Virginia Dale Oral History Interview, July 30, 2015

SAMUEL SCHMIEDING: Okay, good evening this is Dr. Samuel Schmieding, Oregon State University, College of Forestry. I'm here, we're on the edge of Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, correct?

VIRGINIA DALE: We're on the very edge.

SS: We're on the very edge. We're in the North Toutle River Valley on the edge of what they call the debris avalanche.

VD: What I've learned is we call this the debris avalanche deposit.

SS: Deposit, okay.

VD: So, the avalanche is the process. This is the deposit.

SS: I'm here with Dr. Virginia Dale with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

VD: Correct.

SS: And how would you like to characterize your discipline or what you do, for the record?

VD: I'm a landscape ecologist. My background is in mathematics. My position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is as a Corporate Fellow, which is the top tier for scientists. About 1% of the scientists rise to that level. I've been able to 00:01:00work at St. Helens since 1980.

SS: Very good. This interview's going to focus on Mount St. Helens. Virginia has been coming here since the very first, really month after the big blast of May 1980. She has been continuing to do work here, including at the 35th Anniversary Science Pulse that's taking place in and around the volcano this week. We're going to talk about her experience with Mount St. Helens. What did you know about volcanoes, volcanic processes before this happened?

VD: I did my Ph.D. thesis on Mount Rainier, focusing on a subalpine meadow. The study was pollination ecology, but I clearly knew it was a volcano that had glaciers on it and had visited Kautz Creek mudflow, which is a mudflow that had come down from Mount Rainier. There had been a long-term succession study there 00:02:00that I was helping Peter Frenzen with follow up in terms of successional dynamics.

SS: This is before Peter became involved with Mount St. Helens, he was working up at Mount Rainier?

VD: Right. Right. I was advising that process because I had visited Kautz Creek many times with class projects and was aware that it was a very small mudflow event. I knew the-SEATAC Airport was on a large mudflow from Mount Rainier, which is pretty phenomenal in that they didn't realize that until the airport was being built.

SS: Is that the Nisqually River?

VD: No, it is not the Nisqually River. I've hiked around many of the volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest. As an ecologist, I was aware of successional studies and how they work. SS: What was your impressions, let's say, going back as a child when you first started reading or seeing art or seeing movies about 00:03:00volcanoes and how volcanoes were supposed to act according to some cultural representation?

VD: Gosh, I don't even know if I thought about volcanoes too much at that time. But, you know, volcanoes are snow-cap mountains that sit there and don't do very much. I had certainly heard of Pelée and I had subsequently visited [SS interrupts].

SS: Martinique?

VD: I didn't mean to say Pelée, the [SS interrupts].

SS: Because Pelée is in Martinique, right?

VD: Right, Pelée's in Martinique, but the volcano Vesuvius. Vesuvius is what I'm thinking of. I certainly was aware of Vesuvius and the implications from that.

SS: Of course, that's kind of the iconic volcano in world history, wouldn't you say?

VD: Exactly. So, I knew they could be destructive, but I knew they were beautiful too. I didn't think of them as so active as I do now.

SS: Did you ever have an image like runny lava like Hawaii volcanoes?

VD: Oh, certainly, yeah.

SS: I mean you know what I'm talking about?

VD: Sure.

SS: The stereotypical version that people think of as, like, there's never 00:04:00really been any typical lava like that here to speak of.

VD: Absolutely. There hasn't been anything like that. Yeah, that's true. Hawaii represents a lot of people's concepts of what volcanoes are like.

SS: But you had a different idea just by the mere fact that you had studied in the Northwest and you at least understood something about the large strata of volcanoes [stratovolcanoes] and how different they were.

VD: Right. Because I had been to Hawaii and I had certainly spent a lot of time on Baker and Rainier.

SS: Now, where did you grow up?

VD: I grew up in Tennessee.

SS: Okay, so right where you work, okay.

VD: Nearby.

SS: There's been no active volcanism in the eastern United States for, how many hundred million years?

VD: I don't know. For a long time.

SS: A long time, right. Now, let's get right into it. How did you hear about Mount St. Helens? Did you hear about the initial eruption and were you out there when that was started?

VD: The botany building where I worked [SS interrupts].

SS: Is this University of Washington?

VD: At the University of Washington where I was working on my Ph.D. thesis was in the same building as the geophysics department. The bottom floor was where the geophysics and all their records were. They had a seismometer right there that you could look at. The day I gave my Ph.D. thesis defense was the day that the quakes started happening.

SS: Which was March 19, I believe right?

VD: Yeah. Was the day. I can't remember if it was the 18th or 21. I have to look back.

SS: It was right in there.

VD: Anyway, I can't remember, yeah, it was late March, mid-March. The day I gave my defense was the day the mountain started quaking.

SS: That's pretty profound confluence of events.

VD: When that started happening and I had friends who were geophysicists. The group of people I knew got really excited about Mount St. Helens. We started 00:06:00coming down here every weekend to be part of the group that were volcano watchers. We would go to nearby areas where you could see the mountain steam and then we started coming out to the Toutle River and trying to document the vegetation that was here and think about how we might put out permanent plots.

SS: So, you were actually doing this before the eruption?

VD: Before the eruption? Yeah.

SS: That's interesting.

VD: So, before the eruption and I remember I got to go with a field trip with a group of seismologists because the red zone was set up. We went to the mountain and stood right there at Timberline below the bulge. This was two weeks before the eruption. The seismologists were all, first off, they were all laying around so they could feel earthquakes, because all these earthquakes were going on. They were saying, "Well, I wonder what's going to happen." Somebody said, "I think it's going to erupt." Nobody of that group ever thought about it being this northward directed blast at all.

SS: And nothing on this scale.

VD: Nothing on this scale. We were thinking an eruption would be smoke going up.

SS: A Plinian eruption, a typical upward steam.

