He still remembers having breakfast on the morning of May 18.He saw the ash plume rising high into the sky. Please ask the front desk for pet-friendly activities and restaurants around Grand Lake. Ain’t no way that mountain gonna hurt me.’ Most of my fellow members of the media laughed at Harry and portrayed him as a stubborn ol’ coot who probably belonged in the nuthouse. There Is Countless Miles Of Trails To Hike Including Trails To Utah’s Highest Peak, King’s Peak Standing At 13,528’. We had been following the story about the mountain, but that morning the skies darkened as a cloud appeared like that of an opera curtain over our home in Yakima. Search; About; News; Mobile; Get involved. Prior to 1980, Spirit Lake consisted of two arms that occupied what had been the valleys of the North Fork Toutle River and a tributary. “She couldn’t remember not going to the cabin.”Roy and Sandy Ford hail from Kelso. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 02-468 version 1.0 Geologic Map of Mount St. Helens, Washington Prior to the 1980 Eruption By Clifford A. Hopson 2008. (AP Photo/U.S. 1000-2010 Mercator. Many people were pulling their cars over to look north. I said, 50,000 feet? Stunning views of Mount St. Helens drew a loyal following of cabin owners, Boy Scout campers, hikers and other outdoor enthusiasts to the shores of Spirit Lake. First Name. We could tell Spirit Lake was gone, and [we could see] enormous amounts of lightning bolts shooting from the crater. I turn to the people in the seats across the aisle and told them about the eruption and they unbuckled their seatbelts and stood up to get a look. There are pictures of Sandy Ford sunbathing atop a snowdrift in her halter top and shorts. The morning she erupted I was resting in the family room, when I saw the black ash.

Found out later that a friend’s mother and sister were killed that day.

001, Manila, Utah 84046, United States. Quickly my eyes were full of gritty ash and I could not see. Email Address. Share on Discovering the Cartography of the Past. You mean 5,000 feet? We ended up with about a half inch of ash on the ground. We had purple sparks that came from our outlets in the kitchen as the lightning struck, and picking up the phone we heard our neighbors even though we hadn’t called them. Harry said he owed his life to the fact that he’d refused to obey orders when his ship was torpedoed by the Germans in World War I. Our WWII-vet captain estimated the ash cloud to be at 60,000 feet by the time we got beside it, so you can imagine how huge and wide that cloud seemed, bulging and growing and changing. There was also a number of lodges catering to visitors, including Spirit Lake Lodge and Mt. We had 26 people aboard -- and nobody had a camera! St. Helens [at Spirit Lake], also stick with me, and I still don’t understand his thinking. The ash cloud was FULL OF LIGHTNING! — If you’re old enough, you probably remember exactly where you were on the morning of May 18, 1980 when Mount St. Helens erupted.

It was FULL of lightning!

“And nature doesn’t let you keep the status quo.” We packed up and started driving back to our home outside Cottage Grove, and as we descended Willamette Pass we noticed the sky darkening. More eruptions and an ash fall that, what I imagine, looked like the onset of nuclear winter.
Within a few hours Hillsboro was inches deep in ash. Sunday May 18: Gorgeous morning, and I was driving on the Fremont Bridge. The pilot flew right over the top and we looked down into the eruption. I looked off to my left and saw a patch of blue, and through that, the mushroom cloud. St. Helens erupted, blasting ash 50,000 feet in the air. After spending part of that morning driving around, he remembers walking into his parents’ house, which was east of the mountain, and that’s when things really hit him. By Roy’s count, that means one Ford family cabin was burned, one was buried, and access to a third washed out.“People forget the back country is nature,” Roy says with a smile. Spirit Lake is a lake north of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. © 2020 KGW-TV. I made it only as far as the nearest Denny’s restaurant before driving became impossible and managed to snag the very last room at the motel next door.“I was 8 months pregnant with our second child. Every day we watched little plumes of ash shoot out of the top of the mountain. The stewardesses served drinks with dry ice in them, looking like eruptions.”“On May 18, 1980 I was flying back to Grand Junction, Colo., from Portland. St Helens visible in the background through a light cloud cover.