Racing roadblocks for film

On the morning of May 18, 1980, I, along with my husband and our 1-year old son, was camping on our recreational property near the town of Cougar.

My husband woke merely seconds after the eruption, though he heard no noise from the blast. As he ventured outside our camp trailer, he heard faint rumbling sounds. He couldn’t figure out where the sounds were coming from until he looked up to the sky. There he saw strange billowing clouds and within the clouds he observed tiny bolts of lightning. The sounds he was hearing were from the faint thunder caused by those tiny bolts of lightning.

He ran back into the trailer, grabbed our son and told me to get in our pickup truck because the mountain had blown. We headed down to Yale Lake Park, about a mile west of Cougar, to get a better look at the mountain and to determine whether we needed to beat feet down the road to Woodland.

The view we saw was simply awesome! After a while, we, along with some friends, drove back to Cougar. At the Lone Fir Resort, we witnessed a bunch of guys tossing their belongings from a large trailer parked in the RV section of the Resort. They had panic on their faces and their eyes seemed as large a silver dollars. As we talked to them we found out they were part of a tree planting crew that had been on the mountain that morning when it erupted and they were getting out of town as quickly as possible.

By this time, the winds aloft had begun moving the billowing ash cloud to the east. It was a beautiful sunny day, so we decided to stay and view the mountain. But because the mountain is not visible from Cougar, we decided to find a spot closer to the mountain to get a good look. However, by that time authorities had begun placing roadblocks on most roads leading to the mountain. But a friend of ours, who had grown up near Cougar, knew of an old logging road that authorities didn’t know about. So, we made a beer run to the local store, gathered some food together, and headed up the old logging road to a ridge top known as Cinnamon Peak. There, we had an incredible view of the mountain, which was probably only about five to six miles away.

My husband took his camera with him, but had not thought to check how much film he had in it before we left Cougar. After three pictures, he was out of film. As we had our picnic on Cinnamon Peak and observed the awesome spectacle unfolding before us, my husband said he could not pass up the opportunity to capture the event on film. So he and a couple of the guys jumped into a truck and made the trip back to Cougar to purchase more film. As luck would have it the local store was still open for business. Upon their return, things were getting a little dicy on Cinnamon Peak. The ground was beginning to shake and we were getting a bit nervous. So, while my husband was quickly taking additional photos, I used the empty film containers to gather ash. With the film finally exhausted, we all agreed we needed to get back down to Cougar.

Although we enjoyed our day observing the mountain, we had no idea of the death and destruction that had unfolded on the other side of the mountain. It always strikes me, when looking back, how lucky we were that the mountain erupted in the opposite direction from Cougar and how stupid we were to seek a closer view of a very dangerous mountain that day. But we were much younger back then and had that sense of immortality that goes with being young.

We will never forget that day and are reminded of it often through the expanded photos taken by my husband that day. Demand for those photos ultimately resulted in our selling of the negatives to Sandy’s Photo in Portland. It’s likely that one or more of those photos exists in the homes of many Portlanders.