I was watching a YouTube tour of Wayne Sutton’s chainsaw museum and heard about this STIHL/Mt St Helens advert.
Here’s the video set up to start at that point.
I haven’t found a copy of the ad Wayne shares online, so here’s a screenshot from the video.
The ad reads:
MOUNT ST. HELENS GAVE US A DURABILITY TEST EVEN OUR ENGINEERS HADN’T THOUGHT OF
In the summer of 1981, about a year after Mount St. Helens erupted, a retired plumber namedd Dale Heikes agreed to clean up all that was left of the Toutle River Boys Ranch. Under one condition. Whatever he found he got to keep.
Well, considering that volcanoes have a way of destroying everything in their path, this was perfectly fine with the Toutle River Boys Ranch. So Heikes went right to work.
One day, to everyone’s complete surprise, Heikes did find something worth keeping. Buried, for one year in the muck that was once the ranch machine shop, was a Stihl chain saw. Which Heikes took home, washed off with a garden hose and started. With only three pulls on the cord.
Stihl chain saws. Everything you hear about them is true.
You can read the same in this magazine clipping pulled from this thread on the Chainsaw Collector’s forum.
Wayne also explained:
That is correct, Dale Heikes was clearing some of the debris in the mudslide on the Toutle side of Mount Saint Helens.
In the process of his excavation, he dug up some older model, STIHL chainsaws that had been buried in the volcanic ash. They had big corrosion holes, eaten into them by the acidic ground and did not show a lot of promise.
I hosed them off to get the bulk of the ash cleared and then picked up that 031 and gave it a pull. To my surprise it fired, there was a tiny bit of fuel left in the carburetor. So I use some epoxy and sealed up the gaping holes in the gas tank. Put in a splash of gas and it started. Ran just fine.
I had to share my amazement and called the marketing department at STIHL Inc. So STIHL provided Mr. Heikas with a replacement unit brand new, and that machine was headed to Virginia Beach.
I have no idea whatever became of those Volcano units, but several years ago at a dealership in eastern central Washington, the young guy working at the bench, asked me if I knew Dale Heikes, as it turns out he was Dale‘s grandson and he and his grandmother gave me the letter that was sent from Virginia Beach to Dale after the incident, thanking him.
I can’t tell you how many times it seems that I have been at the right place at the right time, I thank God for my good fortune.
The following newspaper clippings come from the same thread.
STIHL CHAINLETTERVolume 5, Number 4, October/November 1984STIHL CHAIN SAWS SURVIVE MT. ST. HELENSStihl chain saws enjoy a worldwide reputation as products of quality and durability. But Dale Heikes of Kalama, Washington, was still amazed when two Stihl 031s, pulled from beneath five feet of volcanic mud and ash a year after the Mt. St. Helens volcano erupted, still ran when cranked.
“It seemed impossible to think they would run in that condition,” Heikes marvels.
In 1981, a year after the famous Mt. St. Helens eruption, Heikes answered an ad run by the Toutle River Boys Ranch for someone to conduct cleanup operations there in the aftermath of the volcano. Heikes explained that the year-long waiting period was necessary because, at first, the volcanic mud mixture was like quicksand, prohibiting cleanup tasks.
“I had a backhoe and a little tractor at the time,” he explains. “When the mountain blew, the mudflow came down the Toutle River, just a big wall of mud, and the boys’ camp, of course, had to be evacuated.”
Heikes was awarded the contract to clean up the boys’ ranch, a six-month job, and the contract’s provisions allowed him to keep items salvaged from the debris.
“There was a machine shop on the ranch where they kept saws, drill presses, grinders, and other tools,” he recalls. “The machine shop was filled with five feet of this volcanic mud and ash liquid.”
As Heikes worked, he discovered three Stihl Model 031 chain saws buried in the volcanic crud.
“I dug the first one out, took it home, and washed it off with a garden hose,” he relates. “I blew it out as best as I could. It still had gas in it, so I pulled the cord three or four times, and it started right up!”