VD: Yes, and didn't think about mudflows, didn't think about debris avalanches. Didn't think about pyroclastic flows. I didn't know those words, but we knew that there would be an opportunity for succession studies. We were trying to configure ourselves to be in a place and did a whole lot of literature review, actually, before the mountain erupted. When I talked to Fred Swanson later, he was really happy that we had this literature review we put together of how plants started recovering from succession. One of them that is really good was on Hawaiian volcanoes, which, as you pointed out, are so different from here. In a sense, before the eruption I had the proposal written and was waiting for this to happen. After it erupted, then I shared this information with the group at Oregon State University and at the University of Washington, and that's how I 00:08:00got involved with this team, because I had done some homework initially and most of them had been off on their other things. I was kind of a free agent. Because I had finished my degree and I had a new baby, I thought I would be able to have a break and spend some time at home with my baby and [SS interrupts].

SS: Surprise!

VD: Yes, it just didn't happen at all. But it was great having done the work that we did. We'd also driven on a lot of the logging roads, because we were able to get permits to come in. It was a red zone, but we could get permits to come in for the day, and, so, I knew some of the logging roads already on the south side of the Toutle and on the west side of the mountain.

SS: In addition to the plots that you laid out and some general survey stuff, did you also take some photography which would give you a baseline for future photography?

VD: No, I mean we didn't really monitor the vegetation. We were just thinking how we should do this. We should have collected soils. We should have really 00:09:00monitored the plants, but we had no idea there would be an impact down this low. We were trying to get up toward Timberline.

SS: It didn't last. It was only about 2 months before it blew.

VD: Yeah.

SS: Less than 2 months.

VD: Yeah, because May 18th it was just a couple of months. In retrospect, we could have done a whole lot more, but we didn't.

SS: Now, did you meet David Johnston?

VD: I don't know that I ever met him. I was trying to think about it.

SS: Because he was at Washington, wasn't he? Or briefly?

VD: No, I thought he was with USGS.

SS: No, but he did something where he went up and interacted with UW people?

VD: Oh, I'm sure he interacted a lot with them. I interacted with a couple of geologists, quite a lot. I don't know that I ever met him.

SS: What was your sense of the predictions about what was going to happen from the geologic experts and the people that you knew?

VD: It was going to be really exciting and I wanted to be there. Keith Ronnholm, who was one of the people that survived and had some fabulous pictures, was a 00:10:00neighbor of mine. We were going down every weekend and he heard about it, so he thought he'd go down and then he ended up with these fabulous pictures he sold to National Geographic. As soon as he came back and survived, he took his pictures to one of these 1-hour photos and invited us down to look at them on his living room wall and we all just died. It was amazing the pictures he had.

SS: Were these the famous ones of the kind of the side of the landslide and the blast, those ones, right?

VD: Right. There were two sets. There were Gary Rosenquist's and Keith Ronnholm's. They both were at the same spot, and they captured different parts of it. Those two sets. Immediately we were engaged with that, with what had actually started to happen.

SS: In terms of your conceptualizing what you thought might need to be done in an eruptive landscape and you did this literature review. What was your sense 00:11:00about what had been done and what had not been done in volcanically disturbed landscapes?

VD: One thing is these permanent plots - being able to follow things over time. I knew from my study at Kautz Creek that I helped Peter with, that those plots had been set up and we were able to go back and visit the same plots and see the changes that had happened subsequent to the mudflow and the vegetation recovery that occurred. Having information before and during the recovery we knew was going to be critical. That was one thing that was important. What was your question again?

SS: From the work that you did on literature review in preparing for whatever what was your sense of what had been done and what had not been done going into and then all of a sudden it happened and your thinking about these things and you obviously had some concepts floating around in your head about what you thought would be good to do.

VD: One of the things, a guy named Griggs. I think his name was Robert Griggs, did a very nice series of studies at Mount Katmai in Alaska. They were published in National Geographic. This was in the early 1900s when that magazine was more scientific.

SS: The Valley of the 10,000 Smokes of Katmai.

VD: Right. Right. He had 3 lengthy papers that were really exciting and really good, and he documented how burial affected vegetation and the depth of burial had an effect. I thought that was interesting that he did that, but I thought the debris avalanche offered something entirely different. The average depth is 45 m. It was way over anything that he had seen at Katmai.

SS: I mean, Katmai was probably 3 to 5 to 10 maybe?

VD: Yeah. I don't think it was near that deep, so he was talking about less than a meter [SS interrupts].

SS: Oh, so it was really small.

VD: It was very small in the places that he was working. Looking at the book by 00:13:00Mueller-Dombois and Ellenberg, in Hawaii they were classifying vegetation recovery in terms of different types of lava flows. Again, it's really different than what happened here.

SS: It's also a tropical zone, as well.

VD: It's a tropical zone. It's just really different. But the importance of getting out there early was really critical. That was apparent that it was important to get out there early, to get out there as often as you could. For me, as a fresh Ph.D., to not be reliant on others to helicopter you and things like that, but to see what was available and to run experiments as well.

SS: You were obviously at Rainier and there's the big three of Southern Washington: Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens. What do you remember thinking about St. Helens even before the eruption started? That cute little cone to the south, or?

VD: Yeah, well, it always looks so much younger than Rainier and Adams. I don't have any experience with Adams, really, so I can't speak to that, but I have a ton of experience with Rainier and I knew that the subalpine in the Pacific Northwest is more expansive than at any other place. I have looked and seen that these volcanoes have some endemics on them, which is kind of interesting to see what is here. We found a paper by Harold St. John. You know about this paper? It's a classic paper. I can't remember the exact details. He had been on a field trip to Mount St. Helens and 20 years later he published his notes from that field trip, and he published it in 1979. The notes were basically a species list.

SS: How nice for you.

VD: Yeah, so it's the only really good species list that we have.

SS: Didn't Jerry Franklin do some work around here in the '60s, too?

VD: Yeah, but his work was on soils and his was in the forest systems. Jerry did some great work, but it was different than knowing what is there. We knew something about what the forests were like, but getting a species list of what was here was really important because that's what I'm looking at right now - how these species change over time. We're getting some of the species, of course, that were on his list. In fact, we're finding that everything's coming back that was here before and that happened very early on. But, in terms of scientists doing their work and taking years to publish it, this was a great example that you need to go through your records. We found some real gems like those kinds of papers that I mentioned. We found that St. Helens was very unusual in terms of volcanology in some ways, in that it was this northward-directed blast, but Pelée, that we mentioned earlier, was more characteristic of some things. It 00:16:00wasn't like a Vesuvius. It wasn't like many of the other volcanoes.

