Mount St. Helens belongs as much to Oregon as Washington. Relatively few people in Washington live within sight of the mountain, while hundreds of thousands of Oregonians can see its truncated peak on any clear day. When the volcano began erupting in 1980, Portland got more ashfall than most major Washington cities (Yakima and Spokane were the exceptions). I'd wager that the guest registers in the visitor centers contain as many Oregon as Washington entries.
So the question might be asked: Why do I write almost exclusively about Washington state in my new book
Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens? Wouldn't it have made more sense to write about the entire region and how it was affected by the 1980 eruption?...