Mountain of Fire: Chapters 28–37

In “suspended ashdust like firesmoke,” Buzz described, they could now see about 150 feet in front of them.

Through the ash and mud, dehydrated and scared, they kept moving.

On the third try, the pilot finally rose using his instruments alone—without being able to see anything out of the windows—to get them aloft.

The words, the reminders of persistence, kept them moving on amid so much death and destruction.

When Sue and Bruce told the crew about Dan and Brian, the pilot immediately responded that Dan had already been picked up. But when they showed him on the map where they had left Brian, the pilot was incredulous.

An hour and twenty minutes after the mountain had first erupted, the cloud cleared enough for Don Swanson to get his first, sustained look at the top of what was left of Mount St. Helens.

“A roiling, dark column pumped and convected up as a high cloud looking like dirty cauliflower but every knob moving,” he remembered. “A little knob grew to a huge one, this all over the outside of the column that rotated up to the right, a twisting helix. It looked very slow, but from its enormous size I knew it must be very fast…It towered miles above us, far larger than I’d imagined.”

Later he would remember that “the views were so brief and fuzzy, a missing summit so unexpected, we were in denial about it.”

“I’d been measuring the mountain for weeks. We thought increased swelling and seismicity would herald a big event,” said Swanson.

For a single, fateful night, Johnston had been on the mountain.

“Spirit Lake was all debris, the forested ridge just west was barren. Truman’s lodge and cabins among the firs were gone. Only horizontal [fallen] logs and gray debris [remained],” remembered Cooney.

“A churning wall of mud, trees, and debris swallowed Camp Baker, overturning bulldozers and trucks like toys,” said duBeth.

The blast toppled trees in a 230-square-mile area north of the volcano called the blowdown zone and left vegetation standing but seared lifeless—the scorch zone—on the edges.

Acoustic energy from the blasts was directed upward. This energy remained trapped in layers of atmosphere for twenty to thirty miles away from the volcano. This “cone of silence,” which has since been noted in other volcanic eruptions, meant that anyone close to the mountain didn’t hear the blast.

Eventually, the trapped sound was refracted back down to the ground, sometimes hundreds of miles away. People as far away as British Columbia reported hearing “booms” and explosions.