On May 18, 1980, Jimmy Carter was still in the White House, IBM personal computers were still on the drawing board and Roald Reitan Jr. was fishing at Jericho Hole, a favorite spot on the South Fork of the Toutle River.
That Sunday morning, the 19-year-old climbed out of his tent at precisely 8:35 a.m., rubbing sleep from his eyes. He gazed at the sky and saw it would be a "blue and nice day."
Some 30 miles east, he knew, Mount St. Helens was rumbling. It was in the news a lot. People said it could blow straight up at any time.
But he was at least 20 miles from the "red zone" they'd drawn around the mountain. No sweat.
And he'd felt no earthquake or heard a boom.
Just another day in paradise . . . except that something was wrong.
Milky tendrils seemed to thread their way down the cool, clear river. And the blue sky was turning white. He looked at the river bank and felt the first shudder of alarm, noticing the ever-milkier water climbing rapidly toward him.
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| Roald Reitan was 19 years old when Mount St. Helens erupted. Camping at Jericho Hole on the Toutle River, he and his girlfriend were swept miles downstream by the pyroclastic flow.MIke Urban/P-I |
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"Then I started seeing small sticks, then branches, then limbs floating by," Reitan recalls.
"We should get out of here," he shouted to his companion, Venus Ann Dergen, who was still asleep.
In the time it took to fling their tent into the car, trees were coming down the river.
"The water had gone from chocolate milk to chocolate pudding," Reitan recalls.
And the pudding was getting hotter.
Cut off by the rapidly rising water, they watched as the old-growth trees along the bank were trembling and tearing loose. They climbed onto the roof of the car. In moments they would be floating in the churning mud, logs and debris unleashed by an explosion just three minutes earlier and 30 miles away.
Too much was happening to even feel afraid. That would come later.
Everyone knew St. Helens was restless in that spring of 1980, but no one was ready for the instant when the mountain shuddered with a relatively minor earthquake and opened the door to hell.
The exact sequence of events is still a matter of scientific debate, although it matters not at all to the 57 people who were killed that morning.
At the Bear Meadows campground 11 miles northeast of the mountain, photographer Gary Rosenquist had his cameras ready. A member of his party, looking through binoculars, commented that the mountain seemed to be getting "fuzzy."
Rosenquist started capturing images as fast as he could press the shutter. In his excitement, he kicked the tripod, shifting the frame slightly -- and perfectly aligning it to capture the now-famous sequence showing the largest known landslide in the history of the world traveling at nearly 200 mph to bury Spirit Lake and the Toutle River.
Without the weight of the mountain on it, the bulge that had been building on the north face of the 9,677-foot-high pressure cooker exploded with the force of a 24-megaton atomic bomb.
At near-supersonic speed, an apocalyptic cloud of 1,300-degree poison gas was blown sideways and north.
A pyroclastic flow of 1,470-degree magma and rock, moving as fast as 200 mph, covered 6 square miles north of the crater.
On a ridge east of the lake, 5 miles north of St. Helens' summit, the volcano lashed out at David Johnston, a young U.S. Geologic Survey geologist.
His was the last message heard from the blast zone.
"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!" he screamed into his radio. "Vancouver! Vancouver! Is the transmitter still working?"
Then Johnston ceased to exist.
Next came the lahars, walls of melted ice, water and debris mixed into fast-moving mud that would cause the most damage that day -- 27 bridges, 200 homes, 180 miles of roads and 15 miles of railway were consumed between the mountain and Kelso. The sediment washed down the Cowlitz River was so thick it blocked Columbia River ship traffic.
Chunks of glacial ice, boulders and pumice were hurled miles from the mountain, and a massive column of sand and powdery ash shot 80,000 feet into the sky, blowing east to choke out the sun before falling like snow.
The top of the graceful mountain, once world-renowned for its beauty, was gone. In place of its symmetrical summit was a hole big enough to contain downtown Seattle.
The blast zone, a fan-shaped swath 8 miles long and 19 miles wide, was a monochrome of gray. Not a single tree stood. Not a particle of paint was left on metal.
Those within five miles of the mountain died instantly, and some were blown as far as 2 miles from where they had been standing. Others were instantly mummified by the heat. But most of the 57 fatalities were outside of the 10-mile red zone, where death came from falling timber or raging rivers.
All told, 230 square miles of trees were blown down. Damage was estimated at more than $1 billion.
Mostly, it was humbling, even to the battle-tested.
"It put things in perspective about how big we really are on this Earth," recalls Jess Hagerman, 57, a former Marine chopper pilot in Vietnam who flew National Guard rescue missions after the eruption, when no one knew what the volcano would do next.
"We're actually pretty small," says Hagerman.