Heikes said the saw, buried in the sulphuric ash solution for over a year, “looked like it had been shot with buckshot” due to corrosion. The second 031 started, but the third saw refused to crank.
“Parts of the saw were just eaten through and corroded; the metal part was just rusted out with holes in it,” he adds. “But the power head was unaffected. I was just amazed!”
He notes that he has been using the first 031 he recovered “ever since.”
Heikes is retired from the plumbing business, but works with his son-in-law business, cutting timber from a 20-acre tract of land about thirty miles away from Kal- ama in Amboy, Washington. He already owned a Stihl 056 prior to retrieving the 031s and says Stihl’s “ability to always start has been a longtime attraction to Stihl products for him.
“You never carry ’em out of the woods overnight,” he explains. “You just leave them where you’re working and you can go out the next morning, in the fog, rain, whatever, and a Stihl will start right up.
So it wasn’t until recently, some three years after Heikes discovered the 031s, that he even thought to tell anybody about his Mt. St. Helens find, other than Mike Butler, manager of the Toutle River Boys Ranch where Heikes found the Stihls. But then he began doing business at Wayne’s Saw Shop in Amboy, near the timber tract he and his son-in- law are working.
“Wayne’s Saw Shop provides very good service, and Wayne Sutton does very good work,” Heikes observes. “When I brought the 031 in to Wayne to be serviced, he asked me, ‘Where in the world has this saw been?”
Once Sutton learned the story of the Mt. St. Helens saw, he contacted Stihl Incorporated and passed on the information and Stihl obtained the original 031.
Heikes, whose home in Kalama is about 30 miles from Portland and about the same distance from the volcano, says living in the Mt. St. Helens vicinity only bothered him once. Soon after the volcano erupted, he was in the area, and rounding a bend in the road, he noticed a big column of smoke shooting up from the volcano.
“It scared the h— outta me!” he admits.
But Heikes, who came west from Kansas at age 19, says he has no real fear of the volcano, despite the destruction he witnessed. He was involved in search operations after the volcano erupted and recalls one scene with horror.
“The top and sides of the volcano blew off, and if you can just imagine a forest where trees ten feet in diameter are all broken in half like toothpicks, all blown away from the mountain, then you can imagine what the volcano was like,” he explains.
See MT. ST. HELENS- Page 3 (continued below)
Image caption:
Dale Heikes (left) is ready to exchange the 031 saw he recovered from five feet of volcanic mud from Mt. St. Helens for a new Stihl 032. Wayne Sutton (right) of Wayne’s Saw Shop in Amboy, Washington, presents the new Stihl to Heikes as Karl Lindsey of Stihl Northwest looks on.
MT. ST. HELENS – Continued from Page 1
A story Heikes tells about the volcano involves the same boys’ ranch where the Stihl saws were discovered. In the immediate aftermath of the Mt. St. Helens eruption, a two-story administration building on the property was picked up and floated about a hundred yards downstream by the volcanic ash.
The boys’ camp officials made a plywood catwalk to get inside the building. and once inside, discovered two goldfish, still happily swimming inside their bowl undisturbed by the volcano’s violence!
Heikes plans to purchase a new wood stove for his home and undoubtedly Stihl saws will deliver much assistance in fuel chores as well as in his timber business.
“I’m pretty well sold on Stihls”‘ he declares. “I’m convinced hey are just one heck of a saw!”
And while the average Stihl owner won’t have to face volcanos, it’s nice to know that “the Mt. St. Helens Stihls” took all the abuse a volcano could dish out and survived to work another day to prove once again that “Stihl’s the One.”
After sharing this story on Facebook (our post here), Wayne Sutton commented on a thread on the Stihl Chainsaw Fans page:
The story is fairly accurate. But Hikas never washed the saws off himself. He brought them straight to my Saw shop where we wash them off and we’re shocked when the first one started right up on the third pull.
Which is good to know!
STIHL ran these other testimonial-type ads around the same period.
This next ad for the STIHL 020 AVT.
And this one for the STIHL 010.
Great ads!
Also, check out these old STIHL Contra ads.
