The first thing in my life that I both recall and can put a date to are two vignettes from May of 1980. One is scouring a closet with my mother for a red bandanna to tie around my face, the other is a dim, gray moment-memory of an ashen street scene.

So, I can say with some truth that I remember the Mt. St. Helens eruption. I was two and a half.

I grew up here. I not only recall (albeit vaguely) the eruption itself, but, being in a journalistic family, I know its legacy and its impact on our local psyche. I know its causes, its histories; I’ve chewed the fat with involved scientists and gungho reporters who violated boundary restrictions to be the first to fly helicopters over the smoldering craters. I had a surreal overnight camping adventure with a professor (in a geodesic dome in the middle of the park in front of Smith Memorial Center at Portland State Univ.–this is a long story) who managed to get himself stuck on the side of the mountain when a tree blocked his only way out. Et cetera.

Yet I have never once (at least to my recollection) been to any of the visitor centers. I had not, even, set foot within the National Monument itself. This is not a badge of pride, and so today David and I fixed this marked glitch in my otherwise consitent regional adventure/travel record.

Most of the exhibits in the several centers we visited repeated things I already know. I took a lot of geology and earth science in college. But I did learn three new things, which I shall share with you! Lucky you!

1. The glacier that formed around the lava dome in the crater after the eruption is the youngest glacier in the world. It was greatly pissed off and melty after the lava dome activity of 2005.
2. The landslide and debris flows from the eruption covered and then boiled the Toutle River and local groundwater. The resultant trapped steam exploded in places, geyser-like, and created craters as much as a quarter mile across. In a landscape of such monumental disarray it’s easy to miss “smaller” details like this.
3. Because of the way sound waves were directed–relatively straight up, then bouncing off the atmosphere somewhere up there–a “cone of silence” existed some 60 or so miles around the eruption. Those, like me, in Portland, would have heard nothing. In Eugene, it was another matter: many solid minutes of dynamite-exploding, thunder sounds. Even people on the very flanks of the mountain only heard the local sounds of trees snapping and rocks falling, not the eruption itself.

I’d like to revisit with my family and see what their recollections are of the event. I’m sure my parents would have clearer memories.

Mt. St. Helens from Johnston Ridge.