Scientists first deemed St. Helens the Cascade volcano most likely to erupt in 1975. By March 1980, eruption was imminent. Geologists made accurate predictions, helping emergency services save hundreds of lives.
But St. Helens was full of surprises. Scientists expected a timely seismic warning; there was none. The blast went sideways, not upward as expected. It cut across the backcountry like a scythe. Only once before had scientists seen a mountain disintegrate that way, when the Bezymianny Volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula blew in 1956.
"It wasn't in the scenario of what we were told would happen at Mount St. Helens," says Mike Nichols, the Cowlitz County coroner, who helped retrieve many of the 57 known victims. "It was a hell of a blast."
It happened in a flash
Decades later, people remember where they were on May 18, just as they recall where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
Those close to the mountain recall the silence -- in an oddity of nature, the sound of the mighty explosion went straight up, bounced off the atmosphere and ricocheted back to Earth miles away. Folks as far as Canada reported a boom or crack in the air.
There were plenty of witnesses. Climbers on Mount Rainier saw 1,000- to 2,000-foot-thick flows from the eruption hug the ground, disappearing into valleys and reappearing as the mud hopped over ridges.
Those caught in the fury first saw pumice the size of golf balls rain from the sky, felt shockwaves rush through trees and the ground tremble, and smelled sulfur, poisonous gas and death. Birds crashed to the ground, blind or injured deer ran terrified from between toppling trees and frightened mice raced across the ground searching for cool surfaces.
It all happened in a flash.
Crusty, 83-year-old Harry Truman became a legend when he stubbornly refused to leave his Mt. St. Helens Lodge, 4 miles from the mountain. Some say he planned to make a run for it when he saw lava, but the mountain didn't work that way.
Scientists say Truman likely felt an icy, wet wind pushed down from the shattered glacial slopes, then was incinerated.
Nichols, the coroner, said many of the dead were tourists, campers and loggers moonlighting near Elk Rock, northwest of the volcano with an unobstructed view of what became the crater.
"For them, death was instantaneous. The blast was so powerful that the vehicles were sometimes blown or rolled a mile," he said. "Some pickups and campers tumbled for miles down or across ridges."
The heat mummified some. One body was blown a quarter-mile from a campsite. The camper was found in the fork of a tree, face frozen in an expression of surprise and hands raised where binoculars had just been brought up to see the blast.
The speed of the event was astonishing. Charles McNerney, driving 8 miles northwest along the North Fork of the Toutle River, recalls that a thick black cloud rapidly descended two minutes after the eruption, overtaking drivers trying to flee at 75 mph.
"The base of the black cloud looked like avalanches of black chalk dust -- first one part of the black cloud would shoot out in front, then another, like waves lapping up on a beach," McNerney said. Cars became so hot inside it seemed as though the heaters were turned up. Only the very fast survived.
Thirteen miles north at Elk Rock, Jim Scymanky, a logger, and two companions were cutting timber, shielded from the mountain by a ridge. They heard nothing, realizing they were in danger only when a fourth man saw the explosion and screamed.
Within 10 seconds, "a horrible crashing, crunching, grinding sound" came through the trees from the east, Scymanky later said. Then darkness rendered everything invisible and a terrific heat roared in.
The air the men gasped burned their mouths and throats. Something knocked Scymanky down and broiled his back. All four were rescued, but only Scymanky lived.
'Like a roar, like a train'
The mudflow that swamped Spirit Lake also left a dam of mud and logs 200 feet high that extended 17 miles down the Toutle River.
As the roiling mess of logs, mud and debris churned down the river canyon, it crushed Weyerhaeuser's Camp Baker, killing five people in two cars as they tried to escape. Logs, trucks and a locomotive were tossed around like toys. Homes were torn from foundations for 46 miles along the banks of the river.
Bill Varner, a contract logger, felt the eruption from his home off the South Fork of the Toutle near Castle Rock.
"I was standing outside and the radiation from it picked up all the hair on your arms like a magnet," he said. "I heard the river coming. It was like a roar, like a train. You could hear the popping of the trees breaking off like a string of firecrackers."
He jumped in his truck to drive to an overlook and saw Weyerhaeuser's railroad trestle, 40-feet high, break loose, smothered by a wall of mud and logs backed up behind it.
Varner didn't realize then that his young niece, Karen Varner, and her boyfriend, Terry Krall, had been camping 10 miles north of the volcano, and were killed by a falling tree.
A couple camping with them, Bruce Nelson and Sue Ruff, had to use their fingers to dig the thick ash out of their mouths. They were pummeled by falling rocks and pumice. But they lived.
"The miraculous part of this whole thing is that more people weren't killed," said Varner, who had been scheduled to work with a slash-burn crew at Elk Rock that weekend before shifting winds canceled the job.
"I had 18 high school kids on that crew bus," he said. "It was a miracle it blew so early on Sunday morning."
