Had a great view of the big one when it happened, we had seen multiple smaller eruptions prior but this was immense.  We got plenty of ash from the prior eruptions but the wind blew the other way on May 8th.  

My dad had worked a roadblock on the mountain the night before but got done around midnight.  They had a 5 mile exclusion zone, which turned out to be plenty of room on one side, and not at all enough on the side that blew out.  Most of the people killed were outside the exclusion zone.

I later watched on TV all day as houses and bridges were knocked down by the mudflow, then happened to be on a school bus crossing a bridge when the mudflow debris made it to us the next day, but by then it was just a mass of logs and debris in the Columbia and not capable of knocking down anything.  It clogged the Columbia though, and it stayed a problem for a long time.

I watched houses, docks, tens of thousands of logs, and other debris wash out the Columbia river.  Every wing dam (log jetty) had hundreds of logs jammed up against it all summer.  Know where a house is that was floating by, it was salvaged, towed in, and put up on skids and is currently in use.  

There were huge pumice rocks that came down the river as well.  All the logs came from a logging camp, some houses were built from lumber cut from them, as a home sawmill turned into a money maker.  The logs supplied firewood for at least 10 years too.  

Not something anyone would be likely to ever forget.  

There have been several smaller eruptions since then.  If you have not seen it, it is a great place to go see what nature is capable of.  Unfortunately, all the cabins and such that were destroyed got taken in as part of the volcanic monument that was created, so you can’t really go vacation on the mountain anymore.

40 years tomorrow. This popped up in my Facebook feed a few years ago on another local persons FB page, a while later it got discovered more widely. I don't remember which lake, but it's either Merwin, Yale, or Swift.

I remember it happening. I was in the 7th grade my science teacher was big on it.
Closest I ever came to the place was flying over it on a commercial flight. Truman would have been drug out by a SWAT Team and or shot for not complying now days

Remember watching the ash cloud go up in the sky. Harry R Truman RIP. That was back when Washington was a real state, not this sad shit show we have now.

wow.

Cool word. lahar - a destructive mudflow on the slopes of a volcano.

At least he still has his 16 cats keeping him company.

The day I graduated from  high school it blew.

I got to visit it a couple of times when I was at Ft. Lewis. I would love to take the wife and kids so they can see it. Somewhere I have a small hot sauce bottle from an MRE filled with ash.

This.

He was a character.

I was in kindergarten in Texas. Don't seem to remember much at all about it, other than I did see a little bit on TV on ABC World News.

Of course if you were a little kid watching cartoons, volcano's were a regular kind of deal, you just kind of accepted it.

Reagan getting shot, now that was somewhat more memorable, but I was a year older too.

I went to a paper mill in Longview right after it happened, a lot of ash still in the river.

I was in Guantanamo Bay Cuba.

Yeah, I don’t know. I understand your sentiment. I totally get that but the thought of dying in a volcanos pyroclastic flow doesn’t sound too appealing to me. My hope is to get a blowjob and die in my sleep. I guess we can all dream.

Washington is lousy with volcanoes. St. Helens, Rainier, Baker, Glacier Peak and Adams.

We camp right here pretty often. About 6 miles from the crater. You can see where the lahar went through.

I was only about three when it blew, so I don't remember it happening, but I do remember it being discussed a lot on TV when I was little.  News programs, documentaries, Mr Wizard's World, and made-for-TV movies.

I was 12, we were directly in the path of the ash, on the Columbia River..buckets of that shit.

My dad took us years later 1987 to a viewpoint on the NE side, the destruction was impressive.

I submitted to the crater rim Southside in 2013, simply amazing.

How did it establish dominance?

It would be interesting to find a similar picture from before the eruption... prior to the eruption Mt. St Helens had an iconic ice cream cone shape, and the peak was 1,300 feet higher than it is now...

If it wasn't a shitty rainy day, I'd walk up the hill and take a picture of it. Not visible right now.

IIRC, it was sometimes called America's Mt. Fuji.  Beautiful mountain.  Now still very striking, just for a very different reason.

I lived in Olympia when it blew. I was talking about the anniversary with Mom. Found out my Aunt, who worked with WDFW as a warden, and my cousin were both on the mountain, inside the exclusion area, the day before.

Awhile back I remember reading about a logger they found sitting on a log, dude only spoke Spanish and died halfway through the flight. Can't for the life of me find the story again.