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#MagicalMay #mountains

I was just discussing with my sister that May 18 is the 40th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. That made us feel very old.😬 I was in junior high & living in Portland & even though we were 70+ mikes away from it, it was so dark & creepy from all of the ash that blew 40,000 feet into the air & settled over everything. I‘ve had this mountain book on my Kindle for a while now & hope to actually read it one day. 🌋

My book club read this 2 months ago, & the author happened to give a presentation on it today - whoo hoo!
Here‘s a picture of The Blast - the eruption of Mt St Helens - that killed 57 people.
Fun fact of the day: I am far more likely to die in a Cascadia earthquake than a car accident. So... yay.

As someone still new to the PNW, this book was fascinating: all the history of logging, the railroad, forestry, Mt St Helens itself, the Weyerhaeusers... all intriguing.
But the eruption steals the show, of course.
Some of the other narrative threads get lost in that, which is a shame - they were developing well. But it‘s still an overall pick.
And if you‘re ever up here, make the trek to Mt St Helens - you‘ll never see anything else like it.

I don‘t think I‘ve ever seen a tree big enough to build an entire neighborhood 😕. If trees used to be that big, no wonder they thought it was no big deal to chop them down.

Started this tonight for book club. The prologue is interesting, especially when it compares where Seattle was before & after the eruption. Things certainly have changed. But the foundations for what transpired in that day in 1980 lay in the past, thousands of miles away.
As a person who is part of the new PNW, I‘m looking forward to this read very much.
Great rec, @respekt1111

When you really, really want your friend to join your book club, you buy her the next book & give it to her.

I really was hoping that this was more history about the eruption and the mountain. The first half of the book was all about Weyerhaeuser. If I wanted to know about Weyerhaeuser I would have asked my family. The second part of the book was all about the MT.

It was good. The title is misleading tho. It's mostly a history of the area and Weyerhaeuser, the company and the family, and the area surrounding the mountain. The second half covers more of the geology and unsettled mountain and the horrible policies and indecision that contributed the deaths of 57. There's no real untold story told here. But I did work at MSH as an interpreter and for Weyerhaeuser so I may not be the target audience.

Just a few of my one word titles. I've been reading Alaska for 9 years. Do not laugh. 😁#riotgrams #onewordtitles

Catching up on the couple of #ReadJanuary posts that I missed. I've always been fascinated with natural disasters and although I vaguely remember when this happened, I'd #liketoknowmoreabout this topic.

#readjanuary #booksetinyourvity

Shout out to my home state of Illinois! I lived a few hours from Starved Rock State Park where so.e horrifying murders took place down by a popular waterfall. Turns out we took some goofy pictures in the cave where the bodies were found😕 (I learned this after the fact)

I currently live a couple hours north of Mount St. Helens and highly recommend Eruption, which even profiles the tiny town where my family lives!

Time to dive into another of my Northshire gift card purchases. I'm definitely having a non-fiction kind of year.

The historical sections bog down the narrative a tad, but overall, this reads like a thriller. I would have enjoyed a bit more science, but it was certainly a great read. Hard to put down!

This was a fantastic account of Mount St Helens eruption. The history of the mountain and logging industry as well as the personal stories of those who worked on the mountain and fished and camped there made me invested in this story. An amazing account of this natural disaster.

Nonfiction that reads like a thriller! Mount St. Helens is practically in my backyard and I've been obsessed with it since I was old enough to understand what a volcano was. I've been telling everyone about this book; I learned so much, and it was an excellent read!

I really enjoyed this - a very interesting look at the politics around why so many people died on the mountain that day along with the geology (understandably rendered) and some amazing stories of survival.

This event helped shape my fascination with volcanoes. I can't remember a whole lot else from 1980 though. This should be fascinating.

Story of the 57 people who died on a Sunday morning in 1980 on slopes of Mount St. Helens. Why did they disregard the warnings? What else was going on in 1980 & what sociocultural issues came into play? A fascinating, well-researched, human-level account of a geological event that caught world attn