Mount St. Helens, getting scolded...and Bigfoot!

[pdedse]

Thank you for that report and pictures. I remember Mt St Helen’s blowing up. As Tev says, it took a fair bit off the top, didn’t it?

It's eye-opening to see the before / after photos while you're there looking at what's left. As always, photos fail to capture the magnitude of what we see in person.

I wanted to get an idea of just how much blew in this lateral explosion and found the [url=https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount-st-helens/1980-cataclysmic-eruption?qt-science_support_page_related_con=2#qt-science_support_page_related_con]USGS site which has some cool photos.

From the site: "The total avalanche volume is about 2.5 km3 (3.3 billion cubic yards), equivalent to 1 million Olympic swimming pools." 3.3 billion cubic yards... for comparison, 12 million cubic yards of concrete were used to build the Grand Coulee Dam and 4.3 million to build the Hoover Dam. If my math is right, the material that blew from Helens is equal to the amount of concrete used to build both dams more than 202 times.

They never found ol' Harry Truman...the Net says he's buried under 150 feet of debris and ash...that his death would have been within a second of the heat shock that reached him shortly after the explosion. I'll always remember news folks interviewing him weeks before the eruption, his seemingly crazy defiance and insistence that the volcano blast wouldn't overtake him. Then one Sunday morning, it did.

Anyway, thanks for the comments...I'm nearly recovered from my roadside parking encounter. Had I replied unkindly to the gentlemen trying to give me advice, the situation likely would have blown up in my face, road rage averted.

Great pics as usual. The area appears to have recovered well. May 18, 1980 I turned 30. That was a long time ago lol

Wait, I just re-read that...so Helens blew the day of your birthday?!?

I was going to add from 2004-08 Helens "re-awoke" with a number of smaller eruptions. It's biggest was on my son's birthday on March 8, 2008. We could see the ash plume rising in the sky from Gresham, OR as we were driving to a restaurant to celebrate his b-day.