Mount St. Helens Trivia
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41 free Mount St. Helens trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Mount St. Helens trivia quiz covers the Cascade volcano whose 1980 eruption remains the most economically destructive volcanic event in American history. The easy questions cover the state, the year, the death toll and the mountain's Fujiyama-like shape before the blast. From there the quiz moves through the eruption itself: the March earthquake, the bulge on the north face, the 5.1 quake at 8:32 on a Sunday morning, the largest debris avalanche in recorded history, the lateral blast, the ash that reached Edmonton and the 1,300 feet the summit lost. The hard end covers the Kalama and Goat Rocks eruptive periods, the 1831 ash that tinted the sun over Nat Turner's Virginia, George Vancouver's diplomat friend, the Klickitat legend of Loowit and the Bridge of the Gods, Harry R. Truman, David Johnston's last radio call, Robert Landsburg's camera, the Crater Glacier that grew inside the breach, the whaleback and the slab of the 2004-2008 eruption, and the returning mountain goats and beavers. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry on Mount St. Helens before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our volcanoes and national parks quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 41 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which US state is Mount St. Helens?
Washington
Washington: the volcano stands in the state's southwest, so its nearest big city is actually Portland, Oregon, about 50 miles away.
Q 02Because Mount St. Helens erupted on a Sunday, which workers normally found in the blast zone were mostly away?
Loggers
Loggers: the crews who felled timber all around the volcano were off for the weekend, and officials believe a weekday blast would have killed far more people.
Q 03How many people were killed by Mount St. Helens's 1980 eruption?
57
The 18 May 1980 eruption killed 57 people, most by asphyxiation from hot ash; the bodies of some victims were never found.
Q 04By roughly how much did the 1980 eruption lower Mount St. Helens's summit?
About 1,300 feet
About 1,300 feet: the peak fell from 9,677 to 8,363 feet, and the missing top was not blown sky-high but slid away down the mountain's north side.
Q 05What shape is the crater left by Mount St. Helens's 1980 eruption?
Horseshoe
The blast left a horseshoe-shaped crater about a mile wide, its north side breached where the landslide carried the summit away.
Q 06Mount St. Helens's 1980 blast was a 'Plinian' eruption, a type named after a Roman who described which volcano erupting?
Vesuvius
Vesuvius: Pliny the Younger's account of the AD 79 eruption that buried Pompeii named the type, and that blast and 1980's share a rating of 5 on the 0-to-8 explosivity index.
Q 07Mount St. Helens's 1980 ash column rose 15 miles in 15 minutes, reaching which layer of the atmosphere?
The stratosphere
The stratosphere: the eruption roared on for about nine hours, and by 9:45 that morning its ash had turned daylight to darkness in the city of Yakima.
Q 08Mount St. Helens's 1980 ash cloud crossed the United States in three days and, within 15, had done what?
Circled the Earth
Circled the Earth: visible ash fell as far away as the Great Plains, some 900 miles east, while the finest dust stayed aloft and kept going.
Q 09What are the volcanic mudflows that raced down the Toutle River from Mount St. Helens in 1980 called?
Lahars
Lahars are fast mudflows of volcanic debris and meltwater; those on 18 May 1980 choked the Cowlitz and Columbia rivers, cutting the Columbia's shipping channel from 40 feet to 14 feet deep.
Q 10Scientists liken the moment Mount St. Helens's north face slid away in 1980 to doing what?
Uncorking a bottle
Uncorking a bottle: with the mountainside gone, the pressure inside burst out sideways, levelling 230 square miles of forest at 300 mph or more.
Q 11Which 83-year-old lodge owner refused to leave Mount St. Helens and died in the 1980 eruption?
Harry R. Truman
Harry R. Truman: he stayed put with his 16 cats at the Spirit Lake lodge he had run for over 50 years, which now lies under about 150 feet of debris.
Q 12What was volcanologist David Johnston's famous final radio call as Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980?
"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"
"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!": Johnston, 30, was hailing his USGS colleagues, based in the American city of that name, from a post six miles north of the summit on what is now Johnston Ridge.
Q 13Photographer Robert Landsburg, caught by Mount St. Helens's ash cloud in 1980, saved his film by shielding it with what?
Q 21What has drifted across Spirit Lake, below Mount St. Helens, ever since the 1980 eruption?
A raft of dead trees
A raft of dead trees: thousands of trunks felled by the eruption were swept into the lake, and more than 40 years on the survivors still drift from shore to shore with the wind.
