The Volcano Lover
Barbara Decker '50 continues the mission she began with her late husband, Robert--to popularize volcanology.

By Lea Aschkenas '95

The Rebirth of Mount St. Helens
By Barbara Decker ’50
Sierra Press / 64 pages / $9.95

For several years in the late 1970s, Barbara Decker ’50 and her husband Robert, a former geology professor at Dartmouth, fantasized about writing a book on volcanoes.

With Barbara’s English degree and Robert’s position as the director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory where the couple lived on the rim of the active Kilauea Crater, they felt they would be the perfect pair to undertake such a project. Together, they had already written several articles about volcanoes for their local paper in Hawaii. Like their articles, they wanted their book to be accessible and accurate, employing the correct technological terms but as Barbara puts it, “not sounding so stuffy that people would be scared off from reading it. We wanted to popularize volcanology.”

At the time, volcanology was not exactly a common conversation topic, but the Deckers didn’t let this deter them. They began writing about the volcanoes they’d studied from Surtsey in Iceland to Krakatau in Indonesia. They explained the difference between Kilauea’s pahoehoe (smooth-surface) and aa (rough and broken) lava flows. And they compiled a comprehensive list of the world’s 101 most notorious volcanoes.

Then in 1980, just as their book, Volcanoes, was going to press, Mount St. Helens erupted, causing more destruction than any other volcanic explosion in U.S. history. The volcano spewed a plume of hot ash 17 miles into the sky, and its mudslides leveled 230 square miles of old-growth forest and killed 57 people. Suddenly, volcanology was a hot topic and, with a Mount St. Helens photo procured at the last minute, the Deckers now had a very timely cover for their book.

Twenty-seven years later, Volcanoes, which has been translated into German, Dutch and Korean, is now in its fourth edition. Robert died in 2005, but the legacy of the couple’s writings lives on with Barbara’s updates of their 15 volcano-related books, eight of which they’ve published with their eponymous Double Decker Press.

In 1985, after noticing that the National Park Service bookstores had very few books detailing the geology of the parks, Decker and her husband decided to found Double Decker Press to market a series of road guides to volcanoes in U.S. national parks and monuments.

“We thought the guides would really fill a niche,” says Barbara Decker, who spent two years at Pomona and another two at UC Berkeley. “And we decided to publish them ourselves so we could control how they turned out.”

The Deckers chose the photos for their road guides and, for their maps and drawings, employed the help of Rick Hazlett, one of Robert’s former geology students from Dartmouth. Coincidentally, Hazlett is now a professor of geology and environmental analysis at Pomona.

The 48-page road guides to such places as Joshua Tree, Crater Lake and Lassen Volcanic National Park detail two-day driving tours. They give descriptions of the significant geological sites along the drive while also offering a list of hikes and backpacking trips, as well as books and Websites for those who want to read more. To date, more than half a million road guides have been sold.

Currently, Decker, who divides her time between Northern California and Hawaii, is updating Road Guide to Haleakala and the Hana Highway. In 2007, Sierra Press published her first solo book, The Rebirth of Mount St. Helens.

“It was a very strange experience,” she says of the process of writing the book by herself. “For all the other books, we’d each write a different part and then edit each other’s work until we couldn’t tell who had written what.”

The Rebirth of Mount St. Helens is a glossy coffee table paperback with dramatic photos of the volcano before, during and after its eruption, as well as illustrations of area flora and fauna such as the avalanche lily and the Western toad. The book is an elegant mix of detailed yet very comprehensible explanations of the eruption and the ongoing transformation of Mount St. Helens from, as a local Native American tribe has described her, a burning witch to a beautiful maiden. A page titled “Gallery of Destruction” shows photos of a bridge torn apart by a mudflow from the volcano, a forest where trees of up to six feet in diameter were blown over like toothpicks, and a journalist’s car that was buried in a mudflow.

Just a few days before the Mount St. Helens eruption, Decker and her husband had also been within striking distance of the volcano, flying out from Hawaii with several geologists after hearing the first reports of volcanic activity. Fortunately, they thought the activity could go on for some time before anything worth documenting happened, so they returned to Hawaii, narrowly escaping getting caught in the explosion.

Looking back on her nearly three decades of writing volcano guides, Decker is satisfied that she and her husband accomplished their original goal of making their books accessible to a wide audience. Their works are available in national park and university bookstores as well as in more mainstream venues such as Barnes & Noble.

“I remember this reviewer once writing about one of our books,” Decker says. “He wrote that he liked it very much, and that his mother even read it. And I thought, ‘His mother!’ Yes, that was our aim.”