For trailer and tent campers, attractive Rock Creek Campground, less
than a mile from the mouth of Madison Canyon, was a favored site. So
much so that it was full most of the summer season. Campers who pulled
into the canyon too late to find campsites in the formal, or improved,
area just pulled off the road and overnighted on any level spot they
could find along the road.
Two vacationing families, the Osts and the Fredericks, felt lucky when
they found adjacent campsites at Rock Creek on Monday, August 17. Rev.
Elmer Ost, who teaches psychology at Biblical Seminary in New York City
and doubles as pastor at Bethany Congregational Church in Corona,
Queens, his wife, Ruth, youngsters, Larry, 14, Geraldine, 13, Joan, 11,
and Shirley, 6 had been enjoying a leisurely camping vacation in the
Northwest.
The Melvin Fredericks family (he's a biscuit salesman for B & B from
Elyria, Ohio) included Mrs. Laura, Melva, 16, Paul, 15, and George
Whitmore, 15, who lives with the Fredericks in Elyria, Ohio, while his
folks are missionarying in Brazil.
The two families met in Columbia Falls, Montana, at the home of Rev.
Ralph Werner, who was a relative of the Fredericks and a college chum of
the Osts. They'd both toured Glacier National Park and were headed for
Yellowstone Park and the Black Hills, and decided to camp together the
next night. Ost told Fredericks that if you didn't make it to
Yellowstone Park before noon, the campsites would all be filled. But, he
knew of camping areas in the Madison Canyon, near West Yellowstone, and
not too far outside the park where they'd be more likely to find room.
The Osts got to Rock Creek Campground at 6 o'clock Monday, August 17,
found a site, and stationed Larry by the road to stop the Fredericks.
The two families chose a small open area near the stream and pleasant
evergreen trees at the east end of the camp near the entrance.
[Illustration: The Elmer Ost family were special guests at the
Madison County Fair at Twin Bridges, five days after their
earthquake ordeal. (Christopherson)]
They set up camp, ate together, socialized, and made plans to get up at
6 o'clock next morning, breakfast on dry cereal, and get an early start
for Yellowstone. They swapped stories about their vacations, joked about
the bear that was supposed to be scavenging around the campground, and
decided to walk down to the highway where they'd be away from the trees
and able to see the moon, which lit the mountain behind them. But the
mountain that looked high on the south side of the canyon kept them from
seeing the moon directly.
They turned in early--at 9 o'clock. The two younger Ost girls, mildly
concerned about the bear, decided to sleep in the car, a 1950 Buick.
Larry and Geraldine and their parents all slept in their tent. Mrs.
Fredericks and Melva slept in their station wagon, while the men
stretched out in a tent.
Everyone was nicely settled by 11:37, when a thunder-like commotion
outside awakened them. Ruth and Gerry Ost shouted something about bears
as they jumped out of the tent.
"It's a cyclone!" Mrs. Ost was screaming in half-wakened terror as Rev.
Ost emerged from the tent.
The sky was clear, the moon bright, as Rev. Ost looked up and to the
west. There were no clouds or wind.
But terror ran through the whole party as they saw tents swaying, trees
shaking as though torn in a violent wind. Then the Osts' 1950 Buick
began to rock from front to rear as if men were jumping energetically on
the bumpers. The brake lights went on as one of the gals jumped on the
brake.
Then came a tremendous roar, like several express trains passing right
through the camp. The trees shut off their view of the huge, 7,600 ft.
mountain falling, of the huge boulders, big as houses, hurtling down one
side of the canyon and up the other side, a mile away, throwing sparks
and dust as they fell. Rev. Ost sensed the rushing of the wind and water
trapped by the avalanching mountain, and thrown back at the dazed
campers--at tornado speeds--from under the slide. "Hang onto a tree!" he
shouted. Mrs. Ost ran for the car as she saw the wave of water coming.
Larry was caught in the tent when the wall of water, mud, and trees hit
them with such violence that it crumpled trailers and hurled the Osts'
4,000 pound car thirty feet and smashed it against a row of trees.
Although Mrs. Ost was holding onto the steering wheel, the violence of
the surging water threw her against the side of the car so violently
that it made a pulp out of the right side of her face. In the midst of
the mud, water, and floating and flying debris, Larry managed to tear
his way out of the tent.
Dust from the slide obscured the moon and heightened the sense of
tragedy and terror.
The tent was gone. The deluge of water had jammed cars and trailers
together. The rocks had covered the site of a trailer where a family had
been playing earlier in the day.
[Illustration: Remains of campground.]
The night rang out with the bewildered crying out for lost relatives.
Stunned like the others, Rev. Ost shouted for "Fran." After hitting the
brake pedal she'd jumped out of the car and scampered, like a deer, to
higher ground.
