After a recent ancestry study unearthed generations of regional roots, a wave of homesickness stirred. I assured myself I’d return to my origins soon, and to the setting of a disaster film—Roger Donaldson’s 1997 volcano epic, Dante’s Peak—that time had all but forgotten.
Every summer, I flee my obligations into the forest air up north. The scent of sweet-sharp pine sap settles like perfume over trails of crisp brown needles and silvery mist patches drifting up from the lakes. Evergreens carve sunlight into slats that wiggle in edgewise to kiss you. If you lose yourself in the right stretch of pines, you’ll not be disturbed by another soul, save for a chance deer, turkey, or, if you’re lucky, a bald eagle.
For many, America is best embodied by its metropolitan sprawls. For others, like myself, the spirit of this country feels intrinsically woven into its open wilderness and quiet corners, where mankind has wielded a softer touch. At present, one of those corners—the graceful yet modest Inland Northwest—suffers from wildfires that have destroyed countless homes and smothered the region in smoke.
Recently, I planned not only to return to my haunts but also to revisit a comfort movie filmed there. Under ideal circumstances, I’d write this essay about fire- and ash-filled disasters without drawing uncomfortable parallels to real-life events that affect real people. I now approach the subject with reverent affection in light of the Spokane, Washington fires in 2026.
The Town of Dante’s Peak
Dante’s Peak, starring the always-elegant Pierce Brosnan and Terminator (1984) icon Linda Hamilton, is one of two volcanic thrillers released in 1997; its rival, Volcano (1997), hit theaters just two months later. While I’m more viscerally affected by the latter, after having seen it around age five and being pleasantly scarred for life, Dante’s Peak is easily the better film.
It follows volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) as he tries to warn a small town in the Cascade Range that its nearby volcano is about to blow. Predictably, nobody heeds the warning in time. The rest of the film is a fight to survive ash-choked air, lahars, acid lakes, and delightfully unbelievable stunts like driving over fresh lava.
Realistic? Depends entirely on the scene. Thrilling? Certainly, assuming a willingness to suspend disbelief and embrace the well-trodden disaster film formula.
Dante’s Peak is not a real location in the United States, but it was filmed in the tiny mining community of Wallace, Idaho. In a 1996 article by the Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington’s daily newspaper, director Roger Donaldson expressed, “We wanted a place that would feel very enclosed, with the forest coming right down to town. Wallace really fitted that very well. The only problem Wallace had for us is that it had a freeway running through it, which really wasn’t the way I had originally seen it. So we went back and re-wrote the script and made the freeway part of the story.”
That freeway is Interstate 90. It’s the longest Interstate Highway in America and stretches from Washington state to Massachusetts. In Dante’s Peak, Wallace’s slice of it becomes eruption fodder when the bypass collapses, sending people in their fleeing vehicles skittering to destruction.
Despite its Idaho filming location, Dante’s Peak is narratively set in Washington, and its fake, digitally inserted volcano takes inspiration from Mount Saint Helens. Visitors should not expect to admire a towering conical summit if they visit Wallace. Like much of Northern Idaho, Wallace isn’t dominated by the sort of prodigious peaks that graze the Big Sky in neighboring Montana, but it still hugs you from all sides with its steep, densely forested slopes. Dante’s Peak conveys this sense of locational intimacy, then turns it on its head—the charming little town becomes a coffin once the volcano erupts, trapping residents between its canyon walls.
To make Wallace extra charming ahead of its doomsday, Roger Donaldson staged a ferris wheel in its backdrop, constructed a new church that he’d eventually topple, and added new flowers and shrubs around town. These additions helped transform the humble burg into Money Magazine‘s “Second Most Desirable Place to Live in the United States, Population Under 20,000” in the film.
Nods to Wallace appear throughout. Signage inside Dante’s Peak High School says “Home of the Miners”; Mayor Rachel Wando’s (Linda Hamilton) son (Jeremy Foley) likes to play in a disused local mine, which becomes a respite for the main cast when a pyroclastic cloud levels the town. Even using a US Forest Service truck to gun it over lava could be seen as a gesture of regional appreciation. What better way to celebrate the Northwest’s forest managers than to “advertise” the seemingly indestructible gas tanks, engines, and tires on their vehicles?
