The Eruption of Mount St. Helens
Two photographers, Robert Landsburg and Reid Blackburn, were among the 57 people who died May 18, 1980. These are their final images.
Days before the the eruption of Mount St. Helens, freelance photographer Robert Landsburg wrote in his journal, “Feel right on the verge of something.”
On May 18, 1980, Landsburg was less than four miles away from the volcano when it exploded. He knew he wasn’t going to survive the blast so he rewound the film into his camera, pulled it off the tripod and stowed it in a backpack to try and preserve the photos. Seventeen days after the eruption, Landsburg’s body was discovered near his 1969 Dodge station wagon. His film survived.
Landsburg’s final photographs were published in the January 1981 issue of National Geographic.
“It contained not only telling images of the killing edge of the blast but also the scratches, bubbles, warpings, and light leaks caused by heat and ash, the very thumbprint of holocaust.”
One other photographer died that day. Reid Blackburn, a staff photographer at The Columbian, had been photographing Mount St. Helens for weeks, setting up remote cameras for the U.S. Geological Survey and National Geographic. He was eight miles from the eruption, fired off four frames, then took cover in his car, which was discovered four days later. His photographs were unsalvageable. This is Blackburn’s car, a 1969 Volvo 144, buried under the ash.
National Geographic published a photo of Blackburn setting up one of the remote cameras in that same issue. The photo, taken by fellow Columbian staffer Steve Small, shows the styrofoam-encased Nikon on a tripod. There’s also another photo of Blackburn’s buried car, taken by Ralph Perry. Sadly, Perry died five years later in a helicopter crash on Mount St. Helens while photographing for National Geographic.
This is one of the remote cameras Blackburn was operating, triggered via radio transmitter.
Thirty-three years after Blackburn’s death, a roll of unprocessed black and white film was found in storage at The Columbian. Blackburn had taken the photographs in April 1980, a month before the eruption, during a helicopter ride over Mount St. Helens. Here’s the contact sheet.
Of all of the photographs made that tragic day, I think the most recognizable is this one by Roger Werth of The Daily News in Longview, Washington.
Werth and his colleagues at The Daily News won Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for Spot News Reporting. Werth’s iconic photo made the June 2, 1980 cover of TIME. It was also used on the May 2010 cover of National Geographic.
Another stunning, apocalyptic photo of the eruption is this one by United States Geological Survey photographer Robert Krimmel.
This last photo has always been a bit of a mystery to me. It’s kicked around the internet for years and has gone viral almost every year on the anniversary of the eruption. It is believed to be taken by a Boeing plant worker named Richard “Dick” Lasher. A former co-worker, Gary Cooper, said that Lasher made the photo and barely escaped the cloud on his Yamaha IT175 motorcycle (seen hitched to the back of his Ford Pinto). “This pic came with one helluva story,” Cooper wrote. Indeed.
Will circle back on this one day, hopefully.