FTV: Volcano Cowboys
Do you need to be a little bit crazy to be a volcanologist? I used to show a video to my Geography / Earth Science classes that featured a French couple named Katia and Maurice Krafft. As he talked about what it is like to work on an active volcano, Maurice described the chaotic environment as being, “A little bit crazy.” Tongue firmly implanted in his cheek, he went on: “I have seen so much that if I were to die today studying a volcano, that would be okay as I have seen enough. I would like to build a canoe out of titanium or something and ride down a lava flow taking temperatures and gas measurements.” This would not only be ‘a little bit crazy’, it would be certain death. I do not think the Kraffts had any sort of death wish, but perhaps they became a little too familiar with their prey and too complacent in the dangers posed by their chosen profession.
On June 3, 1991, Katia, Maurice, fellow volcanologist Harry Glicken and forty other people were killed by a pyroclastic flow eruption. A pyroclastic flow is a cloud of superheated gas and ash that roars down the flanks of a volcano at tremendous speed. Japan’s Mount Unzen, where they perished, has a long history of this type of eruption. One can only speculate how, with their great knowledge of volcanic eruptions, they put themselves in harm’s way. When their bodies were recovered two days later, they were burned beyond recognition and had to be identified using personal items including Maurice’s watch and their camera equipment. Any film they had taken of the approaching flow was destroyed by the intense heat but in the end, the position of their bodies near their rental car indicates they had made no attempt to flee. Glicken apparently had and his body was found some distance away from their vehicle. Certainly they knew that what they saw coming down the mountain signaled their doom.
May 18, 2025 marked the 45th anniversary of the eruption of Washington state’s Mount St. Helens. Marking this event compelled me to dig out a book my wife had given me for my birthday back in 2000. The book’s title, Volcano Cowboys: The Rocky Evolution of a Dangerous Science (by Dick Thompson, St. Martin’s Press 2000) was coined from comments made by a graduate of the Hawaii Volcano Observatory’s training program. The un-named former student said, “Feeling earthquakes in the middle of the night, driving into the observatory, driving out to the Chain of Craters to try to be where the eruption might occur, when lava first broke the surface. . . it was all a very exciting set of experiences. September seventy-seven, that was my first eruption. It went on for three weeks. Big nighttime fountains. I remember flying over the top of them with Jack Lockwood in his light plane and having [the plane] get shot up in the air by the thermals, and that sort of thing. We were young guys in love with volcanoes and we wanted to see as much red rock [lava] as we could. We called ourselves ‘volcano cowboys’ and we were anxious to go to any volcano that would have us.”
There was only one problem with having the United States Geological Survey’s premier (and only) on-site observatory / training facility on a Hawaiian volcano. The Hawaiian Islands are massive shield volcanoes built up from the ocean floor by thousands of lava over the eons. The fiery rivers of lava snaking their way across the big island of Hawaii to the sea are impressive but not as dangerous as explosive type composite volcanoes like Mount St. Helens. Composites are made of alternating layers of volcanic ash and lava flows with much more explosive potential than the Hawaiian type. The folks trained at the HVO who were dispatched to Mount St. Helens in April of 1980 were not at all familiar with the eruptive patterns of a beast like this. This put them at odds with geologists from what was known as the USGS’s ‘Denver group’.
Dave Johnston had spent a few good years at HVO but he had pursued a different path in his volcano studies. As an undergraduate student, he spent two summers as a field assistant for Pete Lipman studying ancient (and inactive) volcanoes in southern Colorado. In 1975, an old friend studying geology in Alaska called and asked him if he would be interested in a summer field assistant position, “on a real volcano, not one of those dead ones.” The experience Dave and Doug (Lalla) had on the St. Augustine volcano prompted Johnston to change the focus of his PhD thesis from ancient volcanoes to active ones. This gave him direct experience with a Mount St. Helens type of composite volcano that other HVO vets did not have.
