Big Sky Blog

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The unemployment rates in Big Horn County are not so much a factor of poor development as it is the presence of the Absaloka nation making up a large portion of the county. The way to help the tribe is economic opportunity provided by good jobs but a large part of the Absaloka nation feels that education is a waste and the lack of education makes finding a good job hard. The present administration of the tribe is making progress on this problem but it takes more than the government to fix attitudes but I digress.

I was skeptical the power plant would ever get built but now that steel is getting put together it is more than a paper project and it will help boost the local economy. I just wonder how much it is going to cost the property taxpayers, farmers and ranchers, of Big Horn County in the long run.

The master plan shows a Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail spur running into the plant, but those plans are in the future. In the meantime, trucks will deliver up to half a million tons of coal a year.

The planning for this plant envisioned they would use coal from the Absaloka (Sarpy Creek) Coal Mine and I had been afraid that they were going to decide to truck it in just as they mention here. Anybody that lives in the Sarpy country can tell you there is no way the road from the mine to Hardin can stand that kind of traffic without serious damage to the road requireing the county to rebuild it. Is this new power plant going to pay to rebuild this highway? I doubt it, the cost will be on us taxpayers.

Overall this kind of development is great for Big Horn County but I really wish there was some way to keep them from trucking the coal to the plant from the mine. They say, “It will, when its built, be the cleanest coal plant in Montana and one of the cleanest in the U.S.,” but I wonder if this takes into count the extra pollution that will be created by trucking the coal to the plant instead of using much more effecient rail transportation?

In a society of little economic development, universal inactivity accompanies universal poverty. You survive not by struggling against nature, or by increasing production, or by relentless labour; instead you survive by expending as little energy as possible, by striving constantly to achieve a state of immobility. Ryszard Kapuscinski

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Since we lived about an hour’s drive from Yellowstone Park, we made it up to that area quite a bit. We didn’t go into the park itself very often — a couple of times in the winter (on snowmobiles, which is awesome) and a couple of times in the summer. Yellowstone was right in our backyard, so it wasn’t really a big deal for us. Sometimes we never realize how fortunate we are!

The trip from Ennis to West Yellowstone always took us past Earthquake Lake (known locally as Quake Lake) and Hebgen Lake.

Earthquake Lake is so named because on the night of August 17, 1959, one of the most powerful quakes in the lower 48 states shook the Hebgen Lake area, and created Earthquake Lake.

Most newspaper and magazine accounts refer to it as The Night the Mountain Fell.

The earthquake was (depending on which source you read) 7.3 to 7.8 on the Richter Scale. The violent shaking cause the side of a mountain to dislodge, and plunge into the Madison River and 400 feet up the opposite side of the valley. The force and air displacement from the plunge was enough to overturn cars in the area.

90 million tons of debris moved from one side of the valley to the other in an instant.

28 people lost their lives that night.

You can look at some photos and see for yourself the forces at work, but a mere photo doesn’t do justice to the sense of awe you feel when you are there on the ground.

On the opposite side of the mountain from the slide, there now stands a visitors center. Next to the center is a boulder as big as a house, with a plaque inscribed with the names of those who perished.

I’ve never actually taken the time to go in there, as I’ve heard a lot of the stories first hand.

Doc Losee tells the story of what happened in Ennis that night. No one knew the status of Hebgen Dam, and with the aftershocks, they didn’t know if it would hold. The town was set to evacuate, if need be. The warning sirens were tested, and people were ready to roll. As they learned later, if the dam had gone the water level of the Madison River would have only been raised 3 or 4 inches.

Dad graduated from EHS in 1959, so he was fresh out of school, and waiting to go into the Army. As I have heard, he and his buddies, under the guise of helpfulness, offered to evacuate perishables to high ground above town. Many people took them up on this offer, and while most of the contents of refrigerators made it to high ground — a great deal of beer did not. (I heard this story 2nd or 3rd hand, and haven’t verified it with Dad yet.)

While I have no memories of the quake itself, the area has been imprinted on me pretty firmly.

On a straight stretch of road next to Hebgen Lake, there was a fence adjacent to the old roadway. You could see how the earth had turned them from straight lines into zig-zags. The fence has long since been repaired, and the roadway grown over, but I can see it as if I were there.

I can picture my Grandfather standing in one of the scarps, where the ground fell, and trying to imagine how a chunk of earth could just drop 15 feet.

For some reason, though, the most poignant image to me is where old US 287 simply disappears into the south end of the lake. I don’t know why, but that imparted to me more about the rapid brutality of the quake than anything else could.

There was a road that had gone somewhere, but now it only led to the dark bottom of a lake that was conceived in tragedy and violence.

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