SS: Well, Pelée, what killed all the people in Saint-Pierre was just a serious pyroclastic flow.

VD: Right. That's more like Vesuvius.

SS: Correct.

VD: We quickly started learning how the different disturbances were what was important here, and it wasn't just one thing. It was many different things. Getting to know the geologists and working with them closely was really fun and important to do.

SS: Where were you when it blew?

VD: It was at home in Seattle.

SS: What do you remember?

VD: I remember somebody must have called us or somebody must have told us. They said it finally blew and was really excited. Then getting to talk to Keith Ronnholm that afternoon with his eyewitness accounts was fabulous.

SS: You got one of the great eyewitness account firsthand right away.

VD: Right away, yeah.

SS: That must have really been exciting.

VD: It was really cool. Then, as I said, shortly thereafter I got to go in with 00:17:00a team that Jerry had, but over the summer a lot of people wanted to fly in and see it and they would take scientists so they could get in closer. I didn't go in the crater very often but did get to see the area. But being with the first group of biologists later on was cool. Immediately, I knew this was going to change my research career that day. I mean, it was pretty clear.

SS: When did you go in the first time and who were you with?

VD: The first time I went in a helicopter was with Jerry and that team. Maybe Jerry will remember who was on the helicopter, but I can't remember. I think it was probably Fred Swanson and Jim Sedell and Jerry from OSU [actually from the Pacific Northwest Research Station, US Forest Service]. It was Roger Del Moral and Larry Bliss and me from UW. That might have been it. I don't know how many seats are on a Forest Service helicopter.

SS: You're flying over the hill. Tell me about what went through your head when 00:18:00you saw what you saw.

VD: I don't know if this was that trip. But the most impressive way I ever saw it was when we went in one time and it was really cloudy. It might have been that trip. Because you go in the Toutle Valley and it was really cloudy, so you'd pop up into the clouds and then you'd go into another valley. Here, you'd see all this mudflow and then you'd pop into another valley and you'd see all this blowdown. Then you'd go up and pop into another valley and it would be the mudflow. Instead of just coming in and seeing it from the top you'd see all these different kinds [SS interrupts].

SS: You saw elements of it.

VD: Yeah. That was really neat. That was really exciting. I'm sure before I went in on the helicopter that we drove down and went in as far as we could. The red zone [the zone of restricted access] was still set up and we probably went in on the South Fork of the Toutle, because that was more accessible than going in on 00:19:00the North Fork. But this road is obviously new [referring to the road near where we were sitting], but the road that it connects to was an old Forest Service road, so we could get down that road, and that's one of the reasons our plots are nearby here.

SS: So, actually this road did not get destroyed by?

VD: Oh, this road is a brand-new road.

SS: Okay, you're talking about the ones up high?

VD: The one that came down. It isn't really accessible now. The debris avalanche was impacted on the side, so if you got a permit to come in and the way the permits after the eruption were, and before to some extent, you had to go to Vancouver that day, get the permit that day, come in, check in on your radio every hour [SS interrupts].

SS: Because the thing was still smoking away.

VD: And be out that night. We got a nice support from the Washington State Department of National Resources (DNR), who had people at work would could listen to our radios. But the radios didn't always work here, so we'd have to walk, go up high. It was physically hard to do it, but we did a lot of it.

SS: So, you started setting up plots or conceptualizing how to do things how many days after the big blast, or weeks approximately?

VD: Well, two weeks after when we went with Jerry, we had spent a lot of time on the phone talking about how to set up a study for long-term succession and everyone agreed that we'd have these 250 m2 circular plots that were 50 m apart, and that was pretty much what we did. That happened within weeks, that there would be these different things. Now, the Forest Service didn't actually set up their plots until 1981 and 1982. I set up my plots earlier than that. These are not Forest Service plots, per se.

SS: Of the 103 that are listed in your literature, that's when that process started, right?

VD: Right.

SS: Did they all go in that first year?

VD: They went in in 1981, I'm pretty sure.

SS: Okay, so the first year was figuring it out.

VD: And in the first year we wandered all overlooking for any survivors we could find.

SS: So, you were looking for people?

VD: No, for plants.

SS: Plants, I mean. Excuse me.

VD: Plant survivors, yeah. In fact, there was someone killed right up there. There's a cross right up there that I've run across.

SS: Kind of sobering, huh?

VD: Yeah!! But we were looking for plant survivors. What we found were everything that survived was from a piece of a stem or a root or some part of a plant that happened to be near the surface. They were much more common along the margins than in the middle of the debris avalanche deposit.

SS: Because the middle was just the weight, it was just so intense.

VD: It was the tumble down of the mountain, you know, the tumbling down of the mountain. It's really rough still when you go out there in the middle. So, the first year we were wandering around trying to figure out where to study and we did a lot of soil samples. I collected soils and did analysis and did these 00:22:00experiments to grow the plants in this material to see how well they would grow to try and figure out if it would have enough nutrients and the particle size was right to grow plants. But, when we put in our permanent plots, it organized what we would be doing.

SS: What was the biggest challenge the first week, two weeks, the first summer?

VD: Logistics. Getting in. Getting in was really a challenge, because we had to have these radios. We had to check in. You had to get a permit every day.

SS: And you had to bring in by helicopter.

VD: No, we could drive in.

SS: Oh, you could drive in? Okay.

VD: That's what I'm saying. And I had a baby. So, I had a babysitter down in Toutle. I would drive down to Vancouver, get the permit, leave my child at the babysitter, come in and then come back out.

SS: Momma's going to visit the volcano, right?

VD: That's right. We didn't have to rely on helicopters, which made it really great. We could spend a lot of time getting out here. That was really great. But 00:23:00the news helicopters did take us out to our site sometimes, and that made it a lot easier.

SS: We're kind of in the lower portion. Kind of draw a quick word picture of let's say from the bottom going up what you saw, what was there? The physiography?

