Boom ! Thar She Blows !

I can't believe it has been 30 years. May 18, 1980. I wasn't living in Portland like I am now. I was in Boise, Idaho -- and in church praising Jesus on that particular Sunday morning. The local news is priming the pump for this Tuesday's 30th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. You can see the live webcams here. It sits about 90 miles to the Northeast of us.....we see it every day (except on those eight months a year when it's cloudy and gray here....shh, don't tell anybody) minus the pointy top that it used to have.

Here's what it used to look like:


During the eruption:


And this is what it looks like on most days today:

We have taken a picnic lunch up to the Johnson Ridge Observatory many times. And I've even shot some photos from the air while traveling over it -- I've flown over it hundreds of time .... more times than I've crossed any other single piece of land. Even today, you can still occasionally find some of the debris from the eruption. And it has erupted several times since -- October 2004 I flew directly over it 30 minutes after this eruption. The captain called us to tell us what had happened and that he wasn't sure if we would continue on to our Seattle destination or not.

And then, again....only this time, we actually got to see this from our very own bedroom window in March 2005:

And just yesterday, there were rumblings at a different mountain in the Cascade Mountain Range -- Mt. Hood experienced a series of rumblings yesterday reminding us all of the churnings deep below us here in the Pacific Northwest. Mt. Hood sits to the east of Portland -- the sunrise comes up over it each morning reminding us of the beauty that brought each of us to the Northwest. You'll see a ton of morning Mt. Hood shots of my own in this photo set. 30 Years. Who would have known. Even in this day and age of i-EVERYTHING, Facebook, Twitter and all of the others that there would still remain this sleeping giant beneath us.