I was living in Seattle, enrolled in UW at the time…before the eruption it was all over the news and attracted a lot of peekers, a buddy and I wanted to have a look a week before it blew and in retrospect you can see what a bad idea that was. I saw the aftermath just after they put an oil service road in on the East side…the mud flows out to the west precluded any approach from that direction for a long time. On the west side you literally turned a corner in the road and transitioned immediately from old growth forrest to a moonscape, nothing standing. Virtually all the Douglas fir went over like matchsticks. I have a picture of a very small Fir tree that was bent over horizontal from the wind and singed in place. I summited from the south last summer and peered into the crater. Not much has changed. There are still a lot of logs floating on Spirit Lake.

I remember well the last words of Johnson the vulcanologist that had a ringside seat with 0 chance of survival: “Vancouver, this is it!” I think we just might hear those words again from Cytodyn headquarters and they will ring out well beyond Vancouver. Hoping for explosive news, not the kind that devastates but cures.