VD: This debris avalanche extends 25 km, I think is the distance, from the mountain itself. It's a tumble-down mountain. The further it gets away the more organized it is. At the toe of the debris avalanche was this mass of vegetation that came down with it, and that's where you saw logs and things. And sometimes they were along the sides. Most of the material was this gray, mixed up mess. Some rocks are there. It's about 63% sand. It's highly sandy. It's beautiful except it wasn't like Washington. It was more like an Arizona desert or 00:24:00something and this gray color. Then you have all these really steep hummocks that were hard to walk over and just like a moonscape, very, very different. It was gorgeous in some ways, but not what you would expect of Washington. Then there were other parts of the debris avalanche that were different, because there was this process during the afternoon of May 18th and during the whole day there were earthquakes occurring and so that would shake the water to the top through a process called liquefaction. Like, if you get sand in a bucket and shake it the water comes to the top and then the water would gather up. Jon Major talks about bathtubs filling and spilling, and then would rush down. Then you had that mudflow that occurred all afternoon starting about noon and going to midnight initiated the debris avalanche and going downstream. The places 00:25:00where that mudflow passed are smoother than others and, in some places, that's where the erosion initially occurred very quickly, so that's where we would find some plants. There was one place we called "the lupine flats" because it had four lupines on it, and we didn't see them anywhere else.

SS: The lupine flats. Four lupines. Well, it's got to be named somehow, right?

VD: Yeah. We thought that was going to be really cool and there was going to be all this vegetation setting up. We set up some of our plots on the lupine flats, but those were some that washed out because it was right in an area where a stream ended up forming. There was no organized water. The Toutle River didn't exist at that time.

SS: The Spirit Lake was totally gone, dammed up.

VD: Yeah. Over the ensuing years the river found itself, and now you have this massive erosion. But at that time, it was this gray moonscape with very few plants. I remember one time I found this little vole out there in '82, and he 00:26:00was so stressed I caught him with my hands. There was one plant within sight, and he ran under that plant. I don't know how he got out there. But there were no organisms, hardly. We did see some ducks early on, which was crazy because there's nothing there, but people have told me since then that birds have a strong homing system, and they will come back even though the landscape looks very different, and these ducks were just there. It was kind of crazy, but it was all very different.

SS: Yes, absolutely. Were any of the either search and rescue or any of the helicopters from the Forest Service or the USGS or the news reporters, were you able to get any really good footage from that of the debris flow in action that, 00:27:00obviously, there was a lahar, all these combination of things: was there any fresh footage that would be useable scientifically from that first day?

VD: I didn't even ask, because I was more concerned with what it was like after it was established. The geologists were extremely interested in getting that footage for understanding the process, and we're glad they did. That helped us understand what was left in place. But we saw our job as, "Okay, this is what is here now." And understanding how it got there helped us understand its constituents and where it would go, but we didn't even go that direction. What is useful now is the remote sensing imagery and getting the changes over time since the eruption.

SS: How does remote sensing help the particular on the ground fieldwork?

VD: It helps give us an idea of how this system of permanent plots is representative of the larger area.

SS: Now, what were some of your essential assumptions regarding ecological theory going into this and even major disturbances before this thing happened and how did what you saw and studied support, challenge, or overturn that?

VD: Well, the general successional paradigm is that only the light, wind-disbursed seeds come in early that those have to get established and grow up and produce shade and improve the nutrient conditions. Then you get what are called late successional species that tend to have heavy seeds that require the nutrients. And that it's this orderly process that you can look at and say this is where you are in the sere, the word that's used to describe the stages of 00:29:00succession and that one process moves orderly into the next. Early on you should only see one set of species; then they will die out; then you'll get another set of species, and they will become established, and then you might get another one.

SS: Then they'll die out or they'll become a dominant species and they'll be able to regenerate themselves, correct?

VD: Right and so this concept of climax was very important, that you move in succession toward a final state and that state will be static. So, a well-organized, linear process with a well-defined end.

SS: How long did it take you to realize that was problematic here?

VD: Well, it really became clear as we started looking at the seeds that came in and looking at the seedlings that were becoming established. For one thing, we had this system of trapping seeds that we maintained over several years, and the 00:30:00paradigm would say that you would find more seeds on the edge of the debris avalanche, because (as you can see here) there are places nearby that were not disturbed and you would expect the seeds to come from those areas. What we found was that the greatest number of seeds were right out in the middle of the debris avalanche deposit.

SS: Because they were blowing in?

VD: Yeah, we think they were blowing in from downstream, even though it was many kilometers, but that was what was happening. We think what was happening was, although you find more seeds close to the parent plant and it follows a normal distribution, that this situation was out on the tails of that distribution, because it was such a big event. What happens in the tails doesn't follow any kind of prediction.

We also started realizing that chance events were really important. For example, early on Epilobium angustifolium (fireweed - the genus is now Chamaenerion) was really important, and we found a huge population of it out in the middle of the 00:31:00debris avalanche without anything nearby. Later we found three horned caterpillars. Those three horned caterpillars ate every single plant.

SS: They were hungry.

VD: Yeah. There was nothing else out there. That little population of fireweed that we thought was going to be really important for providing a place where plants would be trapped just didn't happen.

SS: It just shows you that nature doesn't care about models necessarily. It may follow models, but it doesn't necessarily follow models.

VD: Right. Then we started seeing the seeds coming in of early successional and late successional species. Not only that, the late successional species, particularly the trees, survived. Now, over time, we're starting to get a community coming in, and we're starting to get more of the late successional understory. Another big surprise is how well the alder are doing. We're sitting 00:32:00here under the alder, but people think of alder as a wet-site species and you shouldn't have them in this really dry, sandy material. I remember I gave a talk; it was either at the '81 or '82 anniversary of the eruption, and they asked me be controversial. So, I said, I think alder's going to be the big story here, and people got upset. They said no way, you know? It's not wet. You've got this sand-sized material. It's just not going to grow. But you look here and what you see are alder.

SS: How long did it take for you to be proven right in terms of the eyes of your colleagues?

VD: Maybe about 5 or 10 years. I mean we started getting the data, but the evidence is the alder were coming in fast. We would start seeing them. They grow very well. We did germination tests with the debris avalanche material and found alder had 23% germination, which is pretty high on this rather inert material. 00:33:00They could grow in it. They're one of the fastest growing trees in the world. They can produce seeds in 3 years.

