Hurriedly they looked around for smoke. Seeing none, frightened, trapped
in a strange, wild country, with all nature seeming to turn against
them, they knew not where to turn.
[Illustration: Helicopter evacuation.]
In an effort to find out about the fire, Ost borrowed the hip boots a
woman had given Fredericks and started off in the direction of the
slide. The plane circled over him and wagged its wings, an action he
interpreted to mean that he was going in the right direction. He
continued, climbing the muddy lower end of the slide, the rubble, the
great cube-shaped boulders, big as cars, all mixed in with trees, some
stripped bare, others still complete with all their branches.
On the slide he met two men walking in from the outside. They told Ost
that the river bridge was 15 miles upstream, past the dam, and advised
him to keep the group where it was until helicopter help came.
The plane message about the fire was still a mystery. It remained so for
several months, until Ost finally got it explained. The message had been
one of several dropped from a plane by a Forest Service guy, Otto H.
Ost, in 1957 to instruct a ground crew to proceed to a fire a couple of
hundred miles from the Madison Canyon. The streamer, Otto Ost figured,
had been found, returned, and sent out without removing the two-year-old
message. The note from Ost to Ost was a powerful coincidence.
"Doesn't it strike you as almost planned?" Rev. Ost said when he got the
explanation.
At 11:30 A. M. the two Forest Service smokejumpers, part of a group of
eight who'd jumped farther up the canyon, hiked in. They had first aid
equipment and food. They reassured the group that a helicopter was on
its way to rescue them.
Shortly after noon, the Johnson Flying Service helicopter arrived,
landing precariously on the canyon-side slope. Mrs. Ost and George
Whitmore, the Fredericks nephew, both with eye injuries, were the first
two taken out. The helicopter ferried them over the slide to a point on
the highway where Highway Patrol cars sped them--at 80 miles an hour
where rocks hadn't made the road hazardous--to Ennis, to medical care,
comfort, and safety.
By the time the helicopter had taken seventeen of the group over, the
turbulence of an oncoming storm made the air so treacherous that the
four remaining men walked up the canyon, were driven to a safer landing
point at the upper end of the canyon. They saw the cracks and damage at
Hebgen Dam. The helicopter picked them up, and they joined their
families in Ennis.
"We'd lost our money, our cars, our clothes," Mrs. Fredericks said. "The
Red Cross didn't ask us any questions about whether we had any money or
not. They just helped. They sent us to stores and got us all two
complete outfits. They told us to make any calls home--to our
relatives--that we wanted to. And they're flying us home.
"We're certainly going to be ardent Red Cross workers from now on!"
That night they stayed--dormitory style in the Ennis High School Gym--as
Mrs. Fredericks put it, "An anvil chorus, each snoring in his own
language."
Conditioned by the quake of the night before, when the town siren
blasted off at 9:00 P. M. the quake victims jumped out of bed in alarm
and hastily dressed. Even after the siren was explained as the regular
nightly curfew signal, Mrs. Fredericks slept the rest of the night in
her clothes.
"I'm damned if I'm going to be caught in my pajamas again," she said.
The Osts moved up to the Shermont Motel in Sheridan, where Mrs. Ost
recuperated from her face and eye injury. Miraculously, though the whole
side of her face was massively bruised, no bones were broken. That
Saturday they were guests of the Madison County Fair at Twin Bridges. On
Sunday the Red Cross flew them from Butte back to their homes in New
York.
The Fredericks moved to the Finlen Hotel in Butte while George Whitmore
had treatment for his more serious eye injury.
"Everyone was so wonderful. A bellhop drove us all around, showing us
this exciting town. The people at the hotel took up a collection and
gave us some money. You couldn't have better people."
The Fredericks flew back to Elyria that same Sunday, leaving George
Whitmore in the hospital for further treatment.
"The irony of it all," Mrs. Fredericks said, "is that we still didn't
get to see Yellowstone Park."
[Illustration: Refugees by the lake.]
[Illustration: The main, Red Canyon scarp runs for 7 miles along
Kirkwood Ridge, parallel and about three miles above the north shore
of Hebgen Lake. (Montana Highway Commission)]
[Illustration: Red Canyon scarp, continued]