My mom, dad and two brothers were at the top of White Pass when this happened. My mother comnented that it wasn't very cold to be snowing. My youngest brother, who had taken Geology in college rolled down his window and reached out his hand and stated "This is not snow, this is ash! The mountain blew!" They were coming back from Yakima Washington where they had attended a conference for my dad's business. They pulled over an my mother wrote "May 18 1980" on a picnic table. The ash was already six inches deep. They turned around and went back to the motel, getting the last room. My older brother got sick with his asma while they waited things to clear up for the next three days. They were finally able to leave and go home to Seattle. My husband, at the time, was stranded at Fairchild AFB. We lived on Beale AFB in California at the time. He brought back 10 pounds of the ash. They were selling it in California for $10.00 a tiney vial. We didn't sell it. I kept some in a baby food jar. It was quite a time for Washington. My grandmother vacuumed ash out of her carpets for several years. She lived in Centrailia Washington. That year, she had a fantastic garden!! My Aunt lived in Maple Valley Washington. She made pottery. Each time the mountain would shoot out new ash, she would gather it and fire it on to a sample disk, labelling it with the day and month. She also gathered as much of it as she could and made pottery out of it.
I was 10 years old, and living in Missoula, MT at the time. It’s cool that this documentary mentioned us. I remember it so well! My aunt’s & uncles, and my Great-grandma, lived in Spokane, and called us to let us know they were OK, but it was dark as night in the middle of the day.
I was in Yakima Washington, had 4 to 6 inches of ash fell around 10 am. Day turned into the night for up to 3 days; such a weird experience had to stay at home.
Yeah, my parents were driving back home to Bellevue from Spokane, past Yakima on the I-90 and were ordered to spend the night in a nearby home. They talked about it being pitch black at midday. A year later, we were flying by the mountain in a Cessna and it still looked scary.
I was almost 5 when this happened, I remember so many things now after watching this. It was truly a weird time. I remember helping my brother wash the car and the drive way was so slick we kept sliding down. Until we complained enough Dad (RIP) saw what was happening, he started laughing and told us to come in and he finished it. LOL good times.
I was in grade school when this happened. And remember it very well.we would collect the ashes from our yard, it was snow. Sky was so dark with ash falling. Yep I remember.
Shelley Holloway I'm in Oregon also I recently bought some of the Ash on eBay for the 40 anniversary my mom lived in Hillsboro in 1980 and said It was falling like crazy.
@@MissAshley-jq9gl Yes those mountains that are up by the river , hundreds of feet long and wide and 75 ft tall with a lot of huge trees on them. Just bring you a little shovel in a baggie..
Some of this footage is on a video series called “US logger” Thank you for posting and sharing, i can remember i was i fifth grade in NJ, and can remember the haze!
Where would I be without RU-vid Aspect Ratio Control? A plugin for Chrome that lets you adjust the width of videos. The vast, vast majority of 4:3 videos uploaded to RU-vid are mistakenly presented as 16:9, including this Mount St. Helens video. You can watch it in its correct, intended aspect ratio by using the setting "75% H" in the plugin.
That was the shiz' guys. TY for sharing this! :) I was 4 when it went off, and coming home from Winchell's Doughnuts here on Fourth Plain and Grand Blvd., in Vancouver just over the hill from where I'm at now. Way cool stuff - thank you. :)
21:56...Truman waving, fade to reality crumbling music in psychotic backdrop effect of Clockwork Orange Synth...NICE! Many of those Helicopter pilots who flew those rescue missions up on Saint Helens in 1980 were Veteran’s of Vietnam.
The ashes made it over the Rocky Mountains and covered the Canadian prairies. The ash is glass.... don't inhale that! Now I'm off to see videos of what it looks like now.
I was camping with a group of friends, on the south side of My Hood. This was before cell phones, so When we woke up the that morning and saw the plume cloud, we thought an atomic bomb had been drop on Portland! Well there might have been some drinking going on. Still, It was unbelievable! We were assured this could never happen!
Not by any means a good president and no, he didn't sound intelligent at all. I laughed when he said there was a "flash" that burned everything. I think he was too busy projecting his "knowledge" of nuclear energy where it didn't belong...
My husband lived in Longview when this happened. He was 13 and he said the blast literally knocked him on his butt. He said it rained ash for days. He told me about how the Cowlitz river used to be clear with a rocky bottom before the eruption. Now it's a muddy mircky ash bottom that became un swimmable. There are still signs of the eruption all over even all these years later. I find it all absolutely fascinating.
That music you hear at the beginning and end of the documentary is Jean Michel Jarre with "Oxygene (Part 1)" from the album Oxygene (1976). Anyways, in 1980 I was living in Eugene during the eruption. My parents bought masks just to be on the safe side, but thankfully the ash never went to Eugene and the skies were rather clear there.
I love all things 80s. I was five when Helens went up. Can anyone tell me how loud the explosion was when the volcano erupted? I've never heard anyone talk about how loud the initial explosion was, only the power.
I was sleeping in a semi at the I-5 Mt St.Helen view point at Vancouver Wash.when it blew it made the truck jump up and a boom and I got out wondering what the hell happened, there is a video of my particular view of the volcano and remember looking at the person filming it, when I see that particular video its exactly what I saw.
@@swirvinbirds1971 How is it that the people who were closest to the mountain that got footage with their cameras are not deaf? I have heard the 200 miles before, really cool stuff.