SS: Because this soil is quite acidic and there's not a lot of organic material, correct?

VD: Yeah, exactly. And it's sand sized.

SS: And the carbon to nitrogen ratio, what was it back then?

VD: It's pretty, I mean I can't remember the numbers, but.

SS: I mean just generalize.

VD: It's very low. It's very low.

SS: Right.

VD: It's very low. In fact, we did this pot test where you grow lettuce as a bioassay in the pots. We did it for mudflow material and with the debris avalanche material. You have the soil, and you add one nutrient at a time and then all of them together plus macronutrients and micronutrients. We found that in the mudflow every time you would add something that the lettuce would grow a little bit better. In the debris avalanche, they never really grew. They survived, but they were these teeny little lettuce plants. They didn't grow. They didn't put on biomass. They survived, which was something. But there were 00:34:00clearly problems with this material and being able to do very well. But alder did. Although that was controversial, it was interesting. I talked to Richard Walker, an alder specialist, and he agreed that alder was likely to make it.

SS: Interesting.

VD: That's been kind of surprising. Now the alder are starting to die. It was kind of fun when we were out there today to see all these alder fallen over.

SS: Because they're what 30, 35 years old, some of them yeah?

VD: Some of them are that old, yeah. Alders can live 60 years or so, but it's a stressful environment.

SS: Yeah. Now, who did you collaborate with in this research on the debris avalanche the first few years? Who were your colleagues that were doing the work?

VD: A.B. Adams was my husband at the time, and he and I were the main people who were working on this. We were part of the proposal led by Larry Bliss and Jerry 00:35:00Franklin and probably Jim Sedell.

SS: Was Fred involved with that, too?

VD: And Fred. And Roger Del Moral. There was one big NSF proposal that went in, and it got funded very quickly.

SS: A lot of the core people that are still here were right there with you at the beginning.

VD: Right. We divided up the areas, and they agreed that I could focus my research on the debris avalanche.

SS: Kind of give me an idea of themes and areas, just rough sketch between some of those figures.

VD: Okay, so Roger wanted the south side of the mountain, and Jerry and Fred worked in the blowdown area. We were working on the mudflow some, but it was spread too thin. We didn't follow up on that as much. Larry Bliss never really followed up a whole lot. He was more of a kind of an administrator. Of course, Jim Sedell was interested in the stream systems, mainly on the other side. 00:36:00Everybody else was on the other side. We were here, which was fine with me because this is where it was accessible. It was really hard to get in in the side over there.

SS: Because of the amount of blowdown, the roads, everything.

VD: Right. Here, you had access through this logging system that brought you right down to the debris avalanche. Now, these logging roads were really hard to figure out, but Weyerhaeuser provided us with maps and keys and let us get into places and then you could walk out onto the debris avalanche deposit from the side of the valley, where disturbance was minimal.

SS: Now, there was some blast effect up on the high ridges, correct?

VD: Absolutely. Well, maybe you couldn't see. As we were walking out today, we could see that. Around to the south side of the Toutle River you can see some blast, and there certainly was toward the other way, toward the north. But this area where we are sitting was all buried under the debris avalanche, so there 00:37:00was nothing for the blast to affect. It was all gone.

SS: Now, 1981 did they have something that you might consider the first Pulse?

VD: I think it was in 1981, yeah?

SS: Was that organized by Jerry Franklin?

VD: Yeah, I think it was.

SS: What do you remember about that first Pulse?

VD: Well, did I tell you on tape about the stepping into the quicksand? Have I mentioned that?

SS: You said when we were sitting over there. Not on tape, so no.

VD: I remember when we first landed on the debris avalanche, because that's where I really wanted to go. I remember the helicopter pilot was really careful about setting the helicopter down because we didn't know what this was going to be like, if it was going to be quicksand, what it was going to be like. He was very, very careful. When we got out, it was this really, hard, hard, hard, hard material. One of the places I walked from the helicopter there was this mound, 00:38:00quite a big mound, and as I stepped on it, it kind of sunk down several feet, and we think what happened there was that it was a big chunk of ice, and, because it hadn't rained since the eruption, the ice had melted and it had a little material on top and it just had been enough to support itself structurally. It never had any weight on it. To me, that was an indication of how very, very fresh this material was. No one had walked on it. There was nothing there. It was just gray and all this up and down and rough material. Little of it was smooth. It was not even like a moonscape, because when you think about that it was rounded. It was this just very rough, and people now refer to this as the hummocks area and are realizing other volcanoes have a lot 00:39:00of these hummocks, but I'd never seen anything like it at all. It was crazy.

SS: Would you classify it as chunky?

VD: Partly chunky, but it had all these sharp, sharp peaks of material that had fallen down. The best way to describe it is as the mountain tumbling down on itself. Just a huge amount of material. I think of chunks as blocks and some of these are extremely pointed and they are still, even when you get out there.

SS: Now, did you have the 103 plots by 1981, your original?

VD: You know, I can't remember. I have to think if we started them in '81 and finished them in '81.

SS: Because there was a sequence of '81 through '84 of every year. Now there wasn't a Pulse every year, or was there?

VD: No, there wasn't a Pulse every year.

SS: But it was that first year, but you came every year to do your work, correct?

VD: Right. I got funding from Earthwatch, and the Earthwatch volunteers helped 00:40:00me put out all these plots. I think we got them all out in '81. I have to check the records. Then we started monitoring and doing experiments associated with these plots. We were monitoring the vegetation as well as seeds coming in associated with these plots. We did this depression and mound experiment. I was standing out here once, and I saw this seed go by, and, as it went over this depression, it just dropped right out of the wind system. I read later (and this was an Epilobium angustifolium, the fireweed) that somebody had done wind tunnel experiments and found that a 1% change in humidity could cause that plume to close up. Pretty amazing. I thought - wow, these depressions are really going to be important for establishment of the plants, and, so, I set up what we ended up calling the depression and mound experiment to document that. It's near about 60 00:41:00of our plots, and our Earthwatch volunteers dug out a quarter meter area, and then we had to put the material somewhere, so we created mounds. We went back over the next couple of years and looked at the number of seeds and seedlings in the depressions and at a control site, and the mounds. We though that it was obvious we were going to find more seeds and seedlings in the depression. We didn't.

