07:38 AM PDT on Tuesday, May 17, 2005

By ABE ESTIMADA, kgw.com Staff

MOUNT ST. HELENS, Wash. – History was being made below Dorothy Stoffel’s feet.

AP

Mount St. Helens sends a plume of ash, smoke and debris skyward Sunday, May 18, 1980 in its most violent eruption to date.

As part of Mount St. Helens crumbled away, unleashing a cloud of ash and steam that would turn day into night, geologist Dorothy Stoffel, flying in a small plane just above the crater wall, knew that May 18, 1980 would not be a date soon forgotten.

“I immediately thought, ‘Oh my, you expect volcanoes to erupt, but you don’t expect mountains to fall apart,’” Dorothy Stoffel said. “I immediately recognized this was going to be a huge event.”

As a stunned Dorothy Stoffel watched the mountain, somewhere in the forest below her, Forest Service employee Valerie Pierson was running back to her truck.

Pierson, gasping as she ran through standing and fallen trees, had to catch her breath. She suddenly realized, if Mount St. Helens wanted to kill her, there was nothing she could do about it. She stopped, turned and looked at the volcano.

“It looked like an atomic bomb,” Pierson said. “It was just billowing.”

A quarter century later, the terror of Mount St. Helens that May day remain seared into Dorothy Stoffel’s and Pierson’s memories.

They also remember eerie quiet – how the mountain made so little noise to them, they didn’t know it had come alive until they saw the volcano awakening from its slumber.

AP

Mount St. Helens sends a plume of ash, smoke and debris skyward Sunday, May 18, 1980 in its most violent eruption to date.

The quiet that Dorothy Stoffel and Pierson remember belied the visual spectacle before them – that of a mountain being torn apart and spewing so much ash into the atmosphere, the ash would circle the Earth.

So Dorothy Stoffel’s and Pierson’s May 18, 1980 recollections, which they shared with kgw.com, very much resemble an old, black and white silent movie.

When Dorothy Stoffel and Pierson recall looking at Mount St. Helens that day, they see steam, roiling among the dark clouds of grey and black ash. They see bolts of lightning cracking the skies – bright enough to overwhelm the darkness for just moments in time.

The silence remained.

Dorothy Stoffel: Mountain crumbles

The mountain looked so serene on May 18, 1980, Dorothy Stoffel thought it may have gone dormant again.

Dorothy Stoffel was in the front passenger side seat of the Cessna 182 plane that her husband, Keith Stoffel, also a geologist and employed by the state of Washington, had rented out of Yakima for a flight over Mount St. Helens.

AP

Early morning sun light filters through steam released by Mount St. Helens on Monday.

The flight was a birthday present for Dorothy Stoffel, who was turning 31 on May 23.

The small plane was on its final pass over the volcano, about 500 feet above the north crater wall, when the couple noticed the shoe string glacier perched on the south crater begin to fall.

They both became excited, grabbed their cameras and began taking pictures. Dorothy Stoffel said she was just taking her second picture when the mountain looked like it was being sliced in half like a load of bread.

Underneath them, a fracture a mile in length appeared.

North of the fracture, the mountain was vibrating, “rippling and churning in place,” Dorothy Stoffel said. They continued to watch as the entire north side of Mount St. Helens began falling away.

Keith Stoffel, sitting in the rear of the plane, was excited and began yelling, “Oh, neat! Oh, neat!” Dorothy Stoffel, becoming increasingly frightened, thought her husband’s reaction was perplexing.

But pilot Bruce Judson heard the excitement and encouraged him to keep taking pictures.

Judson, the then 23-year-old pilot, did not know how violently the volcano was stirring beneath them. Instead of maneuvering the small plane away from the volcano, Judson tipped the right wing so Keith Stoffel could take better photographs.

It was then that the three people realized the grave danger they were in.

“We’re looking down and the north half of the volcano is falling away,” Dorothy Stoffel said. “We began to see steam pouring out from where the mountain had become detached. We could see the blast coming up beneath our feet.”

Judson immediately put the Cessna into a steep dive to pick up speed so they could get away from the roiling volcano. The plane was “red lining,” as pilots call it, with the Cessna, within minutes, reaching its top speed at 200 miles per hour

“I could just see the ground coming up in front of us, ” Dorothy Stoffel said.

