Eruption by Steve Olson

Author:Steve Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

NOT EVERYONE KILLED NEAR MOUNT ST. HELENS HAD CAMPED there the previous night. Jim Pluard—the foreman of the tree cutters who had objected back in April about logging so close to the mountain—liked to check on his crew’s logging equipment over the weekend. Weyerhaeuser had a lot of money invested in its equipment, and Pluard wanted to make sure it hadn’t been vandalized and would be ready to go Monday morning. He owed a lot to Weyerhaeuser. His father had been a logger, and now two of his sons were in the business. Weyerhaeuser paid a good wage and treated its employees well. The least he could do was keep an eye on things over the weekend.

Sunday morning, Pluard and his wife Kathleen tacked a note to the front door of their home in Toledo. It read: 7:30. GONE TO THE MOUNTAIN. BACK IN TWO HOURS. They got in Pluard’s company pickup and headed up the Spirit Lake Highway. If they left Toledo at seven thirty, they would have gotten to the logging site on the back of the ridge where Johnston was stationed about an hour later.

Like Johnston and the trailer, the Pluards and their pickup were never seen again. Dorothy Stoffel later said that she saw a red pickup driving toward Timberline right before the volcano erupted. But the company pickup Pluard was driving was yellow. Perhaps the color looked different from a height. Otherwise, the occupants of the red pickup remain a mystery.

GERRY MARTIN

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