On May 18, 1980, I was 5 years old when Mt. St. Helens blew her top into the atmosphere. I hardly knew what a camera was then, so I don’t have any photos of my own. I do remember my parents taking me up onto the S.E. 10th St. overpass at I-205 in Vancouver and watching the ominous ash plume spew into the sky.

In the following days, ash fell from the sky over the Portland and Vancouver area. Mt. St. Helens had hundreds of minor eruptions since then. In the meantime, the mountain also formed a new lava dome. By the 1990′s, the mountain settled down.

In September 2004, Mt. St. Helens awoke from her nap, producing a swarm of earthquakes from deep beneath the lava dome. On October 1, 2004, after over a decade of sleep, Mt. St. Helens awakens right before my very own eyes as I was driving on Forest Road 99 to Windy Ridge. This time I snapped some photographs of her first eruption since the 1990′s, from start to finish, and the timing could have not been any better.

View Mt. St. Helens Eruption on Oct. 1, 2004 Photo Album

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