The following January, Dave and Doug went back to St. Augustine island because the volcano was exploding periodically and the monitoring equipment they had installed needed to be repaired. The team dispatched (including Dave and Doug) traveled there by helicopter and landed just before a whiteout blizzard began. The pilot tried to get airborne and high enough to radio for help but a burst of wind dashed the helicopter to the ground. The pilot only suffered mild injuries but they were all now stranded on the shore of an active volcanic island. Forced to take shelter in a dilapidated corrugated-metal shed that was still standing from the summer before, they could not help to notice it was full of holes caused by recent lava bombs. The front wall had been caved in by a pyroclastic flow much like the one that had killed the Kraffts. It was not a safe place for them to be.
It took three days before they could be rescued and all the while, “St. Augustine shook and puffed.” Twelve hours after they were removed from the island, the volcano exploded. According to Thompson, “When Lalla returned to the island, he found the shack still standing, but the mattresses had been incinerated, and the batteries and plastics had been melted. To do that much damage, temperatures inside the shack had to have reached eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Nobody would have survived.” When Johnston joined the volcanologists monitoring St. Helens in April of 1980, his experience studying a volcano with this type of explosive potential made him a sort of volcano guru.
Friction between the scientists grew the more exhausted they became. At some point, a heated argument over how much risk anyone should take to gather data soured the atmosphere even further. Johnston was the youngest member of the Survey team at St. Helens and didn’t really fit in with either the Dever or HVO camps. He used his sense of humor to dispel some of the tension between the HVO and Denver groups by announcing he had found an eyewitness to one of the mountain’s biggest eruptions. He opened his hand and released a spark spitting toy dinosaur on the conference table – his message was simple: Lighten up!
There were a lot of different parties anxiously awaiting a definitive word from the Survey team monitoring the activity on St. Helens. There were frequent earthquakes taking place as well as eruptions of steam and ash, known as phreatic eruptions. The Survey team members were at odds as to exactly what was driving the activity. Was it magma rising toward the surface or was there a deeper magma source supplying the heat energy driving the eruptions? While they tossed various theories and opinions around, landowners, logging companies, the U.S. Forest Service, and Washington’s Governor, Dixie Lee Ray, all wanted answers. When Forest Service roads were blocked off, even the gawkers who wanted to get close to the action were irritated. Geologists weren’t used to being asked to predict if and when a major eruption would occur so questions went unanswered and nobody was happy with the lack of information.
For their part, the Survey team was busy trying to find the right equipment to help them understand what mechanisms were at play. Between the phreatic eruptions, helicopters would swoop into the crater so one of the Survey geologists could gather gas and ash samples. Analysing these samples could give them a peek at what was happening deep underground.
Tilt meters were placed at various locations on the mountain’s flanks – rising magma bodies often cause the volcano’s shape to distort. As different monitoring devices were deployed, the Survey teams ran into another obstacle: communicating the results with each other and the public.
When Mount St. Helen’s first began to stir, the survey turned to two of their most experienced members to create a hazard map to describe the chain reaction of various types of destruction an eruption could unleash. Donal Mullineaux and Rocky Crandell did just that but with all the uncertainty of the unfolding events, the maps they produced were questioned: “What did it mean to have tephra (the stuff that falls out of the air from an eruption) so well mapped? Did a zone of hazard as mapped mean that anyone outside of these boundaries was likely to be perfectly safe?” As Thompson pointed out, “No one knew what preceded any of those eruptions. The scientists had no catalog to match the weeks of steam eruptions and quakes. St. Helens was a perplexing volcano. The longer the emergency dragged on, the more pressure was exerted by local officials and timber industry executives who all wanted closer access to the mountain.”
In early April, Crandell reached out to an expert on landslides from Pennsylvania State University who he hoped would give them some insights into potential slope failure on the mountain. Barry Voight, actor Jon Voight’s brother, made the trip out west and set up camp on a hilltop where he could get a clear view of the mountain’s north face. Between photographing and sketching fractures in St. Helens snow and ice features, he dug into the stack of papers he had brought with him about landslides at volcanoes. Before he departed back east, he stirred up the Survey team by suggesting they hire local surveyors to gather more data on the changing face of the mountain. He was convinced it would fail and trigger the largest landslide in history and such an event would uncork the eruption they were still debating. Would happen at all? The Survey members, many of whom were some of the best surveyors in the USGS, didn’t take his suggestions seriously and they blamed Crandell for bringing Voight into the mix.