I do not believe Harry Truman had a false sense of security. He made it very clear, he was 84 years old, that place was his only home. If that beautiful place died he wanted to die with it. He made an honorable choice.
Is there honour in being stubborn and selfish? He didn't value his life, like those kids who begged him to leave. This event must have been terrifying, not romantic.
@@stephss Where is the honor in dying in pain and misery in a nursing home a short time later? Have you had the experience of watching your parents die? To go out quickly and painlessly in the place that brings you joy, when you only have a short time left anyway, I cannot think of a better way to go. We should all be so lucky.
@@umadbra I believe in freedom but I would parse your comment. For a young person with acute clinical depression who is suicidal they need help, not the choice to end their life. I have had a friend commit suicide at age 29. This is different. Harry was 84, he lived a great life and he knew he didn't have much time left no matter what. He was in fact old and wise, knew what he wanted.
@Mike Studmuffin My 87 year old Father yelled in pain for a few hours as I held his hand before the morphine finally took hold and he went to sleep for the last time. His last words were "I can't do this anymore." My Old Man endured 6 months of hell before he finally passed away. When I have to go out I would rather go the way Harry did.
We had just arrived in Penticton BC and it was covered in ash and someone had put a box of soap in the town fountain and there were long foamy streamers for like 50 feet around it. It was F`n awesome lmao! shitty overcast summer tho
I had to move to Oregon in 1980 about one month after the initial main eruption. There was a smaller one that blanketed Portland and areas to the southwest I believe in July...I was watching a political convention on an old black and white tv and there was dust everywhere outside. To read history is one thing to live it is exciting!
I was just a kid and I remember going outside and it was a nice sunny day, went to the front yard and there was this gigantic cloud. People from all over the neighborhood were put looking. As a kid with a vivid imagination, it was incredible to see. No one thought about ash. But hours later it was dark and ash was everywhere. Crazy. I was living in steilacoom, wa. About 100 or so miles north of it. Never forget
I was at the Cle Elm ranger station when the call came out.We heard the young man die.We were 75 miles from the blast.It got darker than midnight,with the a thick darkness that Clomp falling like snow.It was picking flowers from the devil garden!I shall never forget.
CNN Should be ashamed of what their reporting has become!! CNN keeps digging itself in a deeper hole with misreporting information on about every issue!
I'm curious on what Harry Truman's property looked like after the eruption and did they ever find his body? He is probably the main character of this short film, yet all we know is that he died.
Why did I even ask the question instead of looking it up for myself? Wikipedia states that Truman is presumed to have been killed by a pyroclastic flow that overtook his lodge and buried the site under 150 ft of volcanic debris.
@@charlesgrant9900 ive heard thousand feet buried under possibly, i think he was close enough to where the landslide killed him before the blas got him, but shit that would probably be worse, burried in mud
Wow, so close to the story of "Dante's Peak"! thanks for posting. I was in Ca. at the time of this eruption and we noticed her violence in S. Ca. very easily! If Yosemite goes, we are DONE! Pleasant dreams kids!
People heard the bang of the eruption here in my hometown of Nelson BC (which is 8 hrs east of Vancouver about 5 hrs away from the Alberta boarder) my Grandma and Grandpa were on our local lake in their boat when they heard the blast, my grandpa said it was probably miners blasting but my Grandma knew it couldn't have been because it was a Sunday and no mining company operated on Sunday... A few hours later it started snowing... Snowing ash They later found out it was obviously mt st Helens
I wish somebody would locate & place a flag over Harry's Lodge so we can get some perspective what exactly happened with that landslide...is that asking for too much???
Always thought about that too, i mean hes like thousand feet underground but still could do something like what they did for johnston, i think they say its unsafe down there still with vents and stuff
@@marked4death076 Not a thousand feet, maybe 200 feet based on what I have heard from experts. This misconception is exact reason I would like to see an identifier with some statistics. Another thing that should be done is show us where Spirit Lake was originally, the lake was moved substantially. These kind of identifiers help to understand what exactly happened. I'm fairly sure they know all this information w/o a lot ot reserach.
The description of it looking like the lunar surface after this happened is a very good one. Incredible, and while its coming back more and more every year, there are still a lot of areas where you can see something major had happened there, even though its been forty years.
There's probably nothing left or he was scattered among the cabins in the area, pulverized by trees, hotel debris, boiled and dissolved in the lake and what was left was cooked and crushed under tons of hot ash. He is literally one with the lake. The whole lake is his resting spot. I hope there's a plaque or a marker for him there. Anywhere will do.
The ash clouds were very similar to the dust storms in the plains states during the Great Depression. Probably worse because ash is worse than dust in many ways. It was TERRIBLE!!
And to think that Yellowstone is gonna make mount saint Helen's look like one of those gorilla snaps when she goes off...MSH ash cloud barely made it to the black hills but Yellowstones ash cloud with cover the world for at least 20 years
If he was happy for this choice, then I am happy for him. Except, it may set a bad example to others; to disrespect authorities is not always wise. People do imitate others without thinking or realizing it. May he rest in peace.🌿
I still dont understand why Johnston and Martin were allowed to be so close. While I realize most didnt think it would be as big of an eruption as it was, or that it would blow horizontally, they did see a bulge growing on the side, and were unecessarily too close to the mountain considering its dangers. There were remote cameras, telescopes, and other means of observing that were safer, and you ALWAYS should overestimate mother nature, not the opposite.
