Hey iRock!

I think she said she's 40 miles away from Mt. St. Helens, so hopefully she's quite safe.

i hope all those poisonous gases won't reach that far!

So here's where I was today. Crappy picture of me but look at the gal in the background. Thanks for the concern though. I just found out from my husband we are only a little over 22 miles away when we are home but still we would just get a little dust at the most. It is getting closer to some kind of activity but nothing like we went through in 1980.

Less than 7 miles away as close as we can get.

And of course the media. Things are heating up

Scientists said that although the risks were growing larger, they did not expect anything approaching the volcano's devastating May 18, 1980, eruption, which killed 57 people and coated much of the Northwest with ash.

They said the evacuation of the observatory was primarily a precaution in case of heavy ash discharge, which could make it difficult to drive.

"We still feel the risk is confined to this area," Pierson said.

A day after the volcano spewed a plume of steam and ash thousands of feet into the air, there was a very brief steam release Saturday - a puff of white cloud, followed by a dust-raising landslide in the crater. A volcanic tremor signal that came next was what prompted the heightened alert level.

The signal "was far stronger after today's steam eruption" than the tremor that followed Friday's blast, Steele said. "We were picking it up throughout western Washington and into central Oregon. Yesterday we had a very weak tremor signal."

Also, earthquakes continued Saturday during the tremor.

A tremor - a steady flow - indicates movement of gases or fluid within the volcano," Steele said, while individual earthquakes indicate "a pounding and breaking of rock."

More steam explosions are likely, and possibly an extrusion of lava.

"This is the most intense seismic activity we've seen since the May 18th eruption," said geologist Dan Dzurisin at the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcanic Observatory in Vancouver, Wash., about 50 miles south.

The 1980 blast obliterated the top 1,300 feet of the volcano, devastated miles of forestland and buried the North Fork of the Toutle River in debris and ash as much as 600 feet deep.

The intensity "probably just reflects the fact that more rock needs to be broken for magma to reach the surface," Dzurisin said. The 1980 eruption reamed open the route to the surface, and for six years smaller eruptions piled lava into a dome that is now 1,000 feet tall and marks the main conduit for magma.

Friday's relatively small eruption, which generated a plume of ash and smoke 16,000 feet high, was the first since a 1986 dome-building event at the volcano.

smokin' :o

nice webcam image updated every 5 mins: http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

Yep the cam is up and down with the increased traffic but never down for long. We had another emission today.