Escaping Mount St. Helens cloud of ash left this Richland couple ‘like gray ghosts’

A last-minute choice saved Mike Wingfield’s life 40 years ago.

He and his wife are frequent campers, and they had two sites scouted out for a mid-May getaway — Bumping Lake or Mount St. Helens.

The couple were on their way toward the volcano, but they ended up in the wrong lane.

“It was just a last minute decision,” he said. “If we had gone the other way. I know me. I’m going to get as close to it as I can to watch it.”

Winfield and his wife were still in the middle of the wilderness when Mount St. Helens erupted on Sunday, May 18, 1980.

Fifty-seven people were killed when the youngest and most active volcano in the Cascades erupted at 8:32 a.m. The avalanche, earthquake and explosion destroyed 230 square miles, damaged 27 bridges and nearly 200 homes.

It also blanketed a swath of Eastern Washington and beyond with inches of ash.

It came out of nowhere for Wingfield who was 23 at the time. He was having a nice weekend with his wife, Linda, 20 at the time and their one-eyed bulldog Admiral.

“It was beautiful crisp morning in the mountains,” he told the Herald. “The sky was bright clear blue without a hint of a cloud anywhere.”

He decided it was a good morning to go fishing, he got on his trusty Hodaka motorcycle and made his way to the boat rental shop. It was when he started heading back to the campsite that he noticed the clouds rolling in.

He was still riding when he started feeling rain sting his eyes. After slowing his bike, he noticed the surface of the nearby lake was perfectly still.

Just then he realized it wasn’t rain that was coming down, it was ash.

“That’s when the horrible realization hit me like a blast from Mike Tyson. This is nuclear bomb fallout!” he said. When he got back to the campground, he heard fellow campers saying that Mount St. Helens erupted.

“I was very much relieved. I had just survived what I thought was a nuclear war, so this little old volcano wasn’t going to run us off,” Wingfield said.

A long, slow 60 miles

While other campers hurriedly pulled out, some leaving ice chests and awnings behind, Wingfield and his wife were a little slower to pack up.

It only took a few minutes to figure out that they needed to leave too as the sky was darkening.

They quickly lit their lantern and were starting to choke on the ash.

“We being young and stupid didn’t take it that seriously. So we hung out until the point where we couldn’t see our lantern from more than 10 feet away,” he said. “We thought we better get out of here.”

They got into their 1954 Chevy pickup with its six volt battery-powered headlights and started making their way through the ash-darkened roads.

The ash was coming in through every crack of the aging truck making it even harder to see and breath. At some points, they were going 5 mph and twice went off the road.

Then the lightning started. The hot ash mixed with the cool morning air set off one of the most impressive light shows they’ve ever seen.

“Though we tried to make light of the situation, we both knew we were in trouble,” he said. “Admiral, on the other hand, was happy to be riding in the back of our truck.”

After miles of creeping down the road, the ash started to ease and they spotted a state trooper at the edge of Yakima. The trooper had just set up a roadblock to stop people from going into the mess they had just left.

Cleaning up

The Wingfields spent days cooped up in Yakima because officials didn’t want people traveling through the inches of ash on the highway.

When they reached a hotel, the people in the lobby turned to them in horror.

“We were both shrouded in ash like gray ghosts,” he said. “The hotel owners gave us a room at cost. Either they were the nicest people I’d met in a long time or they didn’t want us to haunt them.”

After they washed up, they left a quarter inch of ash on the shower floor, he said. He didn’t realize how much ash was in their ears and hair.

The ash continued to follow them, some of it intentionally and some not.

While his truck didn’t suffer any ill effects, he was driving in Texas six years later and when he pulled out the fuel filter and found it filled with ash.

“They say there are some things that you never forget,” he said. “That camping trip is indelibly etched in my memory. Sometimes I can still hear the roar of the mountain.”