[ music playing ] WOMAN: Come on!

There he is, there he is, there he is.

[ exclaims ] Come over here, buddy!

Good boy!

[ laughing ] WOMAN: Whoo, high five!

Yeah!

The story you're about to see is something truly special, because beneath the ash that fell from Mount St. Helens on May 18th, 1980, are clues to some mysteries that have never been fully solved.

So producer Ian McCluskey set out to see what he could unearth, and he found a few surprises.

[ indistinct conversation ] McCLUSKEY: I got a tip from the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument that a small group of folks were digging around, looking for artifacts.

-MAN: That was it.

-[ metal detector squealing ] Amateur archaeologists, armed with metal detectors.

-Right there.

-Must-- Oh, yeah.

Something big, huh?

What were they looking for?

What did they hope to find?

What hadn't already been answered about Mount St. Helens' most famous day, May 18th, 1980?

We had a major eruption occurring at 8:32 approximately this morning on Mount St. Helens.

It does appear that the northwest flank of the mountain seems to be gone.

REPORTER: Throughout the day, the volcano turned up a continuous eruption of pumice, ash, gas, and steam.

It sent up a cloud so dense, it blotted out the sun.

Officials have finally been able to determine how many people are known dead in the Mount St. Helens disaster and how many are still missing.

REPORTER: 170 people were brought to safety, -but 57 were dead or missing.

-[ siren wailing ] Geologist David Johnston was at a scientific research station six miles northwest of the mountain.

Harry Truman was at his lodge.

Neither was ever found.

Something right here.

-[ squealing ] -Right here?

Scott Kemery is the ringleader of this group of amateur archaeologists.

He watched the eruption of St. Helens from his home in Portland when he was 5 years old.

Ever since I was a little kid, I always wanted to come up here and locate manmade items from before the eruption after being told by so many people for so long that nothing could've survived.

So we reached out to the Mount St. Helens Monument and we asked permission, and we gave them a full rundown of where we were going to go, what we were going to do, we were going to be very respectful.

They asked us, while we were out here, "Could you give us what information you find, the GPS coordinates, the photo...?"

We found everything from a pocket knife to a tire to beer cans.

And all of it's fascinating to me.

Huh!

I just love finding relics up here that aren't supposed to be here.

[ chuckles ] This is embedded in here pretty good.

After a full day of searching, we've found only some beer cans and a rusted wheel.

It doesn't seem like the romantic images I think of when I hear the word "archaeology."

And these are hardly priceless artifacts.

They don't even seem much like historic clues.

-Diet Pepsi.

-Diet Pepsi-Cola.

Pull tab, for sure.

What strikes me being here, however, is seeing the jagged ridgelines and the stumps snapped off at their base.

This was once all a lush forest, laid flat by the eruption.

Standing on the north side of the mountain, in what was once the blast zone, I can't help but feel the immensity of it all.

I wish I had a memory of the mountain before the eruption.

[ music playing ] It was called the Mount Fuji of the Northwest for its beautiful, perfectly symmetrical snowcapped cone.

MAN: It's really difficult to tell people about the before of the mountain because it was just such a unique place-- a green, emerald forest around a really blue crystal lake in front of this perfectly shaped mountain.

Along the edge of Spirit Lake were a couple summer camps.

The Boy Scout camps and Girl Scout camps, of course, were around the lake, so there was always lots of activity from people that came up from Portland and that.

There were also campgrounds and a couple vacation lodges.

One was the Spirit Lake Lodge, run by Mark Smith's family.

Another lodge was run by Mark's most famous neighbor, Harry Truman.

Not the former U.S. president, but a cantankerous innkeeper who had become a local legend.

Harry was 82 or 83 at the time, and he'd been up there for over 51 years.

Folks said he'd been a bootlegger during Prohibition and then had to escape to the most secluded place he could find to get out of some trouble.

He found his hideaway on the shores of remote Spirit Lake.

He had built everything up there without telephone, without power.

And he had created a lodge and a resort, boat rentals and his dock.

In his mind, the mountain was Truman and Truman was the mountain.

Spirit Lake and Mount St. Helens is my life, folks.

I've lived there 50 years.

It's a part of me.

That mountain and that lake is a part of Truman, and I'm a part of it.

