These huge boulders crashed down onto Cliff Lake Campground killing the Lloyd Strykers of San Mateo, California, without disturbing the food on their campsite table.(U. S. Forest Service)
As they moved up the valley, they got the message that a couple of people had been killed in the campground at Cliff Lake, to the south of the Madison, so when they hit the Raynolds Pass road, they headed that way.
They got there at daybreak, about 4:45 A. M. They found that a rock cliff had fallen across the road which ran along the lake, marooning the campers.
At the campground they found two campers dead, killed in a bizarre and gruesome accident. The E. H. Strykers of San Mateo, California, were camped on an improved campsite, with a fire site, a picnic table, and a place to park their car. Their three youngsters slept in a tent 100 feet away. The quake dislodged huge, eight-ton chunks of rock, and set them bounding downwards in a freakish, crescent shaped path, tearing the ground, and toppling 60-year-old fir trees in their downward rush. Nimbly, two of these boulders bounded over the picnic table, stacked with food, and landed squarely on top of the sleeping bags in which the Stryker parents slept.
Cliff Lake tragedy—another view.(U. S. Forest Service)
“It wasn’t pretty,” Stevens said. “But there wasn’t anything we could do. The rocks were too big to move, so we went down toward the Shaw Ranch and got Frank Shaw to take his 4×4 truck up and move the rocks off them.
“We drove back down to the highway to continue up to the canyon. In the freshening daylight on the way down from the high bench back into the valley we could see a couple of trailers down the highway near the mouth of the canyon. A Fish and Game Commission plane flew over, radioing something about an obstruction across the lower end of the canyon, and having two to three hours to get the people out. We had no idea what they meant. We got to the trailers. They wanted to know how to get out—the next section of the highway was blocked with rocks and boulders. We routed them across the river and out Raynolds Pass way into Idaho.
“One of the guys said he thought there were a couple of people still alive across the river. We got to the slide about 5:45 o’clock—the huge pile of millions of tons of rock where the highway used to be. You couldn’t believe what you were looking at.