“That was the first one I started taking care of,” Greene said. She’d also found a nurse who’d been camping there - Tootie Greene. She’d found their mother, whose arm was injured badly. Then they heard their sister call to them from above. They checked the trailer, which was in the water, but had no luck. They couldn’t find their parents or older sister. When they got out of the water, the air smelled of dirt and gasoline. “She goes, ‘Stop crying, you’re going to be OK,’” Thon said. She saw a woman in a white robe float by on top of something, smoking a cigarette. They were crying, wondering what had just happened. “You had 250 people who were trapped between the dam and this massive landslide,” Girvin said.Īfter waking up to the roar and the shaking, Thon remembers falling into the river with her twin sister. Chunks of highway disappearing, leaving people with no way out. The human story is one of terror - buried campsites, falling boulders, trees pinning down people and cars. There are big boulders above the center that show how high the slide climbed, including one that’s dedicated to the people who died here. The geologic story is one of power - how the quake is still the largest recorded in the Rocky Mountain states, how the Hebgen Dam didn’t break, how the slide carried 80 million tons of rock. “It’s the human story, and it’s the geologic story.” “There’s two sides to the story,” she said, sitting on a bench outside the center earlier this month. She has told and retold the story of the quake, and she knows it well. Built in 1967, it’s the domain of Joanne Girvin, who runs the center for the Forest Service. The Earthquake Lake Visitor Center is on the other side of the road. Then the slide itself comes into view, a big barren patch on the otherwise forested canyon wall. West of there, it follows the shore of the 60-year-old lake, dead trees poking through the surface. There’s Refuge Point, a spot above Hebgen Dam where survivors like Thon, Schreiber and Greene congregated that night until help arrived the next day.ĭownhill is the new Beaver Creek Campground. The road between West Yellowstone and the young lake takes people through the highlights. Sixty years later, the lake is still here, a symbol of force, havoc and tragedy, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported. Army Corps of Engineers ultimately cut a spillway. The water backed up and spread out, turning a swath of canyon into an ominous lake. Nine more died because of the quake, including Schreiber’s grandmother and Thon’s mother. The slide went three-quarters of a mile north and spread a mile east to west, burying 19 people. Rocks, trees and earth shook loose at the western end of the canyon, forming a massive landslide. The quake had a magnitude of 7.3, and it remains the largest to hit the region. 17, 1959, turning it chaotic and terrifying. “I drew a blank after that for a while,” Greene said.Īn earthquake had disrupted the full-moon night of Aug. She said the ground was rolling like ocean waves. She was there with her husband and 9-year-old son, a few days from the end of their vacation. In a spot on a ridge there was Tootie Greene, a 30-year-old nurse from Billings.
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