Landscape still bears the scars of Mount St. Helens eruption 45 years later

Sunday marks 45 years since Mount St. Helens erupted, killing 57 people and reshaping the landscape of southwest Washington, which still bears the scars of that devastating event.

Diane Murphy was living on a ranch on a hill overlooking Yakima on May 18, 1980. She recorded audio cassettes to send to a friend back home in Iowa. In one of those recordings, she described what it was like when the eruption happened. In 2020, she shared that recording with KIRO Newsradio.

“The black cloud came over and it became as black as night,” she told her friend on the tape. “It was pouring down so hard you couldn’t see the roads or the stop signs. You could not see. There was just zero visibility.”

John Winkler told KIRO Newsradio in 2020 that he was camping near the mountain with his wife and young son. On the morning of the eruption, he had left them at the campsite to get supplies in the town of Randle when the volcano erupted.

“It’s like Niagara Falls, but goin’ in the opposite direction, and it’s all dirt and just turf,” Winkler said. “It’s going straight up into the air and I’m just sitting there with my mouth open. And then lightning shooting up out of the ground. God, I’ve never seen lightning come up out of the ground before. I mean, you know, because of all the debris hitting each other, I guess. It’s like a spectacular light show.”

45 years later, the scars from the eruption remain

Despite the passage of time, the scars of the 1980 eruption remain starkly visible, said Weston Thelen, a research seismologist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory.

“You go up there and it really doesn’t look like it’s 45 years old,” Thelen said. “There’s still a lot of evidence of that eruption. It’s still a really spectacular place to go to see the power of volcanoes.”

The eruption flattened hundreds of square miles of forest. Logs from that day still float in Spirit Lake.

“They’re just impregnated with ash and floating there,” Thelen said.

The north side of the volcano remains largely barren, a stark contrast to the dense forests below.

The eruption also permanently altered the landscape.

“Coldwater Lake and Castle Lake, which weren’t lakes before the eruption — the failure of the volcano actually dammed both those lakes,” Thelen said. “Right in the middle of Coldwater Lake is a big island that is a deposit from the big landslide that occurred there.”

The scientific community is also grappling with a different kind of loss: the gradual retirement of experts who witnessed and studied the 1980 event firsthand.

“We are, you know, quickly losing a lot of our expertise from the people that were around during that time,” he said. “Those experiences and those stories and ideas are important to know when we’re going into our next eruption, our next sequence, whenever and wherever that is.”

Mt. St. Helens is the most likely of the Cascades Volcanoes to erupt again

While scientists can’t predict eruptions years in advance, historical data points to Mount St. Helens as the most likely volcano in the Cascades to erupt again.

“The activity at Mount St. Helens is way more than any other volcano in the Cascades, and because of that, we think that Mount St. Helens is the most likely to erupt next,” he said. “Now the rest of the volcanoes, they all have had times of activity before, and when we look at geologic records from those volcanoes, what we find is that basically every other volcano has about the same odds of eruption, but Mount St. Helens is obviously much, much higher.”

Still, he cautioned against putting specific odds on future eruptions, noting that scientists cannot predict them years in advance.

However, thanks to improved monitoring, scientists now have a better chance of detecting early signs of unrest. In 2004, for example, researchers had about a week’s notice before a minor eruption at Mount St. Helens. In 1980, there was only one instrument on the mountain. By 2004, there were many, giving scientists a more accurate picture of what was happening.