I’ve got three baby food jars full of Mt. St Helens I collected from my front yard when I lived in Spokane - 350+ miles away from the mountain.
The sky turned dark in the middle of the afternoon. Street lights were controlled by photo-cell switches and the lights came on at 3pm. The birds and dogs fell silent then all of a sudden the only sound heard was a soft hiss as the ash began to fall.
My grandmother brought back some. In the last 3 decades it’s gotten lost.
Mt. St. Helens ash. I have some of that somewhere, along with a pumice pebble I found later, from a hike on Rainier, up at the ice caves. I wonder where that is...
Thankfully, we lived a block from Sacred Hurt where my RN wife worked.
Left Mother-in-law stranded with us several extra days, though.
Sold the Honda after a few years . . . had been careful with it until cleanup—ran it very little etc.
My relatives live slightly east of Yakima. They got inches of the stuff.
I remember..I was there.
I was out at Fairchild AFB for their open house (it was still a SAC base back then). I hadn’t known that St. Helens had erupted when I got there at about 11 in the morning. I was walking through one of the hangers that had a number of exhibits, including a a mobile MARS (Military Auxilliary Radio System) station. The operator had just signed on, and he was talking (via ham radio) to someone over in Toutle, WA. He wrote something on a clipboard and hung it up so everyone could see: “Mt. St Helens erupted 8:30am this morning. Reports say top mile of mountain is gone”.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time. The mountain was 250 miles away...what could it possibly do to us here in Spokane?
Two hours later, the military threw up a cordon around the SR-71 that was visiting from Nevada (I think) and towed it into a hanger. I asked an airman why, and the airman said “Because of the ash. We need to protect the engines”. Ash?? What does he mean by that? I looked to the west and saw what looked like a line of storms way off in the distance. No storms were predicted for that day.
Thirty minutes later, the announcers said the base was going to close early, and asked everyone to go home. I took the bus out there, and it wasn’t scheduled to come for another 3 hours. Well, they got a bus out there...just as the leading edge of the ash cloud got to the base. By the time we left (in the middle of a traffic jam from Hell), there was nothing but an orange strip of light along the eastern horizon. 30 minutes later, it was gone. Pitch black. Street lights on, and stuff falling from the sky that looked like gray snow and smelled like a cross beteen sulfur and smoke. It was the second-most scared I’d ever been.
(It USED to be the first, but the 6.8 magnitude Nisqually Quake on Feb. 28, 2001 took its place.)
My family didn’t go outside until Tuesday. It was the nastiest clean-up job I’ve ever done, and we only got an inch or two.
I don’t even want to think what would happen if Yellowstone went off.