Today, and I'm not making this up, I was trying to kill an hour before going to dinner with some friends. I was driving and I looked up within seconds of seeing a jillion tons of ashes spewing out of Mt St Helens. Briefly, I didn't even notice.
Then my brain went "wait a minute, the mountain is erupting!"
Sweet! Holy Crap Batman! Above Mt St Helens, some 45 miles in the distance, I could see an inverted cone of ash spewing into the sky. It wasn't dissipating or anything yet, altho it was beginning to blow slightly to the east. The plume looked to be about 5 times as high as the mountain, so I figured it was around 25,000 feet high.
I happened to be in a primo location to look at it, so I did. Then I started calling everyone I knew to tell them to turn on the news. My brother, father and mother in Texas, Kurt in San Francisco. I called Dan to tell him to go outside and look at it. Then the cell phones were jammed. So I guess everyone was calling everyone by then.
It was cool. I have now seen an actual eruption from a volcano with my own two eyeballs. I wish I had had a camera with me, but alas, I didn't.
From this distance it was really a cool experience.
Here's a photo a friend took and sent to me.
2 Comments
This was like the scariest eruption in the world. How the hell did people not die in this? Organisation. Typical. Man, I wish I saw that eruption.
um, you do realize in the first picture, the volcano eruption over downtown Portland is a painting, right? i mean downtown Portland is a photo, but the volcano is a painting. It's a little thing I did with Photoshop. When my mom first saw it, she said "oh my lord" 'cause she was sure we were all gonna die soon. But the volcano is 45 miles away, as evidenced in the smaller second picture. So we were never in any danger in Portland.
I had fun making it in Photoshop. I mean, I even reflected the volcano in the
Willamette River, complete with waves and everything. So it does look real. Except for the brush strokes in the painting, of course.