Mount Saint Helens Strikes Again
In my ninth-grade science class in Colville, Washington, my teacher played a grainy VHS copy of Dante’s Peak to help us understand “local” (statewide) geology. He explained that the movie was inspired by Mount Saint Helens and filmed “in our backyard”, a mere 150 miles away. My grandparents, who introduced me to Dante’s Peak one summer in their Coeur d’Alene, Idaho home, also described Wallace as “our backyard”.
The classroom viewing of Dante’s Peak wasn’t exactly exciting—our teacher skipped most of the movie and talked over any scene he did play—but it illustrated how much of Mount Saint Helens’s 1980 eruption Roger Donaldson borrowed for his fictional volcano’s pyroclastic flow and lahars (volcanic debris flows). Several of the film’s tensest moments center around these events. The tragedies at Saint Helens also echo here.
On the natural side, the stratovolcano flattened 230 square miles of forest and “essentially killed every living thing” within the blast zone, per USGS.gov. The end of Dante’s Peak shows very similar destruction. The majestic evergreens for which Washington is known lie dead in ashen ruin for as far as the camera can see. Those visuals no doubt evoked memories in many regional viewers.
One Spokane resident proves they did. “I moved to Spokane in May of 1980… only to be welcomed by a cataclysmic event that dropped a foot of ash on our city,” he told The Spokesman-Review in 2017. “The place was crazy. Literally like driving onto the film set of Dante’s Peak.”
Harry R. Truman, a World War One veteran, is among the 57 reported human deaths from Mount Saint Helens’ catastrophic eruption. Famously, Truman refused to evacuate his lodge on Spirit Lake because “the mountain and the lake were his life. If he’d left and then saw what the mountain did to his lake, it would have killed him anyway. He always said he wanted to die at Spirit Lake. He went the way he wanted to go,” reported one of Truman’s friends. Truman and his 16 cats likely died instantly in Mount Saint Helens’s pyroclastic flow.
Dante’s Peak has its own Harry Truman figure in Grandma Ruth (Elizabeth Hoffman). Viewers who may have forgotten everything else about the film usually remember Ruth’s sacrifice at Mirror Lake—a real lake in Northern Idaho that keeps its name in the movie—when she jumps from a sinking boat into the acidic water to push her loved ones safely to shore.
Ruth suffers brutal burns and dies shortly thereafter. Like Truman, she wouldn’t leave her lakeside cabin to heed eruption concerns because she felt bonded to the place. As she lies dying in the smoky forest after having rescued her family, Ruth’s eyes drift to her grandson, and she utters her last words: “It’s okay. I get to stay on my mountain.”
Capturing a Rural Northwestern Community
In a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times about Dante’s Peak, director Roger Donaldson exclaimed, “Look at these extras! You couldn’t get extras like that in L.A. They look like real people.” Sandy Zeller, a Wallace resident at the time, seemed to share his sentiment: “Those Hollywood people are not like us.”
Donaldson sourced his fresh-faced side cast from Wallace and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The latter has since become a tourist destination for its year-round outdoor recreation and proximity to luxury at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. Wallace and other small regional communities have retained their rural coziness.
Donaldson seemed to understand the region’s identity beyond the superficial. Dante’s Peak brims with quiet local color, something its “pretty slim” story (Pierce Brosnan‘s words in the aforementioned interview) gets right. The people who populate this little town are average-looking, close-knit Americans. Perhaps, like many of Wallace’s residents, they hold blue-collar jobs in the mining or timber industries. They’re far less likely to care about the attractiveness of their side profile than whether or not they’ve sufficiently stocked their firewood piles for the winter—something my own family worried about while living in Northeastern Washington.
Inland Northwesterners also tend to be straight shooters. When Harry Dalton asks his innkeeper which town beat Dante’s Peak out of the top spot for “Most Desirable Place to Live”, the old man replies, “I don’t know, some piece of crap place out in Montana. Who cares?” It’s a minor moment that conveys a realistic regional sensibility. Ask the right Idahoans or Montanans what they think of each other, and you’ll discover the neighboring states aren’t always the best of friends (although the common arch-nemesis aside from Washington is, unanimously, California).