SMITH: So then when the mountain started to erupt, he was the long-time resident, you know, and everybody flocked to see what Truman was going to do now that his mountain was erupting, and he was in the limelight.

And once he was in the limelight, he turned into the showman that he always was.

REPORTER: He will bend the ear of anyone and everyone in sight.

He talks standing, sitting, eating, drinking, and, we don't doubt, even when he's sleeping.

But one day, a couple days ago, all day and night, you could feel it, you could feel it.

He loved talking to the reporters and the press, and he'd tell them just about anything and everything that he felt like that day to get a good story.

He'd give them yarns too and stories about his cave.

You know, he told everybody, "I got a cave across the lake there," you know, "Got whiskey in it, got everything I need."

He says, "Pssh, this old mountain starts to erupt, I will be safe," you know.

And he says, "And they buy all these stories, you know, kid, and they're printing everything."

Truman's philosophy: don't let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

[ music playing ] The first warning signs came from recorded earthquakes.

Then, in March of 1980, the mountain woke up.

It shot a plume of ash and gas into the air.

A massive vent hole the size of a football field had opened on the mountain's summit.

A team of scientists from the USGS, universities, and the Forest Service assembled at Mount St. Helens.

8-4-5.

SMITH: They didn't have, like they do today, a volcano response team.

You know, they were trying to figure out, "What do we do?"

One of the scientists had recently earned his PhD and was starting his career as a volcanologist, David Johnston.

Young, charismatic, and smart, he became sought out by the news reporters for any insights on the pending eruption.

Well, right now there's a very great hazard due to the fact that the glacier's breaking up on this side of the volcano, on the north side.

And that could produce a very large avalanche hazard.

This is not a good spot to be standing.

[ laughing ] Geologists began to focus on the north flank of St. Helens.

An ominous bulge had appeared and seemed to be growing at an alarming rate of five feet per day.

It seemed pressure was building up inside the mountain.

MAN: But then the eruptions started to drop off.

In a sense, there were fewer of them.

There weren't the small ones happening in between bigger events, and then eventually even the bigger ones sort of dwindled.

So it looked like maybe the volcano was going back to sleep again.

Richard Waitt was one of the geologists in 1980.

It was kind of a false sense of things going away.

They weren't going away, but it looked that way.

So I think David was plenty aware that this thing was not quieting down and it could be very dangerous.

David Johnston's warnings and the concerns of fellow scientists convinced authorities to close Mount St. Helens to the public.

A safety perimeter was established around the entire mountain called the Red Zone.

Law enforcement set up roadblocks and they evacuated the area...

Sorry, the road is closed... ...all besides the handful of geologists like David Johnston and innkeeper Harry Truman, who continued to insist he was going to stay no matter what.

Harry wants to stay, and he's not going to leave, so... And he's thanked us for our concern for coming.

He even received letters from schoolchildren begging him to change his mind.

The news reporters often portrayed Harry as a crazy old coot, too stubborn and ornery to comply with the law or to use common sense to get out of the danger zone.

FILM NARRATOR: Crusty old Harry Truman remains, scoffing at those who go.

[ laughs ] No, I'm not going to leave.

You're damn right I'm not going to to leave.

I'm going to stay here.

If I left, it'd kill me.

If I left this place and lost my home, I'd die in a week.

I couldn't live, I couldn't stand it.

[ music playing ] McCLUSKEY: What most folks didn't know was that the reason he was alone was because his wife Edna had died from an unexpected heart attack just a few years before, in 1975.

The two had enjoyed good times and survived hard times at Spirit Lake.

But now, alone in his lodge with just memories, Harry vowed not to let his lodge go or to go with it.

When the weekend of May 17th and 18th came, things seemed calm at Mount St. Helens.

Mark, his family, and a handful of local residents were allowed past the roadblocks to retrieve personal effects.

But time passed fast, and it became 5:00, and we were supposed to be out of there at 5:00 that day.

So the State Patrol goes rounding us all up -to get out of there.

-[ siren chirps ] OFFICER: You're going to have to go, and the faster the better.

SMITH: We were the last bunch to leave the mountain.

Harry had said his goodbyes to my brother, you know, "See you tomorrow, kid," you know.

"No problem," and given him a grocery list, a few little items he could bring back the next day.

