[ ♪♪♪ ] ED JAHN: Someday in the future, we're going to tell a great story about this.

MAN: Oh, wow.

MAN OVER RADIO: They're calling for rain with a low around 47.

I think the gusts have been about 40 miles an hour.

MAN: It's fraught with hazards.

It's caving, mountaineering, glaciology, and volcanology all kind of woven into one mess.

If there was any way to get out of here right now, we'd be going.

MAN: We don't even know how to get out of here.

We got flown in; we don't even know how to climb out if we wanted to.

My name is Ed Jahn.

I've been a producer with Oregon Field Guide for almost 15 years now.

In a previous season, we'd done an expedition to the glacier caves on Mount Hood, and it was great and it was a big success for us.

And after that story, which was fairly extreme in its own right, I figured we were done with glacier caves.

But the cavers that we had met previously on that story, they gave us a call in the springtime, saying a guide from Mount St. Helens had seen a hole in the ice beneath the rim; might be an entrance to a new series of glacier caves.

This is Mount St. Helens.

It's a national treasure.

And here we're getting a call saying, "Would you like to go to some place that nobody has ever been, ever?"

How can you say no?

We're local, but we're a scrappy local outfit.

We still want to get that story before anyone else.

The crater of Mount St. Helens is off-limits to the public, completely.

And here the helicopter is going up over that rim, right over the crest, and this landscape just opens up in front of us.

And it's like something out of Lord of the Rings.

Not welcoming at all.

And the lava dome in the center of this crater is surrounded by this glacier, and on that glacier was this dark black hole into nowhere.

Our next three days are about getting inside that thing.

So for this story, this was pretty typical of a Field Guide story, where it's just two of us, myself and our photographer, Todd Sonflieth.

We got there about an hour before the rest of the caving party showed up, and I remember thinking, "Wow, nobody gets to go here.

What a privilege."

But on the other hand, there's a reason they don't let people in there.

It's a crater of an active volcano, and it looks like it.

It's dark, it's brooding, it's steaming.

And the hazards are kind of making themselves known all around you.

Rock slides peeling off the walls and making this thunderous roar... this ice with these deep crevasses... and then where we were camped was just this black rocky lava dome where just barely enough flat space to put a tent and steam coming up all around us.

Everything about the inside of that crater says you shouldn't be here.

So welcome to Camp Rembrandt on Mount St. Helens.

Most of what you see is steam.

Yesterday we did identify one for sure sulfur vent.

JAHN: The team of cavers is explaining to us we have gas monitors, we have oxygen, we've got all this equipment for all the thousands of things that can go wrong.

No one's ever been in these before.

They haven't been mapped before, so we're actually going where no one ever has, and because of that, we have to carry a lot of extra gear.

So it's taking a lot of time and gear to get it all up there so we can do this safely.

JAHN: So, you know, we're hiking up there totally not knowing what to expect.

The snow was good, but we're framed by the steaming dome on one side and this cascading, crumbling wall on the other.

You know, you kind of make haste.

You go fast.

Got there, standing on the edge of this pit... it was 130 feet or so, just... descends down into the snow, sloped off at this weird angle.

The first caving expedition goes in... CARTAYA: Look at the size of this thing.

Oh, it's overhung, all right.

All right, I'm going.

JAHN: Explores these caves.

It's beautiful, it's massive, it's safe -- well, safe as ice glacier caves can get.

Being here, it just -- it fills you with life force.

It just makes you feel alive and happy to be alive.

JAHN: They came out and they're like, "You've got to go in.

You have to see this."

Of course, the producer in me is saying, "Well, if I'm going to write about it, I've got to see it."

CARTAYA: Ed Jahn, about to do the Godzilla hole.

JAHN: Exhilarating.

About as exhilarating as it gets.

[ ♪♪♪ ] And you're looking up in this grand room with this huge skylight, and you're like, "Wow, I just descended into the center of the earth."

Then there's this massive channel going under the ice, all lit up with blues and wild light.

In two days, we got our story.

Explored two different cave systems, documenting the caving expedition.

They mapped the caves.

They're quite substantial, they're beautiful.

So it's true discovery.

CARTAYA: Go ahead and pull this out.

JAHN: Two days in, I'm like we can pretty much wrap this thing.

And sure enough, the weather starts rolling in.

Those clouds that were just kind of quietly billowing down in the valley just started pushing up into the crater.

And when they did, it got nasty real fast.

[ shivering ] The caving was done at that point.

There was no going up on that glacier.

The shooting was basically done, because everything was just miserable and wet.

At that point, we're all just waiting for the helicopter.

And we were on the radio with him constantly.

He thinks there's a window between storms.

JAHN: "I think I can make it in four hours.

Looks like the weather might open then."

Four hours later, nothing.

It just got progressively worse and worse and worse.

And everything that the weather report said it would be, it would be exactly the opposite.

MAN OVER RADIO: Between a quarter and half an inch... JAHN: We started getting very cold and extremely wet, and we had some people sleeping outside, bivvied out in the rocks.

Oh, it's raining!

There's no building a fire, there's no way to get warm.

You can make tea; that's about it.

It's about a 10 on a scale of 10 misery scale.

It's getting pretty brutal right now.

For a while, it was just raining.

But now the wind's picked up.

Probably blowing close to 20.

Yeah, they promise us it'll clear for tomorrow.

That night turned out to be a hell night.

Okay, I just came back from being outside.

It's about 3:00 a.m. at the moment.

That big cabin's down.

It had blown apart, and all of their stuff is blowing all over the glacier practically.

JAHN: It was truly frightening.

Not only did you have this bad storm, but now we understood clearly the helicopter really probably wasn't going to come.

If the helicopter's not going to come, how are we getting out of this place?

CARTAYA: There's three layers of clouds.

You don't need the whole meteorology report -- he can't do it; it isn't going to happen today.

There's another front off the coast that's coming that's going to actually make things worse later this afternoon.

Obviously now we all have to walk out.

Everyone's already wet and cold, and, you know, it sucks, but as soon as we start moving, you're going to warm up, and we just need to keep moving.

That's why I want packs light.

Only take, you know, food, water, things you can't...

It was just this heavy weight, like, oh, my.

We have to hike out of this crater, and there's no trails, and it's across a glacier, and it's storming.

Everything we do is about making television, and here we are, piling all our television gear -- the discs that we had shot, everything we had worked for, I put out on that ice.

Weather changes things.

Nixed our helicopter and had to abandon our stuff.

Half our party got blown off the mountain inside their tent, went down a crevasse, but it was good.

So still a successful mission, but ask me again when we get to the cars.

JAHN: You know, it was so touch-and-go on the way out.

I had an ice axe in one hand, a pole in the other hand, and even though I had a GoPro camera in my pocket, ready to shoot the expedition out, I never wanted to take my hands off those two things to reach in and get shots, and neither did Todd.

One or two shots, that's all we got.

CARTAYA: Let's plan on six hours.

I think we can do it in six.

JAHN: We had the right people there, which we needed.

In the end, those skills were needed to help get everyone off the mountain.

- MAN: Whoa!

- You got it?

Three days later, helicopter pilot got a window, and he flew up there, grabbed all our stuff.

When I saw that box of discs and they were intact and they didn't have water in them or condensation, I just kissed that box and said, "Here it is!"

This was as bad as things have ever gotten on a Field Guide shoot for me, and I'm sure Todd would say the same thing.

Even so, it was worth it.