This is an REI co-op production.

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 this morning of May 18, 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.

On the fringes of the dead zone, something living but inexplicable began to appear.

Always at night, always accompanied by that terrible silence.

It seemed the eruption had a weak and something other than Mount St. Helens.

Something that was not content to go back to sleep.

Welcome to the Camp Monsters podcast.

Every week or so we sit up here by the fire and try to scare each other with stories about those things you hear

and pass too close to your tent in the middle of the night.

For what runs across the trail, just beyond the beam of your flashlight.

Every part of the country has its own legends to explain what it was you thought you got a glimpse of.

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