SS: You didn't. Okay.

VD: What we found was there were more seeds and seedlings in the depressions than the controls, but they weren't different from the mounds. We think what was happening was that on the mounds you got all these spiderwebs setting up. The mounds were trapping the seeds in the spiderwebs and they were also trapping moisture in the spiderwebs and had some little bitty microtopography. And that was more important than the flat areas. They were a quarter meter, so they were 00:42:00small, but kind of replicated what we have out there now. Excuse me, I interrupted you.

SS: Were there any further flows after the big blast that affected the zone that you studied that first year. There were some fairly major eruptions, although certainly much lesser impact in content than the big one. Did any of the later ones, the mudflows, anything affect your area that first year anyway?

VD: Yeah, there were subsequent mudflows. I remember coming into the Toutle River valley once and we got a message over the radio saying you can't go down into the valley. There's a mudflow coming. We thought, oh this is really cool. We get to see a mudflow. We were up high on a ridge, on one of these ridges over here on the Toutle and looking down and thought this is really cool. Then we could see it coming at a distance, and it was really amazing. Then when it gets below us, I realized these were giant logs that it's pushing along. You think of 00:43:00a mudflow as being small, but the material that it was carrying with it was massive. That was one of the issues with the initial debris avalanche. It picked up all much material. It was really scary. I was quite a distance away to see the force of the flow. These subsequent mudflows have been big, and the erosion as the Toutle has been finding itself is phenomenal. People call it the Grand Canyon of Mount St. Helens. The erosion is just amazing. Really deep.

The other event was we did get ashed upon a couple of times. I remember being with Earthwatch volunteers, and they were petrified when we were ashed upon, whereas I was really excited. I thought this was really cool. We were always really excited about the volcanic events. But I do remember anther time, 00:44:00officials were concerned about legionnaire's disease for people working in the streams.

SS: Did they actually know more about legionnaire's disease by that time because it happened in the '70s right?

VD: Right. They were just learning about legionnaire's disease.

SS: Why were they worried about it here?

VD: Because people were getting sick that were in the streams.

SS: Okay.

VD: There were some illnesses, and officials were concerned. We would come through Castle Lake quite a bit, and we would get hot we'd jump in the streams, which I remember one time we were out here and had a strong smell of sulphur, which is an indication of an impending volcano. The radios weren't telling us anything was going on, but the wind must have shifted, and we got this really strong smell of sulphur - especially as we went high. So we hiked out of the valley as fast we could.

SS: And did it erupt?

VD: No. No, it didn't, but we had to check that radio every hour. That was part 00:45:00of the permit to allow us in - was to check the radio. But we weren't always able to check our contact at the low elevation, so we were constantly climbing up on the hummocks to check in with the radio.

SS: Obviously, the Pulse and everything that's happened, this collaborative thing, which is really quite an amazing model in the history of science, but the first few years whatever was forming was still forming. It hadn't developed its historical inertia, or it was starting to. Characterize the collaboration and the people that you were working with and how did that happen and how did it go forward and why was that important?

VD: Well, one thing that was important was the studies got funding really fast. I think at the time it was the fastest turnaround for NSF funding that had ever happened. That was critical. I think it was important that there was agreement on where different people would be working, because there's so many different 00:46:00questions here and, because of that agreement, we weren't stepping on each other's toes and messing up plots. I think it was important to have an agreed-upon system of sampling so that eventually we could do some comparisons across this area (although that comparison hasn't happened so much). Some of it's in the book you have in your hand, but there could be a whole lot more done. I think it was great that we were able to work that way. Other than those kinds of important things, we didn't really work that much with other groups. We shared the bibliography. We attended meetings and discussed what we were learning and what they were learning, and part of the early Pulses at the Cispus Center was having discussions at night so that we could learn what other people were doing. That's when it started becoming evident how these different disturbances were going along different successional paths, how very different 00:47:00they were, that it wasn't one kind of disturbance event. If we hadn't been talking together, I don't think we would have realized that.

SS: Isn't it true that ecological science, because of its complexity, almost mandates collaboration and sharing?

VD: It does. The International Biological Program (IBP) had had Oregon State University as one of its key efforts. I'm at Oak Ridge National Lab now, and I had done my Masters at Oak Ridge under an IBP project, so that model of looking at large areas as a collaborative group and thinking of ecosystem science is very much where my training came from and is similar to what Oregon State people were doing because they were in that school of thought. Interestingly, I found that University of Washington (UW) had more of a different school of thought. 00:48:00They were more evolutionary ecologists, which is complimentary to ecosystems, it's just a different perspective. It was good for my education to be at places that had that different perspectives. I think Oregon State helped the people at UW learn that their ecosystem perspective complemented evolutionary thought, like the presence of all these rare species on the volcanos. These were some ways of thinking that was different among the institutions that benefited the science as well.

SS: If you were going to describe the first five years, or you can even say the '80s, because you came back in '89, how many species did you find? What would you characterize as the coverage? Just some of the general dynamics of how you classify this study here.

VD: You going to hand me the book so I can read it?

SS: No. Do you want it?

VD: I mean if you really want the numbers, I need to look at the data.

SS: No, just generalize.

VD: Yeah. So, early on there were very few species. Many of them were these light-seeded species, but we did find the heavy-seeded conifers out here early on as well. There were surprises like that. You did find traditional successional thought being supported as well as other crazy things happening. We realized how important randomness was and how very heterogeneous this area is. We had 103 plots out there, but we should have had 103,000 or more to really capture what was going on. There was no way that we were going to understand this area without a really detailed study. The soils were really important.

I remember a professor offering and suggesting to me that I go get a Ph.D. in 00:50:00soil science because that was what was needed here. There were so many different disciplines, but soil dynamics wasn't being captured. Even so, I think we were able to learn a lot early on and have been really lucky to continue this study. The early '80s we started revealing how important alders were, how important random events were, and how important the microtopography was. I don't think the other sites have the microtopography elements, or even the large topography elements that the debris avalanche does. It was funny being at the Pulse this week and seeing all those sites and then coming here. I just realize this is so different, and most of those people have never gotten to the debris avalanche.

SS: Ever?