It was kind of like the script in a Hollywood movie.

We didn't know at the time, but that's what we were running into.

You know, the disaster movie that the hero gets to say goodbye to everyone before the end.

Three miles from Truman's lodge, along a ridgeline at a logging clearcut, a temporary observation post had been set up.

Six miles from the mountain, on the northern edge of the Red Zone, the vantage point offered a direct view to the volcano's north side and the growing bulge.

Geologist David Johnston was with his assistant, Harry Glicken.

Glicken had been camped for over two weeks at the outpost known as Coldwater 2 but needed to leave a day early to meet with his university professor.

David agreed to drive from the headquarters in Vancouver that Saturday to cover the Sunday shift.

That same day, two young researchers studying glaciers on Mount St. Helens came up, Mindy Brugman and Carolyn Driedger.

Carolyn had climbed St. Helens the summer before but was now seeing it for the first time as an active volcano.

DRIEDGER: So I just stood there looking at that volcano and thinking, "This is just awesome!

I haven't been here since last summer, and now I'm getting to see the volcano in a new way."

It appeared to us as a vertical slab of bulge that was just poking out like a big wound on the side of the volcano, and all of our glaciers were fractured.

It was clear that this was an evolving situation.

[ music playing ] David described, with his hands, that, "You see that bulge?

It could come right off the volcano and go across the plain to where we are and come up this ridge."

I think we were just in disbelief, like, "No, it couldn't do that!"

He said, "You know what, we're probably at risk being here.

And I think that you all should go back to Vancouver."

So we put our tents and sleeping bags back in the car and we headed back down to Vancouver.

We bumped down that gravel road really crestfallen because it was a beautiful view, and we wanted to just sleep out there next to this beautiful mountain.

As Carolyn and Mindy drove from Coldwater 2, they stopped and looked back.

Carolyn snapped a photo of the bulging mountain.

Little did she know it'd be one of the last images of St. Helens intact... and that on her camera roll was what would become the last images of David Johnston.

And that in urging her to leave, David had just saved her life.

That evening from camp, David noticed an RV had parked on the next ridge to the north, about two miles away.

It belonged to another observer, Gerry Martin.

64-year-old Gerry Martin was a Navy veteran trained as a radio operator.

He'd come to Mount St. Helens to volunteer as part of an emergency alert team to radio dispatchers if the mountain began to erupt.

Gerry was keeping watch from his RV the fateful morning of Sunday, May 18th, but no one knows his exact location.

It's been a missing part of the story for more than 40 years, and Scott wants to find that spot.

Scott sets out with his team of volunteer explorers.

They are joined by Matt Mawhirter, Heritage Program manager with the Forest Service.

[ indistinct conversation ] They come across a huge piece of logging equipment, a yarder.

It once stood 90 feet tall and was here the morning the mountain erupted.

It is now mangled by the force of the blast, like an abstract sculpture, a moment of destruction frozen in time.

So this is a good indicator of what was blowing through the wind that morning if you would've been up there.

Volcanic rock itself from the volcano, we have pumice from the magma that was coming out of the eruption.

St. Helens erupted on a Sunday morning.

Had it been the following day, hundreds of loggers would've been at work in the woods, including the operator of this yarder.

We continue up the ridge.

Without tree cover, it is mercilessly hot.

And the probability of finding anything out here in this expanse of the former blast zone seems like a needle in a haystack.

How much further?

Because we're not there yet at all, are we?

No, I believe it's around that ridge, it has to be.

[ panting ] They search and search... [ metal detector squealing ] And then, something catches Scott's eye.

My God.

It seems to be what Scott is looking for, a rusted engine overgrown with vegetation.

MAN: You never have the tool you need when you need it.

KEMERY: Yeah.

Matt documents the find with photos and records the GPS coordinates.

Scott hopes this could be the engine from the RV of Gerry Martin.

And for Scott, this would be his most important discovery yet.

I hope it is Martin.

It's a little bit of some kind of closure.

MAN: Exactly.

Everything I've ever read ends with "no trace of Gerry or his RV was ever found."

Standing here, thinking this could be the very spot Gerry Martin was the morning of May 18th and looking directly at the yawning mouth of the crater, I try to imagine what he witnessed.

