We lived in Morton at the time & dad had two of the sides at Coldwater. He had a cast from hip to ankle on after tearing his knee up & still working on it. We were visiting my grandparents (We lived next door) and I remember everything getting very dark and the deepest rumbling you ever felt/heard. My grandpa said that I'd better open my birthday present early (1/18 scale NAPA Kenworth & Trailer) since we didn't know what the outcome would be. It started raining down ash & pumice rock the size of golf balls. My mom was hollering at him to get her trans am under cover so the paint didn't get ruined. Lol, My dad also owned a body shop at the time (mainly for equipment, crummys & pickups) and donned his respirator to head into town. He gathered all the beer, meat, potatoes and coffee he could then got all the air, fuel & oil filters he could.
Snowplows were running wide open to clear the ash and it was just genuine chaos.
It took close to 6 months to get into the gear and it was just as TS said, as close to a nuclear warzone as you could get. Both sides had just flat out disappeared. The only gear ever recovered from there was Shorty Long's saw & the lower of a Linkbelt LS-108.
I am a firm believer that we would have still been logging old growth into the 2000s if not for that eruption and all the eyes from around the world it brought down upon us.
Just barely 10 years after that devastated eastern Lewis & Skamania counties the "Owl" debacle (such a scapegoat it was) came thru and shut us down for good.
It still hurts to this day to see emptiness where Mt. Adams Veneer, Cowlitz Stud and Max West mills once stood. To see the abandoned shops of Ladimer, Filla, Moe and others along with the emptiness where Cascade Loggers Supply once occupied and the general poverty & sadness of an area once so strong, proud & respected.
With this I will end my saddening memory...
Government regulation killed our community, do not let it kill yours.