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Mike Moore of Castle Rock, Wash., his wife Lu and their two daughters, four-year-old Bonnielu and three-month-old Terra Dawn, were on a hike along the Green River trail, about 13 miles north of Mount St. Helens, when the volcano erupted. "The sky turned as black as I've ever seen, and ash and pumice fell on us like black rain," said Lu Moore. "Then the air pressure changed, and our ears went pop, pop, pop."
The family scrambled into a nearby shack, waited two hours and emerged to find themselves in a wasteland of ash and fallen trees. They started off to find their car, but the trail had been obliterated, and they had no idea where to look. So they pitched a tent and settled in for what turned out to be a 30-hour wait, munching on survival rations from their packs and sleeping on the ash. Around noon on Monday, an Air Force helicopter pilot spotted them. Said the pilot, Sgt. Earl Edwards: "The area they were in looked like somebody had dropped the Bomb. I was shocked to see anybody there alive."
Farther away from the mountain, Northwesterners who were never in any danger heard what many at first thought were sonic booms and then saw a spectacular—and frightening—drama in the sky. Said Harvey Olander, a retired geologist who now cultivates a 40-acre apple orchard outside Yakima: "I was working on an irrigation ditch. The sky got dark, and I thought we had a hailstorm coming. Then it got deathly still, and all you could see through the darkness was the purple-pink glow of sheet lightning." Said Chuck Taylor, a reporter for the Tri-City Herald in Pasco, Wash., who was at the Hanford nuclear complex 140 miles from St. Helens: "It looked exactly like a tornado bearing down."
In Spokane, Wash., Jean Penna, 32, a corporate assistant at the Sheraton-Spokane Hotel, was driving to Seattle when she decided to stop first at her mother's home a few blocks from her own. Said she: "In the time it took me to get from my apartment to my mother's house, it went black. All of a sudden this powder began to fall, just like snow. It was 75 degrees outside and pitch black." When she left her apartment complex, she said, several of her friends were sunbathing. "You've got people out there sunbathing," she marveled, "and the sky starts falling."
For all the devastation, however, the long-range effects—if St. Helens does not explode again—are likely to be less drastic than was at first feared. Great though its force was, the explosion was not so powerful as many volcanic eruptions of the past, nor did it spill out gases as noxious as those released by the more famous killer eruptions of history. Scientists predicted that St. Helens will cause little long-range damage to human health and the world's climate.