He found Gerry, unharmed, except for being wet and an injury to her
hand. Sloshing through water to his knees, he found Ruth still in the
car. After several minutes hunting and shouting "Larry" he found his
son, soaked, clad only in shorts.
[Illustration: Mel Fredericks, lifting Rev. Elmer Ost, shows how he
tried to free his trapped son, Paul. (Montana Highway Commission)]
The screams of the lost and losing continued. A woman handed a baby to
Melva Fredericks, saying, "Comfort him." One dazed man walked around
crying out for his missing wife. From the wet and dark came the cry of
another woman calling out, "It's safe here!"--hoping to attract someone
to help or keep her company.
The Ost women and Mrs. Fredericks struggled to higher, safer ground.
When the Fredericks men didn't show up, Ost left the women praying while
he went to look for them. He heard Mr. Fredericks call for help for his
son, Paul. With a flashlight he borrowed, he was able to see the
difficulty. The surge of water and trees had caught 15-year-old Paul and
pinioned him in a sitting position in the water, with one log across the
small of his back and another across his lap. The ends of the log were
jammed between a smashed trailer and the Ost car, so solidly they
wouldn't budge.
Paul cried out with pain as the two men tried to pull him loose. The
water kept rising as the men tried to pry the logs apart with sticks. A
2 x 12 plank, ten feet long, even though full of spikes, seemed a
promising tool to pry with, but with it they were only able to gain an
inch or so further separation of the logs that held Paul prisoner.
The men felt Paul's and their own helpless panic as the water swelled up
to his chest, his neck, his chin. Raised in a soundly religious family,
Paul bravely faced the realization that he was gasps from death. In
desperation, Ost called on Mel Fredericks to pull as hard as he could,
not to care if Paul cried, or if they pulled his arms or legs out of
joint. In this last, desperate straining try they found that
miraculously they could raise him six inches. The rising water had
buoyed the trailer. In their next few feverish tries they were able to
pull him loose and helped him to walk to high, dry ground.
One stranded group, calling for help, included a wheelchair case, and,
mucking shoeless through the water, they portaged him out, chair and
all. George Whitmore had a badly injured eye--from running into a rope,
and it looked like he might lose its sight.
They all moved to the highway, which was still dry. A motley crew they
were, in pajamas, or almost unclothed, some shoeless. By this time the
water had covered their cars. Some of the wounded were taken by car
toward Hebgen Dam--away from the slide.
Marooned, without their cars, in a strange, shaking canyon--prisoners of
a night in which everything seemed mad, somehow word reached them that
their ordeal might not be over. There was possibility that a dam several
miles upstream, which they'd never seen, was likely to give way any
minute. So they scrambled up the sagebrush hillside and built a fire on
a level and fairly open site.
Others joined the two families. One group, whose car hadn't been flooded
so suddenly, managed to save groceries, a camp stove, sleeping bags,
pans and a 9 x 12 ft. plastic tarp.
Without worrying about modesty, they dried themselves around the fire.
There were 17 in the party. It cleared, and then clouds obscured the
moon. The ground kept shaking. With almost every new tremor came sparks
and puffs of dust, and the terrifying, crashing echoes of another
avalanche across the valley, and the realization that the valley side
above them might go any time. The air was full of dust and the sickening
smell of mud and torn fir trees. All through the night they heard the
haunting cries of "Help, help--we're freezing," from the Grover Maults,
who'd been marooned on top of their trailer and by this time were
hanging onto a tree.
They worried about forest fires, and sang hymns to keep up their
courage.
At 3:00 A. M. there was a thunderstorm and a light, continuing rain.
They huddled under the plastic tarp--all 21 of them--and wondered what
would happen next.
[Illustration: Water rescue.]
An elderly couple, the Grover C. Maults, a 72-year-old retired decorator
and his wife, Lillian, 68, of Temple City Calif., had parked their
trailer at the scenic Rock Creek Campground for a week before the
especially beautiful, bright moonlight night of August 17th. There were
lots of bears in the area, and like many other campers, when the first
jolt hit them, they figured that the bears were trying to get into their
trailer.
"No, it must be an earthquake," Mrs. Mault said.
Looking out through the trailer window, the moon made it seem like
daylight. Everything was going upside down. An instant later their
trailer was tossed end over end, landing, miraculously, on its wheels.
Then it seemed as though something picked the trailer up and hurled it
into the water.
Mault got his "nightie-clad missus" out of the trailer and lifted her on
top, and went back into the trailer to get sweaters or something. It
suddenly turned dark. The moon disappeared in dust. The water had risen
to Mault's chin by the time he got out of the trailer.
