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As part of the recreation of Mount St. Helens in its pre-1980 environment, I have decided to rename the project a bit. It is now known as Loowit Sceneries, and is the official name for the entire Mount St. Helens set of pre-1980 packages that are now in final development.
Over the last few weeks (since my last update), I have been hard at work establishing contacts with several in the USGS and the United States Forest Service, as well as the historical archives of the Washington State Patrol, who have each graciously supplied more reference material from which to work. This reference material includes aerials of the peak during every clear weather day in April and May leading up to the cataclysmic eruption on May 18, 1980. This will allow custom sets of scenery to be developed, depicting the peak at various times prior to May 18, 1980.
Part of that development, currently underway and in the first stages of alpha testing, is the fine tuning of the May 4, and May 17, aerial image packages. In addition to the previous overlays mentioned in previous posts, these two were also aided by several high resolution captures of the peak provided by USGS monitoring aircraft, aircraft-gathered images by the U.S. Forest Service, and aerials of the peak provided by the Washington State Patrol. This results in a 95%-to-historically-accurate rendition of the peak, given limitations owing to portions of the peak that are unavailable for recreation in imagery already provided.
For the first subset of images, I recreated a set of aerial photographs taken by geologists Keith and Dorothy Stoffel, who did four clockwise passes over the volcano in a Cessna 182 in the preceding 15 minutes prior to the May 18, 1980 eruption. On their last clockwise pass, they made one last wide sweep of the peak, before flying directly over the summit at 8:32 a.m.
The first five images represent the final iteration of the aerial imagery depicting the afternoon of May 16 through the morning of May 18. The last image represents the final iteration of the May 4 image, showing a light dusting of snow on the bulge and upper north flank.
The last image, recreates the first frame of a 24-frame sequence of captures photographed by photographer Gary Rosenquist, who was on a log landing at the top of a clearcut 8 miles northeast of the peak. Twenty-two of his twenty-four frames capture the moment of eruption approximately fourty one seconds after the earthquake which initiated the eruption on May 18, 1980. One was at 5:40 a.m., and the other was captured at 8:27 a.m.
Over the last few weeks (since my last update), I have been hard at work establishing contacts with several in the USGS and the United States Forest Service, as well as the historical archives of the Washington State Patrol, who have each graciously supplied more reference material from which to work. This reference material includes aerials of the peak during every clear weather day in April and May leading up to the cataclysmic eruption on May 18, 1980. This will allow custom sets of scenery to be developed, depicting the peak at various times prior to May 18, 1980.
Part of that development, currently underway and in the first stages of alpha testing, is the fine tuning of the May 4, and May 17, aerial image packages. In addition to the previous overlays mentioned in previous posts, these two were also aided by several high resolution captures of the peak provided by USGS monitoring aircraft, aircraft-gathered images by the U.S. Forest Service, and aerials of the peak provided by the Washington State Patrol. This results in a 95%-to-historically-accurate rendition of the peak, given limitations owing to portions of the peak that are unavailable for recreation in imagery already provided.
For the first subset of images, I recreated a set of aerial photographs taken by geologists Keith and Dorothy Stoffel, who did four clockwise passes over the volcano in a Cessna 182 in the preceding 15 minutes prior to the May 18, 1980 eruption. On their last clockwise pass, they made one last wide sweep of the peak, before flying directly over the summit at 8:32 a.m.
The first five images represent the final iteration of the aerial imagery depicting the afternoon of May 16 through the morning of May 18. The last image represents the final iteration of the May 4 image, showing a light dusting of snow on the bulge and upper north flank.
The last image, recreates the first frame of a 24-frame sequence of captures photographed by photographer Gary Rosenquist, who was on a log landing at the top of a clearcut 8 miles northeast of the peak. Twenty-two of his twenty-four frames capture the moment of eruption approximately fourty one seconds after the earthquake which initiated the eruption on May 18, 1980. One was at 5:40 a.m., and the other was captured at 8:27 a.m.