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THE NIGHT THE MOUNTAIN FELL 40 years after the Hebgen Lake earthquake, memories are still fresh Stories By DONNA HEALY Of The Gazette Staff The Earth convulsed on the night of Aug. 17, 1959, with the strongest quake ever recorded in the northern Rockies.
 Gazette photo/LARRY MAYER A modern aerial photo shows the Madison Canyon Slide Area, with Quake Lake backed up behind the slide. At 11:37 p.m., the earthquake struck the Madison River Canyon in southwestern Montana. Tremors were felt as far away as Seattle. Along the fault lines, the land dropped as much as 20 feet. At Hebgen Lake, the quake tilted the lake bed, sending tidal waves surging back and forth for at least 12 hours. Water poured over Hebgen Dam, but the dam held. Downstream, the massive face of a mountainside broke away, causing the largest recorded earthquake-triggered landslide in North America. Ninety million tons of rock and debris roared down the Madison Canyon's north wall. It smothered the valley and surged 400 feet up the opposite side of the canyon. The landslide buried an area just west of the Forest Service's Rock Creek Campground and blocked the course of the Madison River. It created a natural dam that backed up the water to form Earthquake Lake. Twenty-eight died as a result of the earthquake, 19 of the bodies were presumed to be buried under the rock. On top of the landslide, the Forest Service built a visitor's center. On Aug.17, the center will mark the 40th anniversary of the Hebgen Lake Earthquake with a memorial service and speakers.
 Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service The Earthquake Lake Visitor Center is shown in 1998 with Memorial Boulder at the left. Several times a week, 85-year-old Roland Whitman drives along the Madison River, past the Earthquake Lake Visitor Center, to get to his job as a ranch caretaker. The center pulls in 30,000 visitors a year, but Whitman's never been inside. He has his own memories of the quake. Whitman lives just west of the Duck Creek Junction of Highways 191 and 287, near the center of the Hebgen Lake Earthquake. He bought the homestead in 1938, two years after he and his wife, Margaret, were married. "We lived through it, but I wouldn't want to sit through another one if I knew it was going to happen," he said. On the night of the quake, the sound of dishes and furniture crashing to the floor woke him and his wife. They got their children in the car and headed for West Yellowstone. In the darkness, they couldn't see the fault that cut the road just in front of their house. His wife spotted the danger first. "The wife hollered at me to hit the brakes," Whitman said. The car slipped over the 13-foot drop and landed on its bumper. They climbed out unscathed. "The wife didn't want to stay in the house for fear it would fall in on us," he said. Instead, they dragged their beds out to the lawn and slept outdoors that night.
Jerry Yetter, and his ex-wife Iris, lived at Duck Creek, the center of the quake. Yetter, 67, now lives about two miles farther west. "You couldn't stand up," he remembers. He and his wife held on to each other, trying to stand. When they got their footing, Yetter opened the door and ran out. His wife held the door open to let their two Weimaraner dogs out.
The Yetters had rented out one of their cabins to a man and his wife. The vacationing couple jumped in their Cadillac and headed for town. About 100 yards from the cabins, the car dropped into a 12-foot fault. Although the car flipped upside down, the couple wasn't hurt in the crash. "The man's wife went into hysterics," Yetter said. The man got several cuts as he crawled out through the car window. "My wife took him to Bozeman. She brought the first patients to the hospital in Bozeman," Yetter said. Duck Creek sits at bottom of a long hill. At night, semitrailer trucks roll off the hill at high speeds. The quake dropped the approach to the Duck Creek bridge by about 18 inches. To warn the truckers as they came off the hill, Yetter parked his pickup in the middle of the road and flashed his lights. "I stopped quite a few of them through the night," he said. A truck driver volunteered to block one lane, while Yetter blocked the other. Aftershocks repeatedly rocked the two vehicles against each other and then skidded them apart. Although the road to West Yellowstone was badly cracked and fissured, Yetter found a way to straddle the cracks with his Jeep truck and to negotiate the roadway. For about a week, he used the route he devised to deliver the mailman to West Yellowstone. Nowadays, he said, he knows fewer people who can relive the events of that night. "Come August, you do talk about it for a while. Then you forget about it again," he said. From his house, Yetter can see the fault line running along the north end of his property. "Something like that spooks you," Yetter said. "It was a ghost town for several weeks afterward. People cleared out. When you saw the mess in the grocery store, you realized how severe it had been." The Hebgen Lake Earthquake is considered a magnitude of 7.5. In comparison, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was the equivalent of an 8.3 on the Richter scale.
He will talk about Montana's earthquake history during the 40th-anniversary program at the visitor's center. "The amazing thing is that, from the 1920s through the 1960s, we had been getting a large earthquake in Montana every 10 to 12 years, a magnitude 6 or larger. In the 40 years since the Hebgen earthquake, we have not had any earthquakes of that magnitude," Stickney said. The historical record is too short to speculate over whether the last 40 years have been unusually quiet, or whether the previous 40 years were unusually active. "We seem to have been in a quiet spell for the last 40 years. It's been 25 years since we've had a magnitude 5 or larger," Stickney said. Earthquake experts have no way of knowing whether Montana is overdue for another major earthquake. "Every time I travel in that direction, I think about how a repeat of that earthquake today would have a much larger impact than it did then," Stickney said. "There are more people and more structures to be affected by an earthquake than 40 years ago."
The 1959 earthquake in Yellowstone National Park has left behind reminders visible today. Here are some spots to view, based on Forest Service information:
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Visitor center and slide. Tourists can view the slide from the observation room of the visitor center. Listen to an interpreter's story or walk the trail to Memorial Boulder and an overlook.
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