The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake

— by Edmund Christopherson
Cover by Elwood Averill
Copyright © 1960, 1962 by Edmund Christopherson All rights reserved.
Illustrations and maps by DeLynn Colvert except for page 56, which was done by Beverly Linley
For correspondence or further copies of these books, write:
YELLOWSTONE PUBLICATIONS Box 411 West Yellowstone, Montana 59758 LAWTON PRINTING, INC.
To those who experienced, suffered the helping and the helped, the surviving and the lost all members of the involuntary fellowship of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake, to those who come to see and wonder, and especially to those who assisted in this book’s realization, “The Night the Mountain Fell” is cordially dedicated.
80 million tons of rock crashed off the right wall, blocking the mouth of the Madison Canyon.(Christopherson)
Where the mountain fell. The tremendous slide tumbled off snow-chuted sections of mountain in center.(Montana Power Company)
August is a busy month in the exciting mountain vacation area that centers in West Yellowstone, Montana, and includes Yellowstone National Park, the restored ghost town of Virginia City, the nationally famous trout fishing reach of Madison Canyon that runs through the Gallatin National Forest, plus dude ranches and lakes in the parts of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho where the three states come together.
Geologically, it’s a new area, where enormous forces are still thrusting up mountains, where volcanic craters still exist, and where the heat of the earth still spouts its imprisoned fury through the geysers that have made Yellowstone Park’s Firehole Basin famous.
At 11:37 P. M. on Monday, August 17, 1959, one of the severest earthquakes recorded on the North American continent shook this area. It sent gigantic tidal waves surging down the 7-mile length of Hebgen Lake, throwing an enormous quantity of water over the top of Hebgen Dam, the way you can slosh water out of a dishpan, still keeping it upright. This water—described as a wall 20 ft. high—swept down the narrow Madison Canyon, full of campers and vacationers who were staying in dude ranches and at three Forest Service campgrounds along the seven-mile stretch from the dam to the point where the canyon opened up into rolling wheat and grazing land. Just about the time this surge of water reached the mouth of the canyon, half of a 7,600-ft.-high mountain came crashing down into the valley and cascaded, like water, up the opposite canyon wall, hurtling house-size quartzite and dolomite boulders onto the lower portion of Rock Creek Campground.