  Montana Highway Patrolman Glen Stevens made the first probe up the Madison Valley after the quake. In response to a request for help from Madison County Sheriff Lloyd Brooks in Virginia City, Stevens and Deputy Sheriff “Dutch” Buhl wheeled down to Ennis, arriving at about 2:30 o’clock. The telephone lines were out. It seemed important to warn people farther up the valley of the danger they were in. Some of the folks had already fled. One ranch family was still in bed. There were three groups of sleeping campers. They didn’t argue or waste time. When Stevens suggested they get out, they just left. As Stevens and Buhl proceeded up the valley, they radioed in at frequent intervals that everything seemed normal. They reported rock on the road at various intervals from 26-mile hill on south to the place above Hutchins Bridge, where boulders tumbling from a rock cliff made the road impassable. Cabin camp operator Otto Kirby had got his people out, but there were two house trailers parked farther up, near the river. Stevens warned the occupants, and got them started out. They gassed up at Kirby’s ranch. It was cloudy and dark. At 3:15 o’clock Stevens radioed in that the water was muddy but otherwise seemed OK, and that he planned to cross the bridge and drive up along the river on an old road on the south side. Sheriff Brooks tried to discourage them, shouting via radio—“Don’t do it, you crazy bastards, the dam’s broke, and you’ll get killed too. Come back!” It was this message which, picked up on other radios, and relayed to Helena, sparked CD director Hugh Potter to order the evacuation of Ennis. With Sheriff Brooks’s warning fresh in mind, Stevens says, “Every turn we got off that bench, I thought we were going to meet swimming water.” These huge boulders crashed down onto Cliff Lake Campground killing the Lloyd Strykers of San Mateo, California, without disturbing the food on their campsite table.(U. S. Forest Service) As they moved up the valley, they got the message that a couple of people had been killed in the campground at Cliff Lake, to the south of the Madison, so when they hit the Raynolds Pass road, they headed that way. They got there at daybreak, about 4:45 A. M. They found that a rock cliff had fallen across the road which ran along the lake, marooning the campers. At the campground they found two campers dead, killed in a bizarre and gruesome accident. The E. H. Strykers of San Mateo, California, were camped on an improved campsite, with a fire site, a picnic table, and a place to park their car. Their three youngsters slept in a tent 100 feet away. The quake dislodged huge, eight-ton chunks of rock, and set them bounding downwards in a freakish, crescent shaped path, tearing the ground, and toppling 60-year-old fir trees in their downward rush. Nimbly, two of these boulders bounded over the picnic table, stacked with food, and landed squarely on top of the sleeping bags in which the Stryker parents slept. Cliff Lake tragedy—another view.(U. S. Forest Service) “It wasn’t pretty,” Stevens said. “But there wasn’t anything we could do. The rocks were too big to move, so we went down toward the Shaw Ranch and got Frank Shaw to take his 4×4 truck up and move the rocks off them. “We drove back down to the highway to continue up to the canyon. In the freshening daylight on the way down from the high bench back into the valley we could see a couple of trailers down the highway near the mouth of the canyon. A Fish and Game Commission plane flew over, radioing something about an obstruction across the lower end of the canyon, and having two to three hours to get the people out. We had no idea what they meant. We got to the trailers. They wanted to know how to get out—the next section of the highway was blocked with rocks and boulders. We routed them across the river and out Raynolds Pass way into Idaho. “One of the guys said he thought there were a couple of people still alive across the river. We got to the slide about 5:45 o’clock—the huge pile of millions of tons of rock where the highway used to be. You couldn’t believe what you were looking at. “Somebody said something about a ‘little slide’. “‘Little!’ I said to Dutch, ‘I’d hate like hell to see a big one!’ “The after-shocks that kept happening—with rocks crashing down and dirt and dust blowing up—didn’t contribute to our peace of mind, either. But we didn’t have much time to look. “We struggled across the river—the slide had stopped the water, but left a muddy ooze and some water lying around in pools as much as three feet deep. We found Mrs. Irene Bennett lying in the rocky stream bed. She was cold and shivering. She didn’t have a stitch on. Neither did her son, Phillip, who was lying near her. Both of them were bruised and bashed. The Bennett boy had a broken right leg, shoulder, etc. We put Mrs. Bennett on an old wooden frame canvas cot and started across the slippery river bed with her. She must have weighed 180. As we struggled through the slippery muck she kept apologizing for causing us so much trouble, and told us about her husband and three other children, the other folks who were camped near her, and the tremendous spurt of wind and mud that threw them out from under the slide. She told how she’d come to—believing herself the only one of her family who’d survived. Despairing, she heard Phil calling from a spot 75 feet away where the water had thrown him. Their torn hands gave the story of the agonizing effort these crippled survivors had made to drag themselves together over the rocky stream bed. “By radio we asked the Fish and Game Commission plane flying overhead to go to Ennis and get Dr. Losee and fly him back, and land him on the highway nearby. We didn’t want to disturb Mrs. Bennett by moving her off the cot, so we put her into a station wagon. Morris Staggers, who lives nearby, showed up with an old iron bedstead, older than anyone there, and heavier, too. I’ll never forget the struggle we had carrying the Bennett boy across on it. Rescuers prepare to move body of T. Mark Stowe of Sandy, Utah, who perished as he was thrown out from under the slide. Note tremendous water damage and dry river bed.(United Press International) “We took the Bennetts up to where the plane landed on the highway and turned them over to the doctor. Returning to the slide area, the increasing light made the slide seem even more formidable. That morning, working with Fish & Game Commission, etc., we found all of the people Mrs. Bennett had told us about except one. Like Mrs. Bennett and her son, all of these bodies had been stripped of their clothing and showed the effects of being beat to hell by wind and water. The coroner said all five of them died by drowning. We never did find Mrs. Marilyn Stowe, wife of Sandy, Utah elementary school music teacher T. Mark Stowe, whose body we did find—she must still be under the slide. “I just don’t care to go through any more mornings like that,” Stevens said. |
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