Mount St. Helens, 20 years later: a reporter remembers

Mount St. Helens seen during the 1980 eruption, above; and the volcano as it appears today, below

May 18, 2000
Web posted at: 7:42 a.m. EDT (1142 GMT)

On May 18, 2000, thousands of people in the Northwest will mark the 20th anniversary of the deadly explosion of the Mount St. Helens volcano. Two decades earlier, an accumulation of gas, steam and molten rock triggered the largest landslide in recorded history, and sent a plume of ash 15 miles into the atmosphere, eventually circling the globe. Moments after the explosion, CNN.com reporter Jack Hamann began a long -- and often emotional -- relationship with the mountain. Twenty years later, he remembers the wild adventures and unexpected lessons.

By Jack Hamann

(CNN) -- The boulders were as big as Volkswagens. I lay in my tent in the middle of the night, eyes barely shut, ears wide open. Three or four times an hour, a loud crack ricocheted throughout the crater of Mount St. Helens, followed by the rolling rumble of car-sized rocks as they tumbled down the near-vertical inner walls of the volcano.

Jack Hamann of CNN.com and his daughter, Lauren, on Mount St. Helens in 1998

We had selected our campsite in the belly of this seething beast by picking a spot where no boulders had yet come to rest. Our logic? After thousands of rockfalls since the mountain blew its top nine years earlier, our little clearing in the crater MUST be a place that is somehow protected from rolling stones. But in the dark of night, it seemed equally likely that rocks fall quite randomly, and that I could be squashed any moment like a bug in a sleeping bag cocoon.

I was a brand-new reporter when the mountain blew. It was the first Big Story I covered, and over the years, it gave me the chance to be part of numerous other firsts. I was one of the first to fly around the monstrous plume of ash, among the first to actually land in the crater, one of the first (and still few) to spend the night next to the lava dome. My crew and I climbed to the volcano's rim on the first day it was legal to trudge up to the summit, where we broadcast the first live shots to much of America. In 1996, I led my son up St. Helens on his first-ever true mountain climb ... then did the same with my daughter two years later.

On May 18, 1980, my wife Leslie and I were at home in Eugene, Oregon, reading the Sunday newspaper on a sunny spring day. At 8:32 a.m., we felt the earth shudder ... not exactly an earthquake, more like a sonic boom. An hour later, I was on the set of KEZI-TV, part of a skeleton crew trying to relay what we knew to our increasingly nervous audience. We did know that Mount St. Helens had exploded about 100 miles to the north and that a wall of boiling mud and snowmelt was barreling to the west.

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With our station's weatherman gone for the weekend, I stood in front of the studio camera trying to relay what we knew about the direction of the wind, and whether the enormous plume of soot and ash would be headed our way. Scientists would later estimate that the explosion had the power of 500 atomic bombs. I had been a reporter for only one week. It was the first time I had ever been on live television.

Early the next day, it was still too soon to know that 57 people had died -- most of them instantly -- when flows of 1,400-degree rock fragments and gas slammed into them at speeds up to 200 miles per hour. KEZI-TV chartered a small two-engine airplane to fly me and a photographer in for a closer look.

An impossibly thick plume of black smoke and gray ash shot 15 miles into the air, obliterating the sun as our little plane buzzed closer. The view below was shocking: millions of giant ash-covered trees lay plastered to the ground, in a pattern mirroring the shockwaves that had killed absolutely everything up to 19 miles from the former summit. Our pilot dove into a sudden vertical turn as he spotted a U.S. Forest Service airplane; we had veered far inside the ominous "red zone" set up to protect rubberneckers and reporters from becoming the next casualties. As the plane banked, I stared almost straight into the volcano's violent vent as a geyser of sandy pumice shot relentlessly skyward. It was all too thrilling to be scary.

For many years, Mount St. Helens was off-limits to just about everyone. I moved to Seattle, and as a reporter for KING-TV, I was given the chance to make increasingly dangerous forays into the dead zone around the mountain. At first, our pilot would land his helicopter on the ridge where volcanologist David Johnston died while monitoring the mountain the morning it detonated. The only colors were shades of gray, the only sound was the wind whipping our jackets. The only sight that mattered was the immense emptiness of the former summit, now eerily mutilated and seemingly abandoned.

As the months moved along, our helicopter pilot was eventually given permission to fly into the crater. An 880-foot lava dome was rising like a wart from the depths of the mountain. As we circled, we could smell the sulfur and see thousands of hissing vents. We were treated to amazing close-ups of what would someday - perhaps several hundred years from now -- rise to become the volcano's new summit. It was a molehill growing into a mountain before our very eyes.

One day, we were offered the opportunity to actually land the helicopter near the open mouth of the crater. I jumped at the chance. Our pilot -- a cautious and professional veteran of flying Army helicopters in Vietnam -- warned us to stay on the ground as short a time as possible. I remember hitting the ground and fairly sprinting toward the crater, my feet skipping over soil no living being had ever touched. Fifteen minutes felt like 15 seconds as, all too soon, we were back in the sky.