VD: No. I don't think they have. They go to the east side of the mountain, and they just don't realize how different it is. You could describe it, but they just don't realize how different it is. Some of them go to Johnston Ridge and 00:51:00you can see that area. Charlie's been out here a lot, and Jon Major's been out here and seen the differences, but I think most of the ecologists haven't really been here to see how different it is.

SS: Tell me about the importance of Charlie Crisafulli.

VD: Well, Charlie, when he got here and started helping organize the Pulse, was really important because I think getting people together and getting some interest in continuing and having the collaboration has been great. Charlie has the personality to both make the logistics happen and to make everyone feel comfortable about doing things. I worked with Charlie and Fred on the first book, the 25th anniversary book. Charlie is meticulous. He wants to get it all right. It's really hard to get him to bring things to fruition. That's why we haven't finished the 35-yearbook yet, but I would rather things to be done well 00:52:00than to be done to meet some artificial deadline. He has been an amazing glue here to bring people together and to get people to meet each other and talk to each other.

SS: What was his position or funding at the very start and how did that change to something permanent?

VD: Well, as I recall he was working on a Ph.D. with Jim MacMahon on the small mammals here and then at some point in time he got hired after the Monument was set up because they had some positions to engage people to work directly on the mountain itself.

SS: Was there any heat in any of the upper debris avalanche when you first got here?

VD: No, it was pretty cold by the time we got here. It had been quite warm, at emplacement, but it was pretty inert. Here comes my glass of refreshment. Thank 00:53:00you, Keith. I really appreciate it.

KEITH: This is our camp thing: wine and time-I'm sorry. I'll step out.

SS: This is definitely off the record, even though it's on the record. What were the fauna that were down here when you were here? I mean you're doing mainly vegetation, but you also pay attention and you see animals that are here or not here? What do you remember the first year and maybe the first decade and how that evolved from what you remember and studied?

VD: Well, what was here at first were insects. I mentioned the lupine flats, where found these lupines that survived: four of them in some places, six of them in others. I had worked with lupine on Mount Rainier, and I knew that it is an obligate outcrossing species, that is, it has to have a bumblebee move the 00:54:00pollen from one plant to another or it's not going to set seed. I thought, this is going to be a classic experiment. We're going to have survivors. There are not any bumblebees out here. It won't set seed, and that'll just be that. Well, I saw bumblebees out here in the middle of nowhere kind of making a b-line. Subsequently I've been out in Lake Washington, and there are bumblebees flying across. I've read since then they can go several miles across inhospitable territory. The insects were really important. I mentioned that on our mound experiments we started collecting all these spiders and spiders were building webs on our seeds traps. We caught a lot of spiders. I shared those with John Edwards [U. of Washington entomologist] and his team. The insects were coming in very quickly and that was the major component that we saw early on. I mentioned the horned caterpillar too, that was very important.

SS: Now, the Toutle started to flow because of the tunnel, or did it start to flow before that?

VD: It started to flow before that because there was water that had to come down the hill. The Toutle started finding itself early on. There were many false starts. There were places where it was kind of quicksand-y and the Toutle really wasn't here.

SS: It was going through; it was percolating through the block.

VD: It was percolating. Right. And it finally found itself. But we did some work with the fishery biologists who were mainly working on the south Toutle who were interested in how sediment was affecting the salmon that were coming upstream. Our hypothesis was that it was either the shading of the stream, (because it was 00:56:00really hot in the water for salmon), or the particles in the stream that was going to be detrimental to the fish. I did a little study with them, and our model predicted that the alder and the poplar, in particular the poplar, would grow up very quickly and shade the stream and it would become cool, but the sediment was going to remain a problem. That has panned out to be-they are getting fish back but the fish early on had quite a bit of abrasions and so the sediments in the streams were important. Of course, now we have this history of the sediment retention structures that keep the fish out and they are trucked upstream.

I was at one of our plots, and I found this little vole out in the middle of nowhere. There was only one plant; you couldn't see anything else. The vole was running under the plant. I don't know how this little vole got out there. I 00:57:00caught it with my hands because it was so stressed. It was a very difficult time to be out there for any kind of animal. Also, there were ponds that were forming. Initially each depression was oddly shaped. There was water seeping through. In these depressions water would collect from the rain and maybe even from the movement of the water through the system. So, these ponds formed. It was really cool when you looked down on them, they were all different colors depending on the minerals that were in the ponds. Fairly early on we started finding tadpoles and little frogs in these ponds and that was kind of cool.

SS: This would be year one or two?

VD: Like year three or four.

SS: Three or four?

VD: Three or four, that you started seeing tadpoles and then you started seeing some lizards in there. I got a herpetologist to come out and start looking at the fauna. Those were the animals that we observed early on. Then later the elk started coming. It was a great habitat for elk, partly because they put all 00:58:00these grass seeds in on the western part of the debris avalanche to support what has become a wildlife area. So, there are a huge number of elk now. [grass seed had been applied by Soil Conservation Service in an attempt to control erosion]

SS: They also wanted a little bit of erosion control, also?

VD: They wanted it for erosion control, yes.

SS: Then it accidentally became habitat, right? Or they wanted both?

VD: The seed distributions were done to support wildlife as well as erosion control.

SS: Now there were a lot of elk in here before, right?

VD: There were some elk, yeah. In fact [SS interrupts].

SS: So, more afterwards, because the habitat changed in the valley, right?

VD: Exactly. It's more open. After the eruption, there were places up near Coldwater Lake where some scientists from the University of Washington Burke Museum had noted where there are mounds and under these mounds were bodies of dead elk, so they flagged all these mounds early on. I went with them some to excavate these elk because it was a way to learn how they died during the 00:59:00eruption and that helped them understand other kinds of eruptions where they didn't know how the organisms died. The elk started coming back into the area in very large number and affect the vegetation because they preferentially eat some species. We hear the coyotes now quite a bit, but haven't really seen much evidence of them.

SS: There's no wolves in this part of Washington, right?

VD: I don't think there are, although they may be someday, but I don't think they are.

SS: They're in Oregon.

VD: Are they really?

SS: Yeah.

VD: Oh cool.

SS: Not very many, but some. Of course, controversial as always.