On April 12, the director of the USGS, Bill Menard, came to inspect the mountain himself. He was a brilliant oceanographer who had been appointed to his position, but he was a political appointee with no experience with volcanoes. A caravan that included Menard, Mullineaux and various other Survey team members made their way to the Timberline parking lot to get a close up view. Mullineaux was very familiar with Mount St. Helens but he had only seen photographs over the course of the monitoring. One look at the north face made his blood run cold – Voight’s assessment of the situation had been spot on.
Thompson described the inspection visit: “In the last few weeks, Mullineaux had seen pictures taken by observers. But now, standing on the north flank and looking up the mountain, he felt queasy. The upper part of the north face was grotesquely distorted, Above him was a gigantic bulge that looked as if someone had put a fist through the back of the mountain, leaving broken circles of cracked snow and ice above the timberline. The new feature had risen so quickly that it was difficult for a geologist such as Mullineaux to imagine the force that had created it. Mullineaux recalled, ‘I had been there many times, but from the [aerial] pictures I had just not understood how much change had taken place and how threatening that thing looked. It looked like a failure about to occur. The bulge was terrifying. I wanted to turn around and leave.’”
When all of Dr. Voight’s predictions were proved out, the mountain proved to be much more of a beast than even he had expected. Infrared film of the bulge had been taken but would not be processed until after the May 18 eruption. It showed increased heat signatures around the upper edge of the dome resembling the perforations one sees in a notebook tablet. When an earthquake shook it loose, two things happened in quick succession: The massive landslide Voight had warned about began (it would be the largest ever recorded). With the weight of this overlying rock removed, the pressure built inside the mountain uncorked to the side, not up as they expected it to.
The cascade of destruction that followed was terrifying in its ferocity. The bulge initially slid downhill at 100 miles per hour in the first 30 seconds and eleven seconds later it was traveling at 150 mph. At his vantage point on Coldwater ridge (six miles away and supposedly outside the expected blast zone), Dave Johnson radioed, “Vancouver, Vancouver: This is it!” A minute after the landslide had begun, two massive explosions the equivalent of ten million tons of TNT burst from the peak in his direction. Johnston was never heard from again and his body remains entombed under tens of feet of debris.
Working for the Washington Department of Emergency Services, volunteer observer Gerald Martin was camped nearby and reported, “Now we’ve got a whole great big eruption out of the crater and we got another opened up on the west side. The whole west side – northwest side is sliding down. Okay, boys, we got it, boys, the northwest section and north section is blowing up, coming over the ridge towards me. I’m gonna back outta here. Gentlemen, the, uh, camper and car sitting over to the south of me (Johnston’s camp) is covered. It’s gonna get me, too. We can’t get out of here.” He was right – it did get him, too.
In the end, there were 57 deaths and about $1 billion in damages. The eruption removed 1,370 feet from St. Helen’s top, blasted out over 3 billion cubic yards of ash and debris and spread 540 million tons of ash over 22,000 square miles. 61,200 acres of National Forest and some 1.6 billion board feet of timber were destroyed (as were 100 miles of streams and thousands of big game animals). The previously mentioned Harry Glicken was supposed to have been at his post at Coldwater II but had traded shifts with Johnston to attend a meeting in California. Johnston had been his mentor and he suffered from survivor’s guilt for the rest of his own brief life.
In Part 2 of Volcano Cowboys, we will examine how the eruption of Mount St. Helens affected some of the scientists who were there on May 18, 1980 and the future of volcanology itself.
Top Piece Video – although in this case, it is a Top Piece Audio only – Jimmy Buffett’s Volcano from 1979