Pilots emerged as heroes
Roald Reitan Jr. still can't take much comfort in that thought.
At Jericho Hole, the young couple was waiting for the rising water to sweep them from the car roof when the largely intact rail trestle, impaled on the wall of mud and logs, came into view.
"It was surreal," Reitan said. "We watched it moving slowly toward us, then, a couple of feet before it got to us, it all broke."
As the car started to go under, Reitan and Dergen jumped onto some logs as they surged by. His leg and foot were caught between churning logs and crushed; Dergen went into the water.
"On the surface, the big logs looked like a raft, but under the surface, smaller logs are going end over end, like a meat grinder," he said. "I thought I was going to be ripped in half."
But he pulled himself free and looked for Dergen.
"I thought she was dead," he said, until her hand reappeared. Reitan grabbed to pull her out but she was ripped away. He saw her hand again, and again grabbed it, gripping tightly as he wrenched her out by her hair.
The 30-mph current carried the two for 3 more miles, to a wide place where the flood fanned out and the water was shallow. They jumped from the logs and raced to a small hill, marooned until Ray Pleasant, a Weyerhaeuser helicopter pilot with two foresters, spotted them. Unable to land, he hovered and braced a skid against the cliff to let them climb aboard.
In the days after the blow, helicopter pilots emerged as heroes, searching the new wasteland for survivors and for the dead.
The pilots wore white surgical masks to avoid breathing the sand and dust, which could quickly grind up an engine, Hagerman recalls.
"It was like flying in a milk bottle -- the sky and ground were the same color, " Hagerman said. He and his co-pilot, the late Randy Fantz, rescued seven people that week.
Often they would search by looking for footprints in the ash and following them to the source. Six hours after the blast, the search led to two badly burned loggers at Spud Mountain, who were the closest to the mountain to survive.
Hagerman couldn't land -- the dust was too intense, too dangerous. So he hovered while Fantz jumped into the Toutle and scurried up a 200-foot cliff to reach the men and help Hagerman land.
"Randy took a lot of guts; he didn't know how hot or how deep that water was," Hagerman said. But any delay would mean the death of the loggers.
"You just did what needed to be done," he said. "There was no other way of getting to people besides using a helicopter and you used what your skills enabled you to do."
Twenty-one bodies were never found.
Nichols, the coroner, says there would have been more deaths had there not been so many former military and civilian chopper pilots who had flown in Vietnam. Pilots fought fierce upwinds and downdrafts in steep canyons and valleys, making rescues with a few feet between rotating blades and trees, plucking people from car hoods and flying into the unknown, landing blind on pure instinct.
Still heartbreaking for many
Twenty years have passed since then. Helicopters now ferry tourists to the mountain, and adventure tours onto the volcano are the rage.
In Castle Rock and Packwood, unemployment is high and homes are being foreclosed on. Weyerhaeuser still cuts trees, but many here now make a living by making lattes.
The ridge where David Johnston died now bears his name, as does the volcano observatory on its crest.
People and mountain are moving on.
The eruption was a phase in St. Helens' eons-old existence. The mountain began to rebuild itself immediately after the eruption, forming a lava dome that millennia hence could again become a cone. Life has returned to areas where nothing lived. More species come in all the time.
Humans, ever less patient, have built visitors' centers and highways, edging closer to the crater.
Just a year after the eruption, Weyerhaeuser began planting 18 million 2-foot-high seedlings on 45,000 acres per year, starting 15 miles out and moving in toward the mountain. The first trees are now 60 feet tall.
Still, it's heartbreaking for many to reconcile what the mountain is now and what it once was.
"I see two separate pictures and can't bring them together," says George Barker, who was once the resident Skamania County sheriff's deputy at Spirit Lake. Now he owns a concession stand in one of the lodges along Highway 504, the main tourist route to the mountain.
"Talk about depression," he says, "It had old-growth trees and unpolluted water. It was quite an ecological happy spot. As a kid you would go camping there at the YMCA camp. It was a place for families. That's why the feelings are so deep."
In the decades since the eruption, some survivors have died, some saw their families broken up, some moved away. Some still love the mountain and visit it often, while others still grieve, unable to talk about it.
"I was told I might have nightmares about what we went through," says Reitan, "but my nightmare was the 2-1/2 years I lived with my injuries.
"The mountain erupted just weeks before the orthoscope was perfected," he said. "With the surgery I had on my knee, I couldn't run a step for four years; it's still painful."
But it's not much of a complaint. He's more thankful to be able to feel anything at all.
"It taught me that there are no guarantees that life won't be snatched from you," says Reitan. "The eruption made me feel pretty insignificant. I don't take life for granted."
Also see:
P-I reporter Mike Barber can be reached at 206-448-8018 or michaelbarber@seattle-pi.com
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