Dan Miller was driving north along Interstate 5 through Southwest Washington when Mount St. Helens blew its top 35 years ago.
“As I passed the Richfield exit on I-5, it just happens that there’s a beautiful clear view off to the northeast to Mount St. Helens,” he said. “I looked over there and it was a beautiful, bright sunny morning.”
Miller is a retired geologist who studied volcanoes with the U.S. Geological Survey. He was on his way up Mount St. Helens on the morning of May 18, 1980. He planned to work on the volcano that day.
“I saw this huge mushroom cloud go up above the top of Mount St. Helens and just boiled rapidly up into the sky,” he said.
Had the eruption been just an hour later he would’ve been killed.
The natural disaster killed 57 people and drastically changed the region's landscape.
The explosive force of the volcano turned what started for many in the region as a beautiful spring day into one enveloped by darkness and ash.
Today the iconic mountain without a peak stands as a memory to what happened.
Carolyn Driedger, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, was also driving north along the highway the morning St. Helens erupted.
“The cloud didn’t just move horizontally,” she said. “It seemed to move up and over the terrain.”
Driedger returned to Vancouver to help field the flood of calls coming into the volcano observatory from people wondering what had happened.
“Later in the afternoon I went outside,” she said. “It was very eerie."
The volcanic ash plume hung over downtown Vancouver, Driedger said.
The city was dark and quiet, she said, and the streets were largely deserted.
“Everyone in Southwest Washington was in a little bit of disbelief as to what was happening,” she said.
The morning of May 18, Dick Zais was sitting down to breakfast in Yakima, more than 100 miles east of Mount St. Helens.
“I noticed the cloud cover was starting to become very darkened,” he said. “And then there was the powdery substance coming down.”
At the time, Zais was the city manager. He said he called 911 to find out what was going on and the dispatcher told him about the eruption.
“I didn’t have a conception at that point of what it was going to require of us or the impact we would sustain,” he said.
As time passed, Zais said it got darker outside. So dark, he said, the city’s streetlights switched on.
“We had a blinding blizzard and electrical storm,” he said. “It was dark and dust and swirling ash.”
Zais said the city was in total darkness for hours. It wasn’t until the following morning that there was any sense of clearing, he said.
By the time the cloud had passed, Zais said it had covered Yakima in about four inches of ash.
Two days after the eruption, Miller toured Mount St. Helens by helicopter.
“It was like walking on the moon,” he said. “There was nothing but grey. Everything was covered with ash. Everything was destroyed.”
For Driedger, the event changed her life.
“Once you see an volcano erupt, you’re never the same again,” she said. “You never forget what it’s like.”
Copyright 2015 Oregon Public Broadcasting
