by Jim Mendenhall, Photo Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Photographer: Jim Mendenhall, Mendenhall Multimedia
Editors Note: Jim Mendenhall, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Photo Editor, recalls getting up close and personal with Mount St. Helens after she blew her top.
It was on a Sunday, 30 years ago, that Mount St. Helens in Washington State erupted, belching ash into the heavens and cascading debris down the mountain. It was the most destructive volcano in U.S. history.
Along with everyone else, I was riveted with the news footage and still images that slowly made their way out of the impact area, starting with the images of the plume rising about 10 miles into flight paths. The next Sunday, it spewed out another round. The third Sunday, it heaved again.
That was enough for the editors of my first daily newspaper, The Louisville Times and Courier-Journal, to send me, the 25-year-old new kid, up to photograph it with a colorful writer Richard Desruisseau, a veteran columnist. Our flight got to Portland, Oregon, about midnight. It was the nearest major airport still in operation outside the blast area.
We steered our rental car directly into the Red Zone, a circle on the map that was perhaps 10 or 20 miles in diameter, surrounding what had been the peak. Desruisseau determined that there was a bar within the bull's eye, which seemed like a good target to contact the natives.
We pulled into the bar's gravel parking lot about 3 a.m. Monday. As a rookie in the business, I didn't expect to find anyone there. It was a full house.
We got story after story of each one's near miss with the disaster. It was all beyond my imagination, as someone who had grown up in a plains state on this side of the Mississippi River.
As we drove into the predawn headed even deeper into the Red Zone, the stories of volcanic stones falling from the sky along with the concrete-colored ash that smothered everything, stuck in my mind. It was difficult to see the road in the headlights, as everything was the same color ash on and off the road. Only the tire tracks of vehicles not disabled by the gritty air, gave us a visual clue to the mountain route.
Near the end of the day, the experience I had been looking forward to most was a possibility.
At a tiny airport close to the mountain, a pilot for our rental plane told us that the flight was cancelled because of cloud cover. But as we stood there staring straight up into the clouds, a tiny spot of blue opened. I could have covered it from view with my thumb at arms-length.
The pilot saw it first and remarked about that being the first time he had seen through the cloud cover since the initial eruption Sunday. No one had seen the mountain during the three weeks since the eruption, he said.
Having come 2,000 miles or so for the opportunity to see the volcano from the air, I pressed him for hope. It appeared that the cover was thin enough — just a few hundred feet — that we might get above it.
He agreed to corkscrew up into the opening in the clouds. We took off and found that it was perfectly clear above the cloud cover. We headed for the volcano.
From about 500 feet above the surface, we snaked along the flow of a river valley that had lead down the mountain from Spirit Lake. It had been a pristine alpine lake at the foot of the mountain before the top of the mountain filled most of it with rock, ash and mud. We already knew the story of the now-legendary mountain man, Harry Randall Truman, the 84-year-old owner of the Mount St. Helens Lodge on Spirit Lake. He had refused to flee in the face of warnings that the volcano would blow. He died in the first eruption, his cabin buried in ash.
No water was visible in the valley, just dust. About 15 miles out, it seemed that all the trees were tipped down on one side of a distinct line that ringed the mountain. A couple of vehicles were visible along a road and we could count the downed trees on the road that were between the drivers and open road three weeks earlier.
At about 10 miles, none of the fallen trees had branches that survived the pryroclastic flow. That was a tsunami of super-heated air that blasted across the topography in flows visible in the patterns of fallen trees. Soon the view toward any point on a compass was the same. It was the view that a flea must have on the back of a gray dog. From above a sense of scale evaporated. What appeared as bristles, that were the toothpick like remains of 150 foot tall pines, coated the hills.
Nearer to the five-mile mark, it seemed we were over a treeless moonscape. To my utter surprise, a few circular sinkholes several yards across had dropped below the surface level and a sulfur yellow rim outlined the interior of the craters. We gagged as we flew through an invisible haze smelling of burning matches and eggs.
As we approached what had been Spirit Lake — now mostly filled in — we could see a plume of steam still rising from the crater. My widest angle lens would be needed to get a vertical shot to show some of the downed timber in the foreground and the peak in the center.
It was then that I realized the limits of this plane with an overhead wing. The strut supporting the wing rose from an angle at the fuselage -- upward into my field of view.
To get a clear shot, I would have to hang out of the window. In the bravado of youth, I did not even consider it a risk. (This was years before I met Deborah, the woman who would become my wife and bear our son, Evan.)
The pilot, too, realized that this was the rarest of opportunities. He agreed to fly at the slowest possible speed, about 80 mph on land. We did a fly-by once to line up the shot.
I figured all the pressure was on the reporter. Clearly no one would want to go back to the newsroom and explain why he let go of my ankles over a volcano. I was right once. I would never consider it nowadays.
With one camera around my neck, I crawled across back seat and leveled my body horizontally out the window, with the window frame just above my knees. The prop wash beat backwards along the side and battered my eyelids against my eyeballs. I could not see more than a teary blur flashing past me.
I had already set the exposure and put on a red filter on the lens to make the pale blue sky behind the steam plume a little darker on the black-and-white film. I just focused by feel, setting the lens a little closer than infinity. (Other photographers in Louisville, especially the late pilot photographer Billy Davis, had taught me to know what to expect shooting aerials from the company plane in Kentucky.)
We fired away a couple dozen exposures on one pass and headed home.
Copyright 1980, Text and Photos, Jim Mendenhall/The Louisville Times
The Louisville Times ran a four-page wrap around the regular paper with the copy that Desruisseau had written in 24 straight hours. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for his coverage of Mount St. Helens.
