It was a sunny spring Sunday morning on May 18, 1980, when I casually strolled into work a little before 9 a.m. and was greeted by the KOMO-TV assignment editor saying, "The Mountain blew. Really, its the big one." And indeed it was. Before long a camera crew and I were headed to Mt. St. Helens in a chartered helicopter. Flying south from Seattle you could see the eruption boiling away into the sky. This definitely was not the little puffs of ash and steam that we'd been seeing off and on the previous three months since Mt. St. Helens reawakened.

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