People scrambled to buy masks. An airborne contaminant threatened the grape harvest while closing schools and businesses. But this wasn’t 2020, with its double whammy of COVID-19 and wildfires. This was 1980 after Mount St. Helens blew its top at 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18.
Mike Sauer, who planted his first vines at Red Willow Vineyard in Wapato, Washington, in 1973, was at church with his family that morning. He remembers walking outside to a horizon of ominous dark clouds. “As we drove home, I could see the ash coming up behind the car,” Sauer says.
On that morning, Mount St. Helens covered over 22,000 square miles to its northeast with 540 million tons of ash. Agrimanagement Inc., an agriculture consulting company in Yakima, estimated that a half-inch deposit on the ground was the equivalent of 70–85 tons of ash per acre.
Three-quarters of an inch of
