Thanks to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dine for the link, an absolutely fantastic, sobering, amazing set of photos from the Mt St Helens eruption that happened thirty years ago yesterday.
As someone born and raised in the shadow of "Mt St Me!!!" as my sister Helen used to call it, I can say that I've never had an experience more impossible to describe than that of seeing a mountain cut in half from one day to the next.
The photos at Boston.com in the link above do a great job of conveying the power of the eruption itself (the fallen trees like combed hair may be the most visceral), and the comments contain a host of "I remember when" stories that help define the impact it had on a lot of lives.
But to convey how it felt to look at the horizon in 1980 and see a different mountain than what I'd seen there all my life, nothing works as well as a before-and-after image:
dine for the link, an absolutely fantastic, sobering, amazing set of photos from the Mt St Helens eruption that happened thirty years ago yesterday.As someone born and raised in the shadow of "Mt St Me!!!" as my sister Helen used to call it, I can say that I've never had an experience more impossible to describe than that of seeing a mountain cut in half from one day to the next.
The photos at Boston.com in the link above do a great job of conveying the power of the eruption itself (the fallen trees like combed hair may be the most visceral), and the comments contain a host of "I remember when" stories that help define the impact it had on a lot of lives.
But to convey how it felt to look at the horizon in 1980 and see a different mountain than what I'd seen there all my life, nothing works as well as a before-and-after image: