Mt. St. Helens

We stopped for a little while at Mt. St. Helens and I went for a short hike. It is amazing that even now it feels like a powerful place.
At 8:32 Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted. Fifty-seven lives lost. They were loggers, campers, reporters and scientists. In all, there were 36 victims brought out of the devastated area. But after all of the searching, rescues and recoveries, there were still many people who were never found. Oddly Mt. St. Helens did not erupt skyward like many volcanos but horizontally. This is why there was such devastation.
Mount St. Helens formed a conical, youthful volcano sometimes known as the Fuji-san of America. During the 1980 eruption the upper 400 m of the summit was removed by slope failure, leaving a 2 x 3.5 km horseshoe-shaped crater now partially filled by a lava dome. Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of this tall symmetrical mountain collapsed in a massive rock debris avalanche. Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown down or buried beneath volcanic deposits. At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. The eruption lasted 9 hours, but Mount St. Helens and the surrounding landscape were dramatically changed within moments.