Scars linger from killer Montana quake of '59

GALLATIN NATIONAL FOREST, Mont. — Just before midnight under the moon's gray light, the world tilted and tore off a Montana mountainside. Sliding rock buried 19 campers alive, their bodies never found, and 80 million tons of rock and trees tumbled into Madison River Canyon, leaving rubble piled more than 200 feet deep.

The Aug. 17, 1959 earthquake that caused the slide in southwestern Montana remains the largest ever recorded in the Rocky Mountains.

Five more campers drowned when displaced air whooshed down the canyon and swept them into the Madison River. Survivors reported the wind generated by the slide was so strong it ripped off their clothes.

Ten miles away, 15-year-old Martin Stryker was shaken awake in his tent. Woozy with vertigo, he told his two younger brothers to stay put and then went outside. The first thing he saw was a tree fallen on the family's car.

"You're thinking, 'I wonder where Dad is?' Then I look over to the left and there I see a huge boulder on top of (his) tent," Stryker recalled in a recent interview from his home in California.

Stryker's father and stepmother were dead, victims of a second, smaller slide. Two more people later died from injuries suffered that night, bringing the final death toll to 28 for the magnitude 7.5 earthquake.

"It happened so God-darned fast," Stryker said. "There was dust and a roar and a smell of pine trees you couldn't believe. It was like the smell when you cut a tree, but these trees had all been snapped."

Fifty years on only a few hundred pines have grown back where the massive slide occurred — small splashes of green within the jagged, gray-brown scar of rock that straddles the canyon.

It will take decades more, possibly centuries, for evidence of the earthquake to fade altogether from the landscape. But the scene of the 1959 tragedy already has evolved from natural disaster to geological attraction.

The rockslide that blocked the canyon also backed up the Madison River to form 5-mile-long Earthquake Lake, now a popular draw for tourists and fishermen.

Along Highway 287 on the lake's north shore, the Gallatin National Forest has highlighted points of earthquake interest with a self-guided "Madison River Canyon Earthquake Area Auto Tour." Signposted stops include abandoned sections of the highway that now end in boat ramps and a "ghost village" of cabins uprooted by the flood.

Atop the rock pile that entombs 19 campers, the Forest Service's Earthquake Lake Visitor Center offers floor-to-ceiling views of the rubble.