Before the big eruption, Mount St. Helens was one of 14 major volcanic peaks stretching from Mount Baker on the Canadian border, to Lassen Peak in Northern California. These giant gems of the Cascade mountain range include well-known mountains like Rainier, Shasta and Mazama (Crater Lake) in between. Like all the others, Mount St. Helens was long popular with mountain climbers. By 1985, there were rumors of rogue expeditions up the north flank of the mountain, in defiance of an absolute ban on all climbing.

At Mount St. Helens base camp on May 18, 1987, the first day the mountain was reopened to climbers

Seven years after the eruption, on May 18, 1987, the U.S. Forest Service officially re-opened Mount St. Helens to climbers. We began our ascent well before dawn, hoping to tell the story of climbers who couldn't wait for the first legal chance to stand at the precipice and stare straight down to the crater below. We hauled a back-breaking load of gear up steep snow-covered slopes, determined to beam a live shot back to our audience for the evening news. We smirked as we ran into fellow reporters from competing TV stations who hoped to have their helicopters drop the necessary equipment at the summit for them.

But we smirked too soon. We made it to the top, but couldn't have been more exhausted. The day was warm, the snow turned soft, and carrying all our gear seemed more masochistic than manly. To make it worse, none of us could find any "real" climbers ... it seemed everyone on the mountain that day was a reporter, looking for the elusive "legitimate" pioneer.

As we regrouped for our live shots, we watched in glee as the competing stations' helicopters discovered it was all but impossible to find a safe place on the steep summit to unload all their gear. Our decision to mule our gear on our backs had paid off. When our own helicopter swooped by, it dropped a small shiny package near our feet: a six-pack of tall aluminum cans filled with cold beer. Our spirits were higher than the summit, and the rest of the afternoon and evening went without a hitch.

As the 10th anniversary of the eruption approached, I made repeated requests to do what few others had done: hike into the crater itself. The U.S. Forest Service was understandably cautious. The lava dome was still sporadically active, and the crater walls were still extremely unstable. There were no trails, no maps, and endless chasms along the way. In the event of an emergency, we would have no easy way out, and no right to demand a rescue, assuming we could reach anyone in those pre-cell phone days.

Years later, it was revealed that several scientists had become extremely sick after exposure to a previously undiscovered bacteria in the blast zone. The bug was related to the often-fatal Legionnaire's disease. Nonetheless, my pestering paid off, and we were given the reluctant okay.

By 1989, the big story at St. Helens was the unexpected recovery of plants and animals in the 19-mile blast zone. But in the crater itself, any life forms were either well-hidden or completely absent. As we scrambled up the steep, deeply wrinkled cliffs that guard the crater's entrance, it was easy to imagine we were climbing on Mars. Jagged rocks tore our clothes and cut into our boots. We heard the cascades of snow-fed waterfalls, the hiss of escaping gasses and, of course, the thunder of those VW-sized rocks breaking off cliffs looming 2,000 feet above our heads.

As a thick fog descended, the boiling magma beneath the surface made our compass go haywire. We realized we could no longer tell up from down. Leslie, my wife, used her own well-tuned internal compass to calibrate our position, until we finally came to our boulder-free campsite, where we precariously pitched our tents for the night.

Burning boots on the volcano's fog-shrouded lava dome in 1989

At dawn, we decided to climb the lava dome itself. We later learned that the strong smell of sulfur might have masked other, more poisonous gasses. As we climbed higher and higher, it became tougher to get a handhold: The rocks and soil were too hot to the touch. When it became clear we could not possibly risk going higher, we stood in awe and soaked in the surreal view around us. Moments later, the dreamy bubble burst, as we suddenly realized the soles of our boots were starting to melt!

I was never hit by a boulder, and the bacteria never entered my body. But Mount St. Helens invaded me long ago in a way that I would never have guessed.

At first, I fell into the typical TV reporter's trap of declaring the 1980 eruption a "disaster." We described everything in terms of loss, destruction and death. Those of us with microphones and notepads painted a picture of pure gloom that kept ratings high and facts muddied.

The truth, it turned out, was that May 18, 1980, was a beginning and not an end. Of course, for the families of the 57 people who died, that perspective must be bittersweet at best. Yet, some of the deceased were there by choice that day, including a few daring scientists, one journalist and the infamous Harry Truman.

I eventually learned that Mount St. Helens has been erupting almost like clockwork every 150 years, and each time it has renewed the land around it, and grown back to its former glory. The rich farmlands east of the Cascades owe much of their fertility to eons of eruptions. The 1980 explosion created dozens of new lakes, some already blessed with an amazing biological diversity.

Pioneer plants and animals are having a field day around the edges of the blast zone, and many myths about the supposed vulnerability of some species have been blown apart (frogs, salamanders and beetles have all done amazingly well). All in all, I feel oddly blessed to be such an up-close witness to an utterly normal but extraordinarily exciting cycle of nature.

On May 18, 1990, the 10th anniversary of the eruption, I stood on the ridge named for David Johnston. Next to me was Tom Brokaw of NBC News. Each of us had finished our respective live shots, and we stood in silence as shafts of sunlight beamed down between darkening clouds over the volcano. "You're lucky," Brokaw quietly said. "I have to head out of here tonight, but you get to live near this mountain. There isn't a place on Earth like it."

Hard to argue.

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