Sometimes you find a bit of silver and it means a bit more personally because of place.

This was the case with two recent discoveries at my local coin shop.

I grew up in Seattle, the biggest city in the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States. Our region is connected in a bio-regional sense to the coastal areas of Oregon, Canada’s British Columbia and Alaska. One of the defining characteristics of the area.... VOLCANOES. ⛰ 🌋

The Cascade Mountains run 700 miles from British Columbia all the way into Northern California. The tallest peaks in this range are volcanic, having been formed by the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate under the North American plate. The tremendous pressure created by plate subduction forces magma to the earth’s surface. Over time this magma has created some of the Cascade’s most famous peaks including Mt. Baker, Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier.

But what does that have to do with silver?

Mount St. Helens

Not the best view, but this is Mount St. Helens as spotted from the freeway in a fast moving car.

On May 18th, 1980 a 24-megaton blast erupted from Mount St. Helens, located in southern Washington State. The blast sent a cloud of ash and 1300F magma thousands of feet into the air destroying a 230 square mile area. The mountain lost over 1,000 feet of elevation during the eruption and 57 people were killed.
Source

The date of the eruption, I was five years old. My mother was in the hospital having just completed a partial hip replacement surgery. Dad and I were meant to spend the day at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Instead we watched the ash cloud spreading across the sky from Mount St. Helen’s.

Mount St. Helens is over 180 miles south of Seattle and wind carried the ash cloud opposite to our location. However, from our safe distance it was still an unforgettable sight. One that we saw several times, as subsequent smaller eruptions continued over time.

So, when I walked into my local coin shop I had to have this bar and round!

Bar: Front depicts an image of Mount St. Helens before and after the May 1980 eruption. Prior to losing it’s top, Mount St. Helens was known as the Fuji of North America thanks to its semetrical profile.