But at 200 miles per hour, the Cessna still did not have the power to escape the lateral blast, churning about 600 miles per hour. But Keith Stoffel noticed the black cloud, funneling into a cone shape, heading north.

He told Judson to turn south. Keith Stoffel’s hunch probably saved their lives.

As the Cessna made its escape, the three of them saw an awesome sight – the vertical eruption was underway, sending a cloud of ash and steam about 30 miles into the air. In and among the ashen clouds, a tremendous light show the likes of which have rarely been seen in the Pacific Northwest was underway.

“There was tremendous lightning,” Dorothy Stoffel said. “In fact, at that point, Keith was scared we were going to be hit by lightning.”

The lightning strikes, thousands of feet high, were so powerful and numerous, they lit up the crater. And for the first time, Dorothy Stoffel saw how eruption had forever changed the face of Mount St. Helens.

“We could see the big, horseshoe crater,” she said. “The basic morphology you see today was there quickly.”

AP

A car is shown submerged in ash in this May 20, 1980 photo from the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington State.

To Dorothy Stoffel’s knowledge, no one else had been that close to Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980 as her, her husband and Judson.

The pictures Dorothy and Keith Stoffel took of Mount St. Helens roiling would become prized pieces – to be scrutinized and analyzed carefully by scientists looking for insight into one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular events, to be looked upon in awe by countless people worldwide.

“I believe Keith and I and Judson had a once in a mankind experience,” said Dorothy Stoffel, now living in Spokane, Wash. “There’s nobody who’s been that close to a volcano, positioned where we were, and seen what we had seen and lived to tell about it.”

Valerie Pierson: Running for her life

Pierson jumped from one downed tree to the next in the woods of the North Basin in the shadow of Mount St. Helens.

Pierson, then a 23-year-old inspector for the Forest Service, was hurrying to catch up to the tree planting crew just ahead of her.

When she hit the ground again, it rumbled. Immediately, she looked up at the mountain.

kgw.com/USGS

For more than nine hours a vigorous plume of ash erupted, eventually reaching 12 to 15 miles above sea level. The plume moved eastward at an average speed of 60 miles per hour, with ash reaching Idaho by noon.

It was about 8:32 a.m. And the top of Mount St. Helens looked like it was vibrating before falling away and releasing a huge cloud of ash. The young inspector wasn’t sticking around.

For the past few months, Pierson had told visitors to the mountain that Mount St. Helens was due for another eruption – sometime.

She had spoken to geologists and studied what might happen if the mountain would awaken. That day had come.

She yelled at the crew to run for their lives. She ran about 50 feet uphill to try to reach her truck, the ground scattered with downed logs, before her lungs could no longer take it.

She stopped to catch her breath and realized it was no use to run.

“I’m not going to outrun (an ash cloud) that travels 700 to 2,000 miles per hour and thousands of degrees in temperature,” Pierson said.

The only thing she could do was watch the volcano’s majesty.

“It was just billowing,” Pierson said. “There was of course a real grey plume, but within that grey plume were white steam clouds, and there was lightning striking.”

She could also feel among the trees the air stirring as the force of the Mount St. Helens blast created a suction in the forests around the volcano. Looking up, she could see the ash cloud spreading in the skies above her head, but no ash was falling on her and the crew because the prevailing winds were taking it to the north and east.

Pierson and two tree planting crews made their way out of the woods. On their way driving to Cougar, the closest town, they constantly glanced up at the mountain, wondering somewhat if these were the last moments of their lives.

While in Cougar, Pierson would meet her future husband. Gerhard Pierson was among the people who wanted to leave Cougar after seeing the volcano come alive. He asked Valerie Pierson if he could put his bike in the back of her truck and for a ride out of town. Pierson agreed.

AP

Mount St. Helens roars to life in this Oct. 17, 1980 file photo sending a plume of smoke and ash skyward.

They drove about 12 miles southeast of Cougar to a hill that they knew would give them a clear view of the volcano. They watched Mount St. Helens erupt for the rest of the day. A few years later, the couple would marry.

Despite the terror of Mount St. Helens that day, Valerie and Gerhard Pierson would live close by, residing in Cougar between 1982 and 1993 to raise a family.

“I fell in love with that country,” said Pierson, now a registered nurse living part-time in North Bend, Wash. “I loved the area. I’ve been fascinated by nature, and the processes of nature and what creates our landscape. And I’ve always been interested in geology and biology and it was fascinating to be around that and be part of that.”