VD: Oh yeah. Well, if they're in Oregon they're going to be here.

SS: Well, yeah, they got a pretty good range if they want to go somewhere.

VD: This is a great place for them to be. But to me the insects are interesting (and I have some background in entomology) and I think insects are cool because ecologically they do everything. They're really important out here.

SS: Now, how did the chemical content of the soils, proto-soils, rock 01:00:00breakdowns, how did that change over that first decade?

VD: I don't know that. I have collected soil samples from all our plots every time we've been out there, and I'm looking for a partner to do soil analysis. My hypothesis is that the particle size has not changed that much. We've probably gotten a little more silt, particularly where a lot of vegetation has built up, but that more nutrients have come in, particularly under the alder, which are nitrogen fixing, and under places where all these elk have defecated because there's a lot of elk out there. We were on our plots today we were looking at some really big plants and our hypothesis was well, that's under an elk feces that's why that plant got so big. But without experiments and soil samples being analyzed, I don't know that, and I think that's going to be really important. But the particle size has likely remained the same and that is important because 01:01:00it's very sandy soil and that's very atypical for what you would find in the Pacific Northwestern United States.

SS: Right. Even though this was an exciting event for you professionally and it's obviously become a major part of your life, but it was also, there was so much death of plants, animals, people.

VD: That's true.

SS: Did you have a visceral reaction to that at times. Can you remember some specific instances early on where you would be taken aback, maybe even became emotional about what you were witnessing and seeing and finding?

VD: Well, obviously, all the people that died and their stories is tragic as well as all the animals that died. When I was walking up this trail right here and came across this cross, which is a small wooden cross, which means someone was killed right there where we're working all the time, it really brings it home.

SS: Still hits you today, huh?

VD: Yeah, that there are people right here basically not very far away.

SS: Do you know the story of who died here?

VD: No, I don't know who it was.

SS: Somebody in the red zone.

VD: Yeah. In talking with my friend Keith [Ronnnholm], who barely made it out, his story is so real.

SS: Now, were you tempted, or was there an opportunity where, if the scenario had worked out, that you might have been close at that time or that week, shall we say?

VD: Well, we were coming down quite a bit, but we were mainly going to the south side for whatever reason and never went to the particular campgrounds that were impacted. But I was standing below the crater two weeks before it erupted, as I told you, with the field trip for the seismology society. If it had been on that Sunday...

SS: Does it ever give you pause to think about how close you were to the bulge and the whole thing?

VD: Yeah, it's pretty weird that we were standing right under it and then thinking when I tell people that story, they say you're crazy. But you know it was exciting. We were thinking - oh this is such a cool thing to do to get to go 01:03:00up and see the mountain and be under the bulge. Even the seismologists that were there were all excited and when they asked, what's going to happen? Somebody finally said, "Well, it's probably going to blow." But they were thinking blow up, I think, not blow out.

SS: I remember when I was an unsophisticated person at 21 years old, with no academic training particularly, I just remember hearing the news reports and something just told me when I'd see bulge 5 feet a day and I don't know why, I'm not claiming to have some great intuition, but it seemed to me that it was going to be something very unusual and very scary. I just remember that, thinking back today about 35 years ago.

VD: Well, we thought of it as really exciting that something was going to happen, which was probably not a good thing to be thinking about.

SS: Did you get to know any of the local people when you were coming in and out 01:04:00of here.

VD: Oh yeah, yeah. Because I had my babysitter down the road. Then when we had all these Earthwatch people here, it was still the red zone set up in the initial year so we could not camp in here. We camped at a farmer's field - pretty much as close as we could. That farmer was nice and let us set up tents in his field. He didn't use it for that summer and just got some income from our payment for camping in his field. One of the funniest times was when I went to the Toutle High School for a safety presentation that officials were giving. This was about the problem of Spirit Lake filling up and the concern about the stability of the debris avalanche to hold back that material.

SS: This was afterwards, of course.

VD: This was after the eruption. They were concerned about the debris avalanche breaching and all of the water in Spirit Lake flowing down through [SS talks 01:05:00over VD] [the town].

SS: That would have been a catastrophe, another one.

VD: Yeah. It would have been a really big catastrophe. So, they had, I think, it was 7 barges up on Spirit Lake pumping water into another stream system so that it would relieve the pressure. A presentation was given that said, okay, we know this is a problem. We have it under control. USGS has a laser pointed directly at this debris avalanche blockage, and, if that starts moving, then the signal's going to go up to a satellite and then it's going to come down to Reston, Virginia. Then they're going to call by phone to Seattle, Washington, and then they're going to call down to Toutle, and they're going to send helicopters up and down the valley warning everybody to go to the high ground. I remember the local sheriff standing up, a country guy, saying, "Well, I don't know about you, 01:06:00but when I see those barges floating through town, I'm going to run for the hills."

SS: A classic moment, huh?

VD: Right, right. It was kind of fun to go to local events like that. There was a place down here we called the permanent garage sale. They had this garage sale going on for years. We would come at the beginning of the field season, and we would buy tables and chairs really cheap and move them up to wherever we were camping, and then at the end of the season we'd sell them back to the same place and then the next season we'd do the same thing again.

SS: Of course, this area is one of the more heavily logged areas anywhere, and you have a very, shall we say, conservative natural resource extraction-based economy and probably a lot of people that aren't necessarily scientifically oriented or fans of the federal government. What do you remember about their acceptance or lack of acceptance of all the eggheads from academia, for 01:07:00instance, coming in? Were they really accepting, or did you feel a lot of skepticism or just kind of a mix?

VD: Gosh, I always felt acceptance of everything that we did. The people were really nice. It was clear there was great interest in building the tourism industry, because this is a depressed economy still, and the tourism industry should be adding more to it. People were interested in actually having a connection to what was going on, because a lot of it was, they felt beyond their reach. It was a red zone. It was places they couldn't get in. They appreciated learning what was going on and understood why it was protected but felt like this was part of their community, and they wanted to know about it.

SS: I'm going to ask one or two more questions. Virginia and I are going to take a break in this interview right now. We are going to recommence the interview in 01:08:00Baltimore, Maryland at the ESA conference on one of the days between August 10 and August 14.