That was really, really cool.

That is indeed very cool.

I have a couple of pieces of jewelery made from the volcanic ash from Mount St Helen's. It's essentially posh glass - obsidian - and is a very clear dark green, similar to a Tsavorite garnet. It sometimes comes in red too. The stone is called Mount St Helens or Helenite.

Wow, how otherworldly. I remember that eruption 28 years ago. The moon was orange for weeks. Cool link, danf.

That is awesome! Thanks for the link. Husband will get a kick. At the moment he is very interested in supervolcanoes and volcanoes in general.

Now I want some Helenite jewelry. I've seen it on QVC. It is pretty.

We lived outside of Seattle when the eruption happened. My dad took me fishing that morning. We heard a loud bang, and my dad told me that someone must be shooting cannons. I had another couple hours with a fishing pole to daydream about pirates and cannons and the like. When we got home, my mom told us what had happened, and it was even more exciting (and scary!) than pirates.

The next day was a Monday, and school was canceled! It was like a snow day, but better! Some other kids and I walked up to the top of the hill to see the "mushroom cloud." I was really disappointed that it didn't look anything like a mushroom. We couldn't stay outside for long, though, because everything was covered in ash and our moms made us come in. I remember asking one of the older kids what would happen if I breathed too much ash. "It'll cut your lungs," she told me. That's when it was no longer cool, but scary. I tried to breathe shallowly for the rest of the day.

My folks still have a couple jars of ash in a closet somewhere that we collected off of the car and the bushes out front. My most vivid memory of the whole thing (possibly because, if I remember correctly, my dad took a picture) is of ash covering the rosebuds in the front yard.

I hear Retin-A helps with that.

I'm with you, mudpuppie, I remember all that. I remember standing in my backyard as a kid watching it erupt. And I got bored much quicker than my mom did.

I remember wearing masks so that you didn't breathe as much ash, and I still have a little jar full of ash I collected from our driveway. It's been moved to Wisconsin, and now back to Oregon.

I was in Eugene. It was a Sunday morning and I had a 10am softball game. The other team forfeited because they were freaked out that the ash or lava would invade Eugene.

Also, no ATM in the state worked because they were all based in Portland.

Wow. That was awesome.

There were ATMs in Oregon in 1980? I don't remember the first one coming to Texas until 1985 or so. (Or maybe my parents were late adopters.)

/derail

ATMs started in Texas! June of 1978.

There are still a few banks around Atlanta with the "Tillie" name on their ATMs.

We used to have Tillie. I remember my dad saying that we had to stop by the Tillie.

Yes. They were called "Day and Night Teller Machines" or some such thing. And because Portland got ashed, it caused them all to go down.

I have ash and rock from Mt. St. Helens, collected during a visit 8 or 9 years ago. I remember seeing a road crew trying to bulldoze some space for a new lane or something--every time they'd cut into the embankment, it'd just collapse in a cloud of fine ash.

I've also collected samples from Guatemala (pumice stones floating in Lake Atitlan, looking just like styrofoam) and from Kilauea (chipped right off the cooled flow).

I like volcanoes.