people were killed. Most died from asphyxiation in the ash cloud. Harry R. Truman, the eighty-three-year-old innkeeper of Spirit Lake Lodge who had refused all orders to evacuate, was buried under hundreds of feet of avalanche debris. Volcanologist David Johnston, monitoring from an observation post six miles north of the summit, transmitted a final radio message, Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it, and was swept away by the lateral blast. His body was never found.

The eruption deposited ash across eleven American states. About half an inch of gray powder fell on Spokane, two hundred fifty miles to the east, turning the morning to a false midnight. The Yakima Valley, already in harvest preparation, was buried. Motorists abandoned their cars on highways.

Mount Saint Helens had been a perfect symmetrical cone before that morning. It erupted because it is part of the Cascades volcanic arc, a chain of active volcanoes formed by the subduction of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate beneath the North American plate. Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Glacier Peak are part of the same system. Geologists regard them all as active.

The mountain has been rebuilding its dome ever since. The silence of the other peaks is not permanence. It is patience.