One of the landmark events of my youth happened in the early morning of May 18th, 1980, during my senior year of high school. On that day, Mount Saint Helens suffered one of the largest recorded landslides in modern history – resulting in a cataclysmic volcanic blast which unleashed a pyroclastic cloud in a lateral detonation that scoured the landscape for up to twenty kilometers from the mountain. It was the first volcanic eruption on the U.S. mainland in two generations (the last being Mount Lassen in 1912) and one [ Continue reading... ]