When Brosnan and Linda Hamilton’s characters sit out on the porch to discuss life, Hamilton says, “I know it’s just a little town, but I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I grew up here. I went to school here.” “Got married here?” says Brosnan. “Yeah.” For a town as small as Wallace, especially in the pre-internet-dominated world of the 1990s, this archetype probably resonated with some locals. The idea of escaping one’s hometown for the big, wide world, or staying to build a life and possibly stagnate, can create real tension for people with ties to an area.
Locals who were fond of the Northwest’s forests may have felt devastated when Mount Saint Helens destroyed them. Toward the end of Dante’s Peak, Hamilton, who plays the town’s mayor, observes her decimated settlement. “Eight years it took us to get this town on its feet. You wouldn’t believe the struggle. Look at it.” Cars are strewn about. Buildings have been hollowed into skeletons. Ash covers everything like radioactive fallout. That’s a difficult sight for anyone who’s lost their home, but in the Northwest, where the wilderness and forging a life against the elements are intertwined with the local culture, it can be especially painful.
Viewed through this lens, Grandma Ruth and Harry Truman’s stubbornness looks as much like devotion as it does irresponsibility. Many proud locals develop a relationship of sorts with their surroundings: in Washington and Idaho, the wild beauty, crisp air, sparkling lakes, and trees become a friend and a sanctuary. The same love that someone from New York or Chicago has for their city is what we Northwesterners feel for our open land, forests, and the blessed solitude.
Dante’s Peak captures this with footage of mountain roads, pine-filled panoramas, hot springs, hills, and pristine bodies of water. It slips through in tiny bits of dialogue and obstinate characters. Its titular town wins the “Second Most Desirable Place to Live” award because its real-life location could plausibly achieve the same. The “Pioneer Days Festival”, which introduces us to Wallace’s fictional counterpart, is itself a nod to the American West and the people who settled it. It takes a certain kind of person to thrive as an Inlander; Dante’s Peak whispers this without fanfare.
Dante’s Peak In Regional Memory
For a movie that The Coeur d’Alene Press has called “unremarkable“, and one of its own extras apparently didn’t think much of, Dante’s Peak sure made a local splash. In the summer of 1996, you could have been the lucky tourist to rent “THE PIPPIN HOUSE MNT LODGE: Families, business excursions, etc. Privately located, close to lakes and Sandpoint. Near Dante’s Peak filming!”
The Idaho Division of Tourism had its own offers. “Dante’s Peak… further establishes Idaho’s credentials as a first-class film location,” Carl Wilgus, Idaho Division of Tourism administrator, told The Coeur d’Alene Press in February 1997. A local non-profit group called Silver Country added Dante’s Peak film sites to its tour bus stops. Silver Country’s president, Tom Magnuson, stated, “Our goal is to tie our area as closely as possible with the filming of Dante’s Peak, because they have really done a wonderful job of portraying the natural beauty of the area and Wallace’s hometown nature.”
Even without the marketing hype, Dante’s Peak was good for business. A 2026 Coeur d’Alene Press article stated that the film “added $5 million to Wallace’s economy through wages, construction and services.”
On opening weekend, locals packed theaters to see Dante’s Peak and a re-release of The Empire Strikes Back (1980). According to The Coeur d’Alene Press, Dante’s Peak sold out in most initial showings. Was the disaster flick a hit on its own merit? Not exactly.
Local columnist D. F. Oliveria, who has found his way back to writing about Dante’s Peak over the decades since its release, wrote in his 1997 Spokesman-Review article that it “wasn’t worth waiting in line for 45 minutes, as my wife and I did Sunday—unless you’re an extra in the flick or you know someone who is.” Oliveria awarded the film a 7/10 for its “boiled bodies” and Pierce Brosnan’s fake compound fracture but knocked it for the driving-over-lava scene. Funnily enough, Dante’s Peak was my introduction to what a compound fracture even was.
Matt Crenson wrote in The Coeur d’Alene Press that the movie “displays all the elements of the classic Hollywood disaster flick, circa 1975 Irwin Allen (with stomach-turning dialogue to match).” One can only imagine that said stomach-turning dialogue had something to do with Pierce Brosnan comparing sexual intercourse to riding a bicycle.
Wallace local Rick Shaffer, appointed by the town’s former mayor as the “Prime Minister of Hospitality & Official Greeter of Historic Wallace,” found the film “fun” despite its lack of critical acclaim and enjoyed his “two seconds of fame in the movie.” He’d like “annual sequels” to Dante’s Peak because of the economic potential.
