Vern Hodgson

Vern Hodgson, a survivor of Mount Saint Helens Eruption- 1980

Vern HodgsonOn Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, Vern Hodgson, a general contractor living in Lynnwood, was on a camping trip with a friend about 11 miles northeast of Mount St. Helens.He would take a series of photos that would change his life: He captured every step of the volcano's massive eruption.It almost did him in.“I had just set my camera up (on a tripod) and there it went,” he recalls.He began snapping the shutter furiously, ending up with 16 images in about 45 seconds.“It was pretty frightening to see the entire horizon disappear in a cloud of smoke in a matter of minutes,” he said.Hodgson and his friend saw that the ash cloud was coming their way.“We realized it was time to leave. We had to drive into the ash cloud to get out,” he said. “It covered the window and it was wet and sticky.”Unfortunately, he had removed the sun roof on his Ford van, so there was no way to stop the ash from coming in.“Every time you took a breath it would stick to your throat or get stuck in your nose. At that point I started to go into shock,” he said. “You couldn't see anything. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. We accepted the fact we were going to die.”Hodgson drove by feeling the dropoff on the side of the road, then crossing back over to the other side and doing the same. He drove very slowly that way for about an hour, he said.If he was to go over an embankment, he decided, “ 'What's the difference, I'm dead already.' ”Finally the ash began to thin and visibility slowly returned.Back in Seattle that afternoon, Hodgson took his film to the Seattle Times. He was asked to drop it off, which he did.“I was dirty and dusty and tired and strung out,” he said.When he called the Times the next day, Monday, he was told they were too busy and short-staffed to process the film that evening, so he could come by and pick it up if he wanted to, Hodgson said.So he did, and took the film to The Herald's office in Lynnwood. Joanne Byrd, then the city editor at the Lynnwood office, agreed on the spot to run the photos, Hodgson said. He told her his story.“As fast as I could talk, she would type,” he said. “It allowed The Herald to scoop the world.”The Herald paid Hodgson $300 to run the photos in Tuesday's paper, he said. The next day he went to the Associated Press in Seattle, gave them his negatives and was paid $35,000.“The next few weeks were absolute chaos. I was contacted by people from all over the world,” Hodgson said.

(http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20120518/NEWS01/305199999