By the time he'd crawled on the trailer roof, put on trousers, a shirt
and sweater, and wrapped clothing around his wife's legs, the water was
beginning to cover the trailer roof and rising fast. They prayed that
the trailer would drift toward a nearby tree. It did. The first branch
broke as Mault grabbed it. He barely had time to get one arm around the
tree and hold onto his wife with the other when the trailer was swept
out from under them.
"It was horrible," he says. "As I tried to pull the missus up the limbs
kept breaking off. I tried to grab higher limbs and cling to the missus
with my legs. The limbs still kept breaking off. Finally we found a limb
that would hold.
"We were surrounded by deep water. Through the night we hollered and
hollered for help. People tried to get to us with ropes, couldn't reach
us, and yelled that we should hang on, they were going for a boat.
"While we struggled to hold on, we could see the mountains sliding and
falling every few minutes. There'd be a terrific roar, followed by more
slides. I thought the world was coming to an end. It turned hazy, with
thunder, lightning, then began to rain.
"As we clung to the tree, with water up to our necks, my wife slipped
under three or four times. The last time she was gasping for breath, I
managed to pull her out.
"'Let me go and save yourself,' she begged. 'If you go, I'll go, too,' I
told her.
"About 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning they came for us in a boat. It was
just in time. We couldn't have held out for another ten minutes. The
water was rising so fast that the rescuers had to move their truck three
times before they could unload the boat.
"At first, when rescued, we could see lights, then everything went
black. We couldn't hear anything over the roar of the tumbling
mountains. We were froze stiff from hanging on so long. We couldn't move
our legs. The men had to help us into the boat."
[Illustration: Lodge by the lake]
In contrast to those who stood around and wondered was L. D. Smith, of
Greeley, Colorado, who with his family was camped in a trailer at the
Beaver Creek Campground a couple of miles downstream from Hebgen Dam.
The loud noise and rumbling woke him. Outside the trailer, he found the
water rising. The ground was shaking violently. He didn't know what was
causing it, but his first thought was that the dam had broken. The
steep-walled canyon didn't seem like a safe place for his family. As
soon as the shaking subsided temporarily, he loaded his wife and two
youngsters into the car and drove away from the dam, the collapse of
which he instinctively felt was the greatest danger, as fast as he
could.
A mile or two before he reached the slide, he ran into heavy dust. Still
fearful of what the dam's collapse would mean for those trapped in the
deep canyon, when the slide blocked his path he turned off the road and
drove up the north side of the canyon wall to a point where he couldn't
get any more traction. He then got his family out of his car and moved
them to still higher ground.
Later in the evening his family joined the Osts and Fredericks around
the fire on the hillside.
At about 8:00 o'clock on the same gorgeous moonlight night of August 17,
the Purley Bennett family of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, pulled their trailer
off alongside the road on the flat at the mouth of the Madison Canyon
Gorge. They didn't plan to set up camp--just to rest for a few hours
before continuing to the park. They talked a bit with others camped in
the same informal area, then turned in. Purley, a 43-year-old truck
driver, and his wife, Irene, slept in the trailer. The
youngsters--Carole, 17; Phillip, 15; Tom, 10, and Susan, 5, stretched
out in bedrolls outside on the ground.
[Illustration: "A car blew past, rolling over and over."
(Christopherson)]
They were awakened a little before midnight by a loud rumbling noise.
They wondered what it was, but weren't concerned enough to get up or
move their equipment. Some time later, in response to a much louder
noise, Bennett left the trailer to see about the children. Mrs. Bennett
was right behind him. As she stepped out of the trailer, she felt a
strong wind coming up. There was a great rumbling, whooshing sound, and
as the wind reached hurricane velocity she saw her husband grab a small
tree for support. The wind swept him off his feet--he hung on like a
flag tied to a mast. After a little bit he let go and was blown away.
She never saw him again. She couldn't see her children, except one
flying through the air. A car was blown by, rolling over and over, and
she found herself swept along with the trees, the rocks, and water.
[Illustration: The Bennett car--thrown out from under the huge slide
onto the dried-up stream bed below. (U. S. Forest Service)]
"When I came to," she said, "I was jammed against a tree with a log on
my back. I don't know how I got out. I thought I was the only one of my
family still alive."
Then, over the awful moaning of the boulders grinding and crashing and
the sound of the tree trunks howling through the air, she heard the
voice of her son, Phillip, calling.
Slowly, painfully, in spite of crippling injuries, they dragged, an inch
at a time, toward one another over the rocky, oozy bed of the river
which the huge slide had instantaneously stopped. Highway Patrolman
Stevens, who found them several hours later, noticed how torn their
hands were from this agonizing crawl.
That morning, in the hospital at Ennis, Mrs. Bennett told reporters,
"They say my husband and my boys are dead, but I have faith. I know they
will be found."
They already had been--dead.