On November 13th, 1931, a child was born in Seattle. They named him Robert Emerson Landsburg, and that’s really all I know about that.
What I know of his story starts many years later, in early 1980. Landsburg was a photographer living in Portland, Oregon. He spent a few weeks, probably starting in late April, making repeated hikes up the tumultuous Mt. St. Helens and photographing the summit. The mountain had started shifting at the end of March, and everyone wanted to see it for themselves.
I don’t know much about that, either. There were a lot of volcanologists in the area, professionals and scientists, studying the pre-eruptive activity. Maybe he was among them. Maybe he just thought it was interesting. Volcanic gas monitoring - how neat!
On May 18th, 1980, Robert Landsburg was setting up to take another shot of Mt. St. Helens. By 8:30 in the morning, his camera was set up on its tripod, pointed at the peak. At 8:32, the entire north face of the mountain suddenly slid away, exposing molten rock. The resulting burst of lava was so fast, it reached the nearby Spirit Lake before the landslide did. Clouds of ash billowed upwards. Raging hot rocks sped down the mountain face at hundreds of miles per hour, obliterating everything in their path.
Robert Emerson Landsburg was perhaps four miles from the summit that morning. Four miles is nothing in terms of mountains and of volcanoes.
I’m a naturally anxious person. I think a lot about what I might do in a natural disaster. Say I’m a few miles away from an erupting volcano and a half-cubic-mile-wide avalanche. Outcome: not so good.
Robert Landsburg saw the eruption, so he took photos. He was in a brand new situation, one he knew he would not survive, and he decided to preserve it as best he could. It’s impossible to know what was going through his head at that moment, but there is a degree of planning there, of premeditation. What we know is that after he took his final photos, he rewound the film, removed the camera from the tripod, and placed it all into his backpack. His wallet was there, too. His ID.
His face and his name and the camera and the film. He wanted to be identified, and he wanted the photos to be safe. Landsburg laid the backpack down on the ground, and then laid on top of it.
His cause of death is listed as asphyxiation. That makes sense to me. After all, it was the ash cloud coming down on him, not the lava. It layered on him thickly, and I guess at some point he just stopped breathing. He was found seventeen days later, under the soft grey blanket of the new landscape. The film was torn, scratched, bubbled and streaked, but still able to be developed. The ID was there, still able to be identified.
His face and his name and the camera and the film. He was 48 years old at the time of death. His photos were published in the January 1981 edition of National Geographic, a year later.
Robert Emerson Landsburg was buried in the Mount Saint Helens Memorial Grove in Washington. Above his name is the inscription “MOUNTAIN OF MEMORIES” - and, above that, an etching of Mt. St. Helens, surrounded by clouds. That seems appropriate. It’s the thing that killed him, and the thing whose history he decided to preserve with his life.
I imagine laying in the ash four miles from the summit, my backpack beneath me, this precious cargo, my final evidence, my face and my name and the camera and the film. I imagine feeling proud and sad, like a parent who will not see my child grow up. I imagine feeling terrified and alone and a little excited. I imagine that before I stop breathing I am hopeful I can make it out alive - but if I don’t, there’s always my face, and my name, and the camera, and the film.

















