A Geological Time Bomb: Remembering the Night That Yellowstone Exploded

On the evening of Monday, August 17, 1959, Yellowstone National Park lay under a gorgeous star-filled sky. The late-summer moon shone especially bright, reflecting off the rivers, springs, and geysers.

In the recreational hall near Old Faithful Inn, tourists gathered for the annual beauty pageant for female park employees. The gender roles of the 1950s were in full force: contestants started out in formal evening gowns before competing in talent, trivia, and even swimsuit rounds. The audience watched, eager to see who would be crowned 1959’s Miss Yellowstone, or the runner-up, Miss Lake Hotel.

Twenty-five miles north, at a lookout station situated high on Mount Holmes, a nineteen-year-old fire spotter scanned the forested landscape. At 10,335 feet, the peak was one of the highest points in the Gallatin Range, providing an expansive view of the western side of the park. With a final glance at the clear night sky, he prepared for bed.

The volcanic and other geologic forces lying beneath Yellowstone were anything but “extinct” or “dying out.”

Just beyond the park boundary near the town of West Yellowstone, where the Madison River flows out of the Hebgen Lake dam, more than forty families were settling in for the night. These included Irene and Parley “Pud” Bennett and their four children, visiting from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, who set up camp just beyond Rock Creek Campground. Given the beautiful evening, they decided to sleep outside under the stars.

Down in the campground itself, Ray and Myrtle Painter, from Ogden, Utah, along with their three children, sixteen-year-old Carole and twelve-year-old blonde twins, Anne and Anita, parked their trailer into one of the last open spots by the river. Ray looked forward to a morning of fishing in one of the nation’s best trout streams.

Around 11:30 p.m., with the kids finally asleep, Myrtle walked down to the river’s edge to wash her hair. The serene night gave no indication of what was to about to happen.

In fact, the few warnings that did exist had been discarded as irrelevant long ago.

*

Almost a century earlier, in late August 1870, Lieutenant Gustavus Cheyney Doane of the U.S. Second Cavalry out of Fort Ellis, Montana Territory, leaned sharply forward in his saddle as his horse lurched its way up the slopes of what would be christened that same day as Mount Washburn. Doane was leading the military escort for the Washburn Expedition to Yellowstone. He was also the only member of the party with training in geological science. As he reached the summit and took in the full vista, he realized what this fantastical landscape represented.

That evening by the campfire, Doane made the following entry in his journal:

The view from the summit is beyond all adequate description…Filling the whole field of vision, and with its boundaries in the verge of the horizon, lies the great volcanic basin of the Yellowstone. Nearly circular in form, from 50 to 75 miles in diameter…a single glance at the Interior slopes of the ranges shows that…the great basin has been formerly one vast crater of a now extinct volcano.

Doane was not the first to notice this. In 1805, the first American governor of the Louisiana Territory sent a roughly drawn map on animal skin to President Thomas Jefferson that identified the presence of a “volcano” near the vicinity of the modern-day park. But Doane’s report was the first published and credible account describing Yellowstone as a caldera: the colossal crater left behind after a massive volcanic eruption. His observations were confirmed a year later by Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, the leader and namesake of the 1871 Yellowstone Expedition:

The basin has been called by some travelers the vast crater of an ancient volcano…Indeed the geysers and hot springs of this region, at the present time, are nothing more than…the escape-pipes or vents for those internal forces which once were so active, but are now continually dying out.

Though both men were generally correct, they each made one glaring error. The volcanic and other geologic forces lying beneath Yellowstone were anything but “extinct” or “dying out.” On the contrary, they were—and continue to be—very much alive.

*

Back at the Old Faithful Recreation Hall, the audience applauded the newly announced Miss Yellowstone 1959. At 11:37 p.m., a sudden violent rumbling shuddered through the building. The beauty pageant came to an abrupt halt as the ground began to shake, timbers creaked, and wall hangings fell and shattered on the floor.

Some 500 panicked tourists rushed for the doors. Outside, Old Faithful and other geysers throughout the Lower Geyser Basin— some of them dormant for decades—began erupting all at once. At the Old Faithful Inn, water pipes broke and spurted. People in bathrobes climbed out of windows, and the stone chimney in the dining room collapsed to the floor. Visitors piled into cars and frantically tried to escape. But with rockslides closing the road to West Yellowstone, cars soon clogged the roads in all other directions, snaking toward the north and south park exits.

Up on Mount Holmes, the young fire spotter was thrown from his bed onto the hard wooden floor. He scrambled to his feet and rushed to look outside, straining to keep his balance. In the distance, he saw a massive plume of dust or smoke rising in the moonlight near Hebgen Lake. And in the lake itself, he could just make out what looked like a thin pencil line moving laterally across the dark waters.

Though he didn’t realize it at the time, the plume was the airborne debris from a massive landslide, one caused by an earthquake in the Madison River Canyon that measured 7.3 on the Richter scale. And that thin line was the crest of a twenty-foot tidal wave.

For campers in the canyon below, there was no time for observation, nor even panic. Without warning, the quiet evening was torn by a thunderous sound like 1,000 freight trains. The ground beneath trailers and tents rippled and shook. Just opposite the campground, a landslide came careening down the north face of the canyon, pulling 80 million tons of rocks, soil, and trees over 1,000 feet in a matter of seconds. The slide was powerful enough to generate hurricane-strength winds in front of it. And when the debris slammed into the water, the force of it emptied the riverbed, sending thirty-foot waves in each direction.

