Mount St. Hilary

Mount St. Hilary is where the Transformers arrive on Earth. The crippled Ark, tangled with the Nemesis's boarding party, goes down into an active volcano in the Pliocene and is buried. Four million years later the volcano erupts again, the shock jars the ship's systems back to life, and Teletraan I begins scanning the local machines. Everything in G1 flows from this single geological accident.

The name is a comics name. The Marvel continuity places Mount St. Hilary a short distance outside what would become Portland, Oregon, and uses the name from The Transformers #1 onward. The cartoon never names the volcano at all and draws the surrounding landscape as desert closely resembling the American Southwest, while the Japanese Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformer manga, a supplement to the series, places Autobot Headquarters in Arizona. Fans use Mount St. Hilary for both, which is convenient but not strictly accurate for the cartoon.

The volcano is a genuine liability as a base. Twice in the cartoon Decepticon schemes reactivate it: on the first occasion several Autobots are blown clean out of the cone into the troposphere and Skyfire has to catch them, while Ironhide stops the eruption by shooting the rocks. The cave system running beneath the mountain is how the Constructicons get inside to attack Teletraan I, and it is also where Sideswipe and Brawn find the dinosaur remains that inspire the Dinobots. In 2006 Trypticon reduces the whole mountain to rubble.

• Mount St. Hilary is a Marvel Comics name. The cartoon never speaks it, and the show's landscape looks nothing like Oregon.
• The name is an obvious play on Mount St. Helens, which had erupted catastrophically in Washington State in May 1980, four years before the comic.
• Laserbeak routinely used the volcano's crater as his way in and out on spying missions, which says a good deal about the base's security.
• The retractable door sealing the crater and the elevator to the upper levels were Autobot modifications added after the crash.
• Marvel places the mountain outside Portland, Oregon; the Japanese manga places the base in Arizona; the cartoon shows Southwest desert. All three are in circulation.