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 × 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.
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.