Born in 1955, Dr. Cathie Hickson co-authored Nature Wells Gray with Trevor Goward, to mark the 50th anniversary of the creation of Wells Gray Park. Her memoir Surviving the Stone Wind: A Personal Account of the Awakening and Rebirth of Mt. St. Helens (Tricouni Press, 2004) was published for the 25th anniversary of the eruption. On the morning of May 18, 1980, Hickson, a UBC geology student, witnessed the most powerful volcanic eruption in North America since the 1912 Katmai eruption in Alaska, and the largest landslide ever observed. In the aftermath of the eruption, 57 people died. Now an internationally recognized volcanologist, Hickson graduated from UBC in 1982 after writing her Honours thesis that documented the deposits left by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. After completing her Ph.D at UBC in 1987, she joined the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) and worked on volcanoes in Canada and elsewhere in the world. In 1995, she was named head of the GSC's Vancouver office, a position she held for seven years. More recently she has managed an multinational project in South America, focusing on volcanoes, earthquakes and landslides, in order to to reduce the impact of natural hazards on local Andean populations.

BOOKS:

Surviving the Stone Wind: A Personal Account of the Awakening and Rebirth of Mt. St. Helens (Tricouni Press, 2004)

[BCBW 2005] "Outdoors" "Geology"