Former Powell Woman Recalls Being At Mount St. Helens When It Erupted 46 Years Ago

A short stop at her desk the morning of May 18, 1980, saved Valerie Pierson’s life and the lives of a dozen of her crew members who were working at the base of Mount St. Helens that fateful day. The former Powell resident had a terrifying front-row seat to the historic eruption. “I glanced up at the mountain, and I saw the top of it shaking. And then I watched the whole thing come right off,” she said.

Pierson had begun work in the Spirit Lake area near Mount St. Helens in the summer of 1979 as a tree planting inspector. On the morning of May 18, she stopped at her district office before heading to the Clearwater section on the north side of the mountain. “At the last minute, I thought, ‘That’s a drive, I should go to the bathroom,'” she said. When she came out, she noticed a note directing her to change the location of their project that day due to temperature concerns. “I had to unload the truck, reload the truck with the right trees for that area, and so we got up there late that day.”

Mount St. Helens had been showing signs of awakening since March 1980, with harmonic tremors, a growing bulge on the north side, and steam events. In the two months before May 18, the USGS logged more than 10,000 earthquakes. Pierson and her crew were planting trees on the southeast side of the mountain about an hour when the ground began to shake. “I was running down this log, but the log starts moving, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, it must not be on stable ground,'” she said. “And I glanced up at the mountain, and I saw the top of it kind of like shimmering and shaking. And then I watched the whole thing come right off.”

Within seconds of a magnitude 5.1 earthquake, the volcano’s north flank slid away in the largest landslide in recorded history, triggering a lethal blast of hot gas, steam, and rock debris that traveled as fast as 680 mph. A massive plume of ash flew 15 miles into the sky. Pierson realized that had she and her crew followed their original plan, they would have been directly in the blast zone. “The force of super hot gasses called a pyroclastic flow toppled huge trees, just all in a row, for 20 square miles,” she said. “If I hadn’t gone to the bathroom and seen that note, I would have just gone right ahead and gone there.”

The eruption’s impact reached Wyoming, with about 520 million tons of ash carried across 22,000 square miles of the Western United States. Charlotte Fravel, working at Jackson Lake Lodge, said the ash was so thick that views of the Grand Tetons were completely obliterated. “We went outside and our car was totally covered in ash,” she said. “People were having problems breathing and coughing from the ash.” She also learned that the ash would eat the paint off a car.

When Pierson and her crew escaped to the town of Cougar, Washington, she was introduced to a man named Gerhard. “I looked at Gerhard, and I said, ‘Hi,’ and then the next thought that came up in my head was, ‘You just met the man you’re going to marry,'” she said. They were married for 36 years until his death in 2017. Pierson later moved to Powell, where she worked as a nurse, and her husband became a sought-after artist. “My nickname at Mount St. Helens was always ‘Volcano Valerie,'” she said. “Years later, I find the memories of that morning, the feelings of fear, awe and exhilaration are still vividly imprinted upon my mind. The month of May will always signal the awakening of the earth’s power and spirit for me.”