He started narrating from the second the mountain started to shake until it hit David, until it hit him.

[ Martin on recording ] What he did was a big deal not just helping warn the valley down below that there was an eruption coming, but scientifically, they were able to figure out the speed of the eruption, the surge, by his narration.

The volcano released a pyroclastic flow, a superheated inferno of gas and rock that crashed over the landscape like a tsunami at more than 300 miles an hour and a searing temperature of more than 400 degrees.

David Johnston had picked up his radio too.

He had only a few seconds.

In a panicked rush, his final words, "Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it."

I'd heard the story as a kid and read those words many times, but now they resonate with a more tangible reality.

Standing here brings a somber understanding to this still raw landscape.

From this spot, I can easily see the ridge where David Johnston had been, the observation post known as Coldwater 2.

I ask Scott to take me there.

So David Johnston's trailer would've been about over here.

And the Scout that pulled it up here would've been about here.

Gerry Martin could see this spot here, he could see the trailer.

And from here, David Johnston could see Gerry Martin's RV.

In the picture of him with his legs sticking out, you know, smiling, you look at those photos and you know that that area is doomed, you know that he's doomed.

You know what ultimately happens.

And then to be here, where the photos were taken, uh... kind of hard to put into words when you're... when you're right here.

Wow.

[ music playing ] The destruction in the blast zone happened in mere minutes as the mountain exploded sideways to the north.

Then it began to boil upwards in a mushrooming plume of gray ash rising miles into the sky.

From a distance, this was most people's first sight of the erupting St. Helens that Sunday, including 5-year-old Scott, who was home with his family in north Portland.

In front of me was the eruption up in the sky, and in the living room behind me was the news broadcast telling us what was going on closer up there.

Four devastating walls of water have roared down through the Toutle River Valley, the fourth coming late this afternoon, perhaps the most damaging of all.

MAN: Get off the bridge!

REPORTER: The Air Force 304th Rescue Squadron evacuated as many people as possible using the Toutle High School as a landing base.

REPORTER: It's so dangerous, so confusing on Mount St. Helens that even experts aren't clear what has happened.

Rescue missions flew towards the mountain, hoping to find any survivors.

PILOT: Okay, we've got a car down here on the left.

Eventually flight crews reached the north side.

This doesn't even look like the same country.

Nothing matches the map.

Where's Spirit Lake?

Is that it over there?

I can't believe this.

We camped up in this area.

Doesn't look like anyplace I've ever been before.

[ music playing ] REPORTER: It is probable tonight Spirit Lake is no more.

That's the word from the Forest Service.

Five-year-old Scott hoped that Harry had gotten safely to his secret cave.

And my dad caught me out on the steps, and was like, "You're supposed to be in bed."

I'm like, "Dad, it's dark out.

What's Harry going to do?"

He's old and he's probably hurt and he's by himself.

How are they going to find Harry in all this darkness?"

And I was only 5, but I knew enough watching the news all day with all the destruction and all the smoke and everything, I knew it was bad, but now the sun was down, so you just couldn't see how bad it was.

And I was worried how are they going to find Harry's cave?

SMITH: There were over 140 mines up in and around that area, which were mainly started from caves, so I would greatly say that Harry had plenty of them hid out.

I mean, there's lots of possibilities.

There were mining claims all over the place.

There's quite a number of things like that that Truman could get to in a boat, you know, and hide out in.

Back in Portland, Scott has been studying old maps of mining claims and using Google Earth.

I'm looking on Google Earth, and it looks really rough.

He thinks he's found what appears to be an opening to a cave.

Could be a trick of the light.

We're not sure.

But until we put boots to the ground and get close to it, we're not going to know 100%, so... Distances and terrain are one thing on a computer screen and something completely different on the Mount St. Helens National Monument.

[ Kemery panting ] This looks as horrible to me as it did on Google Earth.

-It's worse further up.

-Great.

Like in our other expeditions with Scott, there is no trail here.

Holy moly.

The landscape that was 1980 was wiped off the map and a new one laid over it, a dynamic one that keeps changing.

MAWHIRTER: The hikes out on the pumice plain or anywhere on the monument always take twice as long as you think, because this terrain is just so difficult.

Like you think you're going up the right path, and then you get cliffed out with these eroded hillsides and trying to navigate is difficult.

