In One Ear: Astonishing
The Mount St. Helens volcano erupted 44 years ago, on May 18, 1980, blanketing a wide area, including Astoria, in a snow storm of ash.
A 2013 story in the The Columbian of Vancouver, Washington, told of the discovery of a roll of film of aerial shots taken of the smoldering crater about five weeks before the eruption by one of the paper’s photographers, Reid Blackburn (pictured).
Sadly, Blackburn was killed while sitting in his car, in the blast zone, when the volcano actually erupted. His camera was later recovered, but the film inside was destroyed.
No one knew that a roll of his unprocessed film had been set aside in a storage box, and wouldn’t have been found at all if Linda Lutes, on a research mission in 2013, hadn’t gone searching in a box marked “Mount St. Helens.”
There, she found a paper bag containing some of Blackburn’s negatives and the canister of film. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we found what was on it?” she thought.
Easier said than done to find a darkroom to have film developed in the digital age, but they found one. “I was astonished to see how well the film showed up,” the paper’s film editor at the time, Troy Wayrynen, said. And so was everyone else.
