This is an REI co-op studios production.

Summer is right around the corner, which means it's time for campfires, smores, and spooky stories.

Even if it's just in your own backyard, there's something very special about gathering around the fire

that tells tales, late into the night.

And while our second season of camp monsters is still a couple of months away, we figured now was a good time to re-share the episode that started it all.

A very first episode, a legend of the Bat Squadch.

awoken by the explosion of Mount St. Helens 40 years ago, this creature roamed the blasted area around the volcano.

The science called the Dead Zone.

I'll let you listen to the story yourself.

So gather around and kick off your summer by listening to, or re-listing to, season one of camp monsters.

There are eight episodes to keep you entertained long into the night and to prepare you for our new season, coming to your years in early September.

And believe me, it's going to be a scary, legendary season.

You can find all of season one anywhere you listen to podcasts, or at rei.com slash camp dash monsters.

The Force of 50 Atomic Bonds

230 square miles, 150,000 acres of living forest, vaporized, devastated.

A cubic mile of solid rock, the largest landslide ever recorded, traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, burying everything in its path.

A blast cloud, 15 miles into the stratosphere, raining mud and ash, blotting out the sun, streaked with lightning, rumbling with thunder.

That was Mount St. Helens the morning of May 18th, 1980.

And after the terrible noise of the eruption ceased, there was left a landscape of ash and silence.

A dead zone, they called it. The mountain was going back to sleep again.

Perhaps it needed that silence to help it. Perhaps to a mountain of cold dead stone, silence is peaceful.

But nothing living could stand it.

...