2005 Mudslides
Colossal Mudslides close Highway for 2005 season
Early in the morning of Friday, May 20, 2005, after an especially rainy week that dropped nearly 9 inches of rain on the Beartooths, a mudslide of epic proportions roared down the mountainside, gouging a path up to a hundred feet wide and more than two thousand feet long before it came to rest on the banks of Rock Creek. Known locally simply as “the Mudslides,” it was the worst natural disaster in the history of the Beartooth Highway. 500,000 cubic yards of rock dislodged by the heavy rains ripped across the highway’s switchbacks in more than a dozen places that morning, taking long sections of guardrail and road with it. When it was over, the town of Red Lodge was left in an eery stunned silence.
But not for long. Within days, state and federal officials scrambled to secure $20 million of federal emergency funds for the Highway’s cleanup and reconstruction. Construction crews worked around-the-clock all summer long rebuilding washouts, redirecting flows of future water and rock, and erecting huge fence-like structures to contain rockfall in the worst of the slide chutes. When the Highway reopened briefly that October (under budget and ahead of schedule) it was due, you could say, to that same spirit that resided in Doc Siegfriedt himself: It’s only impossible if you believe what they say.
(The Carbon County Historical Society Museum plans to exhibit a display through summer ’11 showing the extent of the Mudslides and the massive cleanup effort. Check RedLodge.com for details.)
Caught in the Mudslides
A dozen snowplow crewmen were stranded on the highway that unforgettable morning.
“It was like a jet airplane,” Kendall Joki says of the mudslides that swept over the Beartooth Highway last month. He and eleven other Montana Department of Transportation workers were on the switchbacks when the now-legendary slides started the morning of Friday, May 20.
“We’d gotten a call from the ski camp,” field supervisor Kyle DeMars explains. “They’d come down after us Thursday night and said they ran into a rockslide about a thousand yards across, and had to leave their equipment at Vista point and walk out.
So Kyle had an extra-large crew that morning, consisting of his guys plus Columbus, Laurel, Big Timber, and Bridger highway crews. “When we went up there, we knew we had a rock avalanche, and that’s it. When we first got there, it was mostly rock. Not a lot of moisture. When all heck broke loose, that’s when it was…very…very wet cement, you could say. But at first, the road was undercut just two to three feet, and we were going to get through it—we could repair something like that.”
They’d worked their way through that slide in a few hours and moved on to another, smaller one when “all heck” began to break loose. “When it started to move, we watched it at first, because we had no idea what it was going to do. But pretty quick, we realized we’d better get out of there,” So they went down to gather the crew all together and go down all at once “so no one would be left behind on the mountain.” Kyle says.
“We were there probably 10 minutes, and we headed down, “ he continues. “And that was my biggest mistake. Stopping. I should have kept going. But I never would have guessed what was coming.”
The next part of the story is like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. Half of the crew is safe beyond the slide area when Kendall gets to a point where “nuggets the size of your desk are coming down. So I decided I couldn’t cross then, I’d sit and see what happened, because I knew I was safe where I was. I got to where I could see up and there were no more loose rocks coming down, so I figured I’d better go now and get through it. By the time I made it through, I looked back and it had closed up. So then I knew the other guys were going to be putting some miles on their tennis shoes,” Kendall says.
Seeing they were stuck, Kyle and the rest of the crew headed back up to the third switchback where they could park the trucks safely and called Kendall from the truck’s radio. “I told him we were walking and it should take us a couple of hours; be waiting for us.” And they took off down the mountainside on foot.
“We got to the 1st switchback and walked down the road, but the avalanche had cut us off. There was no way we could get through that slide.” At this point, the slide was a mess of rocks, mud and “so much water, it looked like Rock Creek coming down the side of the mountain.” Kyle says.
“As they were walking toward us,” Kendall laughs, “it was the funniest doggone thing I’ve ever seen. They were walking down the road, and the mudslide’s there, so they’re obviously not going to cross it. But here comes a tree, horizontal across the road {insert JAWS soundtrack here}, it was like ‘you ain’t gonna cross this way!’”
“And then we were running”—Kyle jumps in—“because it was coming toward us as fast as we could run, about another 30 feet. It was comical. It was just Mother Nature saying, ‘You ain’t coming.’”
With their path blocked, they gave up on the road and headed cross-country down to M-K campground. When they got to where Quad Creek crosses the M-K road, “we could hear it coming. It was a screamer, the trees snapping. We weren’t nervous or anything, until we were there on the bottom. And we were right in its way, trying to get past it. We had to get below it before it come, because we knew we couldn’t cross Rock Creek, as high as it is, and we’d be stranded there. There was five minutes of running, thinking ‘we gotta book!’ Then we were on the flat, and watched it coming down.”
When they finally got back to the rest of the crew. “we just sat there, saying to each other ‘can you believe this happened?’”
Meanwhile, Kendall says, “when we were standing there, waiting for the guys to walk out, we’d look up and see wave after wave of mud and rock come down. And water, and trees… It was not a one-time quickie event. We watched it for three hours, and it was still going. The fury of Mother Nature was unbelievable up there.”
“I just keep thinking, ‘I’m glad it was closed,’” Kyle says of the road. “We know, everyday when we go up there, that there’s a hazard to it. But all of us, I don’t think, ever thought an avalanche or slide of that magnitude would come down. When we’re up there, I guess we put it in the backs of our minds, but we don’t think about it. Until it happened. And then you think, ‘Wow. I am so glad I wasn’t in a certain place at a certain time. Because it could’ve gotten ugly.’”
All twelve crew members made it out safely that day, and the six vehicles that are stranded on the switchbacks are out of harm’s way, for the time being.
