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Crall raced into a tent to wake Karen Varner, and Nelson wrapped his arms around Ruff as trees fell around them and hot ash rained down. Said Nelson: "We were buried. Then Sue and I started digging our way out of the ash, which was so hot that it burned our hands. Our mouths were full of mud. I told Sue we were going to die, and she said, 'Nonsense.' " As they crawled out from under the trees and ash, they began to gag from the gases in the air and had to cover their mouths with their sweatshirts; stones hailed down and raised bumps on their heads.
When at last the darkness began to lift, Nelson and Ruff began looking for their friends. They saw nothing but ashes and logs where Varner's tent had been; she and Crall later were found dead. The two other members of the camping group, Dan Balch and Brian Thomas, were alive —barely. Burned skin hung loose from Balch's shoulders to his hands, and he was in shock. He was unable to walk. Thomas, wearing only the long john bottoms in which he had been sleeping, was lying dazed under a log. Nelson and Ruff hauled him out, helped him walk to an old mine shack nearby and built over the entrance a barricade of logs to protect their friend from any further ash falls.
Then Nelson and Ruff began what turned into a 15-mile, ten-hour trek away from the mountain, over what Nelson calls a "white-hot desert" of ash. They soon joined up with a 60-year-old man. The three kept up their spirits by singing bawdy songs. In late afternoon they heard helicopters overhead and waved some of their clothes to stir up a dust cloud large enough to attract the pilot's attention. They were rescued, and choppers soon carried out Balch and Thomas as well.
Roald Reitan, 19, and his friend Venus Dergen, 20, of Tacoma, Wash., had been camping next to a good fishing hole in the Toutle River, about 23 miles downstream from Spirit Lake. They were awakened by a rumbling noise from the river, which was covered by felled trees. The pair ran to Reitan's car, but water from the rising river poured over the road, preventing them from driving away. Then a tide of mud crashed through the forest toward the car. Reitan and Dergen climbed to the roof of the car. That got them above the mud, but only momentarily. The mud slide toppled the car over the bank and into the river.
Reitan and Dergen leaped off the roof and fell into the river, by now a boiling mass of logs, mud, pieces of a collapsed train trestle and what Reitan described as "hot bath water." Said he: "I thought we had had it. Venus was stuck between logs, and disappeared several times. I kept climbing over logs to reach her. We were lucky that the logs opened up and I could pull her out." The two were carried about a mile down the river before a family of campers spotted them and heard Reitan calling for help. It took the rescuers about 45 minutes to crawl across the mud and logs and pull Reitan and Dergen to safety.