It's not pleasant.

-Okay.

-KEMERY: Oh, my gosh.

And because the hike out here has taken so long, we're not really going to have time to get over there before it gets dark, but this is the location from maps, and the rock is similar to rock where we find other mines in this area, so it's highly likely that it's somewhere eroding out.

If we could just get a little bit closer, we could maybe pinpoint it a little bit more.

It could be over here or it could be over there.

Well, the legend of Harry's cave is another Truman story that will live on forever, yeah.

And I think people will be in search of it for quite a while.

[ music playing ] It's important to think that someday, someone will find it or identify it.

And I won't be the person to say that it doesn't exist.

The realistic part of my brain never expected to find the cave, but my imagination of my 1980s childhood couldn't help but envision a scene like in The Goonies.

In Harry's cave, we'd find an old TV, a lawn chair, maybe even a bottle of whiskey and a John Deere cap.

And this, I realize, is what keeps Scott going on all these hunts.

WAITT: Every one of these stories has got mystery associated.

You just know little fragments of the story.

And some of the artifacts left behind you can tell are the fragments, are the pieces.

It's eroding, it's changing, it's going to open up things and show us part of the past that we didn't know up there.

As river flows shift their banks and winds erode, surviving fragments may surface.

The mountain may give up more pieces, more clues.

And until then, the story of the Mount St. Helens eruption is still being written... and the search is still on.

We're tenacious.

We won't give up.

We'll do it again.

[ music playing ] The story you just saw was produced by two people, Ian McCluskey and Todd Sonflieth, who both saw Mount St. Helens erupt back in 1980.

Now, when you're a kid and you see a volcano erupt in your backyard, it does something to you.

And they both turned that experience into lifelong careers telling stories from the volcano.

McCLUSKEY: I've been fascinated with Mount St. Helens my entire life.

I actually was too young in 1980 to remember what the mountain looked like before it erupted, but I distinctly remember the eruption.

We had a major eruption occurring at 8:32 approximately this morning on Mount St. Helens.

SONFLIETH: I was in high school at the time of the eruption, and I remember my mom getting me up on that Sunday morning and saying, "Hey, it's erupting, it's erupting!

Come see, come see!"

We had some ash come down around our house, and I remember my sister and I, we got into this little business we were going to do by bottling the ash and doing mail-order souvenirs.

[ chuckles ] McCLUSKEY: I think what's fascinating is that this isn't ancient history.

It's something that Todd and I both remember in our lifetime.

[ music playing ] I got a tip-off from the Mount St. Helens Institute that there were some guys that were going around with metal detectors, looking for artifacts from the 1980 eruption.

Something big, huh?

McCLUSKEY: The main character, Scott, who's kind of the ringleader of this group, has this sort of like, "Come on, let's go, let's go!"

And like, "Hey, it's just up the road!"

SONFLIETH: That environment, off-trail, it's very sandy.

So if you think about trying to walk up a sand dune and then, you know, add 40 or 50 pounds of gear on your back... SCOTT: It's not pleasant.

-Okay.

-Oh, my God!

SONFLIETH: What was that, seven miles we hiked one day?

-Yeah.

-I think at least.

-Or... that was one way.

-Yeah, I think-- I think it was like 14 miles round-trip or something like that.

[ both laugh ] Well, I apologize, fellas, for dragging you out here for this.

I had fun.

SONFLIETH: These guys have done their research about where the people that perished were at the time, so now they're trying to go back to those same locations and trying the best they can to find whatever artifacts remain of, you know, maybe it's a piece of an RV.

My God!

McCLUSKEY: And so then we, some 40 years later, are standing on that same ridgeline and we see the remains of an old, rusted engine and we know that Gerry Martin, who was probably the only person up there on that ridge, this is probably the RV where he was making those recordings.

And the story reveals itself.

And that's how we can tell a story about something as simple as guys taking metal detectors to go look for old things buried in ash turns into a portrait of lives that were lost on May 18th and a renewed sense of our connection to this mountain.

I think that's why we love what we do and we love watching the stories after we make them.

We actually go back and we're like, "Gosh, now that we've taken a shower, that was a pretty fun trip."

-Yeah.

-[ both laughing ] You can now find many Oregon Field Guide stories and episodes online.

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