Q 22What split Mount St. Helens's Crater Glacier into two arms from 2004?
A new lava dome
A new lava dome, growing from October 2004, pushed up through the Crater Glacier, splitting it into east and west arms that later crept around the dome and rejoined.
Q 23Mount St. Helens is one segment of which great belt of volcanoes?
The Ring of Fire
His own body
His own body: he stowed the camera in his backpack and lay on top of it, and when he was found 17 days later the pictures had survived, though another photographer's film nearby was ruined by the heat.
Q 14Which US president compared the devastation unfavourably with the surface of the moon?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter toured the blast zone on 22 May 1980 and said the moon 'looks more like a golf course compared to what's up there'.
Q 15Among the major volcanoes of the Cascade Range, Mount St. Helens holds which distinction?
The most active
The most active: its frequent past eruptions led three geologists to warn in 1975 that it would erupt again, perhaps within decades, and it did five years later.
Q 16Helenite, a green gem made from Mount St. Helens ash, was discovered by accident when salvage workers melted ash with what?
An acetylene torch
An acetylene torch: crews on salvage work days after the eruption saw the ash around the flame fuse into green glass, a trick soon copied in furnaces to make gems.
Q 17Despite its name, Mount St. Helens honours no saint; George Vancouver named it in 1792 after a fellow Briton who was what?
A diplomat
A diplomat: Alleyne FitzHerbert, Baron St Helens, was Britain's ambassador to Spain, the odd one out, since Vancouver named Rainier and Baker after naval officers.
Q 18Native American names for Mount St. Helens, such as Louwala-Clough, translate roughly as what?
Smoking mountain
Smoking mountain: local peoples had watched the peak erupt for generations, and in 1847 the visiting Canadian artist Paul Kane painted it erupting at night.
Q 19In the Bridge of the Gods legend, proud suitor Wy'east became which Oregon peak across the Columbia from Mount St. Helens?
Mount Hood
Mount Hood: Wy'east is said to hold his head high in pride, and the maiden the two brothers fought over became Mount St. Helens itself, a dazzling white cone until 1980.
Q 20What nickname did Mount St. Helens's symmetrical, snow-capped cone earn before 1980?
Fujiyama of America
Fujiyama of America: like Japan's Mount Fuji it was a near-perfect snowy cone, until the 1980 eruption removed the graceful top in a few hours and ended the likeness.
Mount St. Helens belongs to the Ring of Fire, the chain of volcanoes around the Pacific; it sits in the Cascade Arc, fed by the Juan de Fuca plate subducting beneath North America.
Q 24Which Cascade volcano, 34 miles east of Mount St. Helens and some 50 miles from Rainier, is known as its 'brother'?
Adams
Adams: the pair are often called sister and brother, though in a Native legend he is a suitor who bows his head in grief for the maiden who became Mount St. Helens.
Q 25For roughly how long did Mount St. Helens shake and vent steam before its catastrophic eruption of 18 May 1980?
Two months
Two months: small quakes began in mid-March, and within two weeks steam explosions had opened a new crater at the summit, the volcano's first stirrings in 123 years.
Q 26Before Mount St. Helens in 1980, where in California was the last eruption in the lower 48 states?
Lassen Peak
Lassen Peak: the biggest explosion of its 1914–17 eruptions devastated nearby land in May 1915 and rained ash at least 200 miles to the east, and the lower 48 then stayed quiet until 1980.
Q 27What nickname did geologists give the long, smooth, rounded lava spine that rose in Mount St. Helens's crater in late 2004?
The whaleback
The whaleback: it was hot but already solid lava, squeezed up from the vent as a smooth-sided shaft more than a quarter of a mile long that kept breaking up as it grew.
Q 28Roughly how much of the crater blasted out of Mount St. Helens in 1980 has fresh lava since refilled?
Under a tenth
Under a tenth: all the lava that has oozed into the crater since 1980 has put back only 6 or 7 per cent of what a single morning removed.
Q 29What did President Reagan and Congress establish around Mount St. Helens in 1982?
A National Volcanic Monument
A National Volcanic Monument: inside its 110,000 acres the devastated land has been left to recover on its own, which has made it a living laboratory for how nature responds to disaster.
Q 30What kind of outing is Monitor Ridge, the standard summer route up Mount St. Helens?
A strenuous day hike
A strenuous day hike: the ten-mile round trip gains about 4,500 feet over boulders and loose ash, but in summer it calls for a permit and stamina rather than ropes or technical skill.