Meanwhile, some writers just across the Washington state line wish people would stop considering Dante’s Peak a local movie. “In creating a list of noteworthy made-in-Spokane films, it’s important to lay the ground rules,” wrote Carolyn Lamberson in the Spokesman-Review. “First: We’re being Washington-centric. So sorry, Dante’s Peak, which brought Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton—yes, James Bond and Sarah Connor—to Idaho’s Silver Valley. You don’t make the cut.”
Another article published years later listed Dante’s Peak as a “Big-Budget Movie Set In Washington” alongside Twilight (2008) and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). Maybe Washington and Idaho can share custody of the film?
Dante’s Peak Forever?
Regardless of the occasional eye rolls thrown its way, Dante’s Peak is something the Inland Northwest remembers nearly 30 years later. It employed a local high school band. It got an amputee an autograph from Pierce Brosnan on his prosthetic leg. It stimulated a small town’s economy. It got played in a high school classroom almost two decades after it came out. The rest of the country may have moved on, but Dante’s Peak continues percolating in the collective Northwestern consciousness, like slow-moving magma that never fully cools.
I didn’t see Dante’s Peak until several years after watching local plays in Wallace with my grandparents. It allegedly features one of my grandfather’s ex-girlfriends. Above all, Dante’s Peak incidentally spotlights not just a beautiful little town but a beautiful region and the people who give it spirit.
Although fires prevented me from returning this year, the Inland Northwest isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Neither are its hardy people. Neither, evidently, is Dante’s Peak.
Works Cited
- “Volcano can’t burn the Force.” The Coeur d’Alene Press, February 11, 1997, 6. Newspapers.com.
- Advertisement for the Pippin House Mountain Lodge. The Spokesman-Review, July 14, 1996, 99. Newspapers.com.
- Appelo, Tim. “‘Dante’s Peak’ Puts Town on Map–Then Wipes It Off.” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1996.
- Crenson, Matt. “‘Dante’s Peak’: They should have called it ‘Ash-tar’.” The Coeur d’Alene Press, February 9, 1997, 18. Newspapers.com.
- Dewitt, Jack. “Cd’A Arts Commission looks to attract movie makers to area.” The Coeur d’Alene Press, June 25, 2026.
- Fernandes, Charles. “Dante’s success could be marketing tool.” The Coeur d’Alene Press, February 11, 1997, 19. Newspapers.com.
- Kershner, Jim. “That’s A Wrap After A Summer Of Filming In Wallace, Idaho, ‘Dante’s Peak’ Heads Back To L.A.” The Spokesman-Review, August 4, 1996.
- Lamberson, Carolyn. “Grapple with this made-in-Spokane list.” The Spokesman-Review, September 24, 2017, T23. Newspapers.com.
- Oliveria, D. F. “Huckleberries: The villainous trio.” The Coeur d’Alene Press, August 2, 2026.
- Oliveria, D. F. “Huckleberries: The volcano that made Sid famous.” The Coeur d’Alene Press, March 19, 2021.
- Oliveria, D. F. “Not Quite A ‘Peak’ Experience.” The Spokesman-Review, February 18, 1997.
- Oliveria, D. F. “Huckleberries: ‘Dante’s Peak’ annual sequels a swell idea.” The Spokesman-Review, February 22, 2017, C3. Newspapers.com.
- Oliveria, D. F.. “Huckleberries: ‘Dante’s Peak’ lives on in part.” The Spokesman-Review, February 15, 2017, A8. Newspapers.com.
- Turner, Paul. “THE SLICE: A moving-here story.” The Spokesman-Review, March 23, 2017, D1. Newspapers.com.
- U.S. Geological Survey, Communications and Publishing. Mount St. Helens: May 18, 1980. Produced by Stephen M. Wessells. May 10, 2010. Video, 7:30.
- VA News, DME Interns. “Honoring Veterans: Army Veteran Harry R. Truman.” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, January 31, 2025.
- Van De Venter, Karlee. “Water Cooler: Here are Some Big-Budget Movies Set In Washington.” The Spokesman-Review, August 21, 2024, A10. Newspapers.com.