Goofy is dead and I killed him

Somehow in all my Mount St Helens obsession, I had missed this full sequence. What makes it especially terrifying, is that it’s not from the side — this photographer was practically looking down the barrel of the gun. I had to track these down to reassure myself he’d survived.

(The only surviving she snapping photos that day was Dorothy Stoffel, filming and praying as her Cessna went into a steep dive trading altitude for speed to outrun the expanding ash cloud).

I should’ve recognized the above photos by AP reporter Vern Hodgson from 17 miles away, well outside the evacuation zone.

But then, so was nearly everyone who died, despite Governor Dixy Lee Ray’s claims to the contrary, blaming victims to hide the fact she’d overruled the geologists and moved the boundaries in to suit logging and fishing interests.

Short article on Hodgson’s terrifying ordeal and his main newspaper not even bothering to develop the film he almost died for here:

IMO, Hodgson is very, very lucky he survived — barely — by being slightly off-center from the initial blast. The mountain had bottled up the pressure way too long under a sticky, thick lava dome, so when that plug gave way, the mountaintop was still capping the top like a thumb over the end of a champagne bottle. So the pyroclastic flow — you know what that is, an avalanche of superheated volcanic gases (highly acidic) lava pulverized to dust made of shards of glass, semi molten lava, chunks of blasted-apart mountain and hunks of glaciers flashing to white-hot steam in a roiling mass moving at several hundred mph — that hellcloud came out under tremendous pressure and shot sideways, a new deadly form of eruption geologists named “sector collapse”.