Mt. St. Helens erupted May 18 with a fury more powerful than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. This photo appeared on the cover of Time magazine shortly after the eruption and was one of a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos by Roger Werth.

In 1999, Werth captured images of new life in a visit to the 1980 blast zone. On the day of the eruption, the Coal Banks Bridge near the town of Toutle, Wash., was swept away by surging mud flows.

Do you remember where you were May 18, 1980?
Like the Kennedy assassination in 1963, this is one of those dates forever carved into the consciousness of the people of the Pacific Northwest - the day Mt. St. Helens erupted over the southern Washington countryside.

The big blast, which occurred at 8:32 a.m. with the force of a magnitude 5.1 earthquake, sent 3.7 billion cubic yards of molten earth skyward and out over 230 square miles of prime Northwest timber country.

Of the hundreds of people in the area at the time, 57 lost their lives as clouds of ash heated to more than 660 degrees raced across the countryside at speeds anywhere from 60 to 300 miles an hour. When all was done, detectable amounts of ash covered 22,000 square miles. Four billion board feet of timber, 12 million salmon fingerlings, 27 bridges, 200 homes, 185 miles of highways and roads, 15 miles of railways, 7,000 big game animals ... allgone in one of the 20th century's most important volcanic eruptions.

Oregon Stater Roger Werth, '80, was sitting in his living room in Longview, Wash., that Sunday morning enjoying a glass of orange juice when the local airplane service called him to say the mountain had just blown and to grab his camera equipment.

Two years earlier, he had joined the Longview Daily News as a staff photographer and had just completed his studies in photojournalism at Oregon State.

At 8:55 a.m., he and a pilot were airborne, hoping to get some dramatic photos for the paper. It was an airplane ride that would forever change his life.

At first, they couldn't see anything. Suddenly the mountain was there in front of them, and a powerful sight was unfolding. Rocks and ash were pouring straight up into the air from the giant crater that used to be the top of the mountain.

They were the first newspaper team to arrive on the scene, and Werth immediately went to work with two 35mm cameras, one with color film, the other black and white. As he photographed the exploding volcano, his thoughts went back to the day before, when he had been the last photographer to take pictures of Harry Truman, the 84-year-old curmudgeon and Spirit Lake resident who made national news for several weeks during early May for his refusal to leave the lake, volcano or not. Now, 18 hours later, Truman lay dead down below, buried under hundreds of yards of debris.

All day, Werth shot photos from the air and continued doing so for the next 38 hours.

His efforts did not go unnoticed, beginning with the cover of Time magazine for June 2, 1980. In the weeks and months that followed, his photos of the tragedy appeared in all the major magazines and newspapers of the country. In 1981, Werth and the Daily News won the Pulitzer Prize for news reporting and photography.

Born in Portland in 1957, Werth still works for the newspaper where he achieved his fame. He has been photo editor there since 1988.

Recently the Oregon Stater caught up with him to ask if he would share some of his favorite images from May 18 on the pages of our magazine as a way of helping mark the 20th anniversary of this extraordinary natural disaster. He did so gladly and even obliged us a day away from the newspaper by taking us up near the mountain to let us photograph him at one of his favorite viewpoints.

Above: The view from Johnson Ridge a decade after thae eruption. Left: Spirit Lake a few months after the eruption.