A 19-year-old Jim Hobson, of Battle Ground, is shown here water skiing on May 18, 1980, as Mount St. Helens erupts in the background.
On May 17, 1980, 19-year-old Battle Ground resident Jim Hobson and some friends launched their boat at Saddle Dam Park on Yale Reservoir. After water skiing all day, Hobson and his friends – Robert Morgan, Ralph Morgan and Dave Pritchard – made a camp up Siouxon Creek for the night, unaware of the sight that would greet them the next morning.
The four friends woke up the morning of May 18, 1980, with no idea that a volcanic eruption was going on right beside them.
“Where we were camped, there is no view of the mountain, so when we went out for our morning ski we were not aware of the eruption,” Hobson said. “As we skied into view of the mountain and saw the eruption, we stopped the boat and sat there staring for a while.’’
What might be surprising to some is that what Hobson and his friends witnessed did not make them instantly race for safer grounds.
“After that we moved our camp out on the beach in view of the mountain and spent the day there skiing and watching the eruption,’’ Hobson said. “On the way home there was not a soul around.”
Hobson said the area where they had been camping and waterskiing was restricted for a while after the eruption, but it didn’t really change or disrupt that particular area too much.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens was the only significant event of its kind to occur in the contiguous 48 U.S. states since the 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak in California. Prior to the eruption, there was a 67-month series of earthquakes and steam-venting episodes on the mountain, caused by an injection of magma at shallow depth below the volcano that created a bulge and a fracture system on the mountain’s north slope.
An earthquake at 8:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980, caused the entire weakened north face to slide away, creating the largest landslide ever recorded.
This landslide suddenly exposed the partly molten, gas- and steam-rich rock in the volcano to lower pressure. The rock responded by exploding a hot mix of lava and pulverized older rock toward Spirit Lake so fast that it overtook the avalanching north face.
“I was 19 years old, friends were 19 and younger,” Hobson said of staying to watch the eruption. “Young males not thinking about anything but having fun.”
