Writing Prompt #10: You look outside: Ah, it is snowing! But look closer. Those are not snowflakes falling from the sky! What is it snowing at your house?

I live in Southern California. Specifically, I live in Temecula, which is a naturally dry, sparsely vegetated area. It’s not quite a desert, but it’s not a lush, green area, either. The summers are hot, the winters are cold, but it doesn’t rain a lot and the ground never freezes over. I’ve seen it snow here a couple of times in my life, but it’s exceedingly rare and it never sticks around long. So what could fall from the sky that might resemble snow?

In 1980, something happened that shattered many Americans’ sense of security and safety. On the West Coast, deep in the State of Washington, a mountain exploded.

“Exploded” doesn’t do it justice. On May 18, at 8:32am, Mount St. Helens abruptly woke America up. The initial blast triggered a landslide that traveled at over 110 mph down the north slope and across nearby Spirit Lake. Debris suddenly filled the North Fork Toutle River up to 600 feet and covered an area of about 24 square miles. Trees were flattened, ridges destroyed, and a 600-foot wave rose up from the lake and devastated the northern shore. The pyroclastic flow (hot ash and magma) flash-boiled much of the lake to steam, creating a secondary blast that was heard as far away as Montana and Idaho. The explosion was the equivalent of 26 megatons of TNT, more than 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. (Believe it or not, while the eruption of Mount St. Helens is the most destructive volcanic eruption in the history of the United States, it doesn’t even come close to the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which is estimated to have been around 30,000 megatons.)

The eruption column rose 80,000 feet into the air, injecting ash and dust into the stratosphere. Drifting at about 60 mph this ash drifted in a mostly northeasterly direction but was still reported as far east as Colorado, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. Yellowstone National Park and Denver, Colorado, reported ash on the ground as early as the next day. It looked like snow, but in reality it was something much, much scarier.