Myrtle Painter sat by the riverside wetting her hair. Before she could comprehend what was happening, a rushing wall of wind and water picked her up and flung her down the rocky shore. Her daughter Carole, who was sleeping in the car with the family dog, woke moments before the vehicle was lifted, slammed into a tree, and flung spinning into the river. Water rushed in through the shattered windows. Carole managed to climb out of the sinking car and wade safely to shore. But her mother and the trailer containing the rest of her family were nowhere to be seen.

The same towering mass of wind and waves also hit the Bennett family. Irene was lifted and thrown across the river like a rag doll. Her husband tried desperately to hang on to a small pine moments before he and his children were swept away. Throughout the canyon and along the shores of Hebgen Lake, cars, trailers, and tents were thrown through the air, crushed by falling boulders and trees, or flung into the water.

And just as quickly, the violence stopped. For a few moments all was silent. Then, little by little, a small but growing chorus of voices began to cry for help.

*

In the aftermath, Irene Bennett regained consciousness and found herself battered and naked, pinned face down in the mud under a large tree. Shaking with cold, covered in blood and mud, she slowly dug her way out, praying for help and calling out for her children.

Meanwhile, Carole Painter walked the debris-littered riverbank searching for her family. In the distance, she spotted someone sitting on a twisted mound of boulders and vegetation. It was her mother. Myrtle could barely move. She had suffered a collapsed lung, a multitude of bruises and cuts, and a nearly severed arm. Carole helped her mother slowly climb up and away from the rising waters.

Seeing a lantern light on the hillside above her, Carole called out for help: “My mother’s lost her arm. Don’t leave us, please.”

In the darkness, she heard a woman’s reassuring voice call back, “Maybe I can help.”

It was a nurse from Billings, Montana, named Tootie Greene.

Up on the ridge, a massive tree had come crashing down on the Greene family’s tent, but they all escaped without serious injury. Ray and Tootie Greene had pulled their nine-year-old son from the wreckage and rushed to their car, hoping to drive back to the road. But the debris stranded it in place. Instead, hearing cries for help down below, the couple lit a camping lantern and began gathering supplies to aid those in need. As a registered nurse, Tootie Greene quickly found herself at the center of the rescue effort.

Farther down the shoreline, the Painter family was reunited. Carole Painter found her twin sisters with only minor injuries near the remains of their trailer, which were sinking in the dark water. Even their father survived. As for the Bennett family, Irene was ultimately rescued by her eldest son, sixteen-year-old Phil, who had a badly broken leg. But the rest of the Bennett family—Irene’s husband and three other children—were lost during the disaster.

*

The 7.3-magnitude Yellowstone earthquake was the largest ever recorded in the Rockies. It was detected over 700 miles away in cities like Denver and Seattle. Aftershocks continued for days. As late as 1964, a shock of magnitude 5.8 was designated as an aftershock from the initial quake. But neither the great size nor intensity of the 1959 event would have been possible without Yellowstone’s volcanic geology.

Yellowstone is not just any volcano. It is the largest and most powerful active volcanic center in North America and one of the two largest on the planet. The oldest and largest eruption at Yellowstone took place 2.1 million years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch. It was a time when mastodons, saber-tooth tigers, and massive 2,000-pound ground sloths roamed the landscape under shadows cast by the eighteen-foot wingspans of vulture-like teratons soaring high above.

News of the Yellowstone quake made many in the country acknowledge, for the first time, a fundamental truth: the park was more than just a vacation destination.

That first eruption may have begun with the slightest of tremors: a subtle vibration flowing across the forest floor, shimmering up tree trunks, along branches, and out to the tip of each limb. And just as suddenly, stillness, the event detectable only by fine ripples across the otherwise-static waters of a nearby pond. But even this would have been enough to emit an ancient message to all wildlife who could sense it: Flee!

Over the next hours, days, or even years, the rumblings continued. Each time, they lasted a little longer, shook the ground with greater intensity than before. Until, one day, it happened. The countdown hit zero, and one of the largest, most powerful volcanos in the world exploded. The earth opened up, arched its spine, and unleashed a blood-curdling scream.

Deafening noise. Blinding, incinerating heat. A release of power beyond any scale of human experience. The eruption remade the continent: Erasing all life in its immediate path. Pulverizing, clogging, and burying the old topography. Blotting out the sun. Altering the climate.

The volcano literally resculpted the landscape, swallowing entire mountains. Scientists postulate that before this first mega-eruption, there were mountains standing where Yellowstone Lake resides today and the Teton Range extended northward beyond Jackson Lake. In fact, the entire area of modern-day Yellowstone National Park was once as mountainous as the surrounding Absaroka or Gallatin Range.

The most conservative estimate of this first Yellowstone mega-eruption is that it released about 600 cubic miles of debris. This is roughly 2,400 times the amount of debris from the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens, which killed fifty-nine people and damaged much of eastern Washington State. The largest recorded eruption in human history, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia, triggered a global “volcanic winter” when it emitted thirty-six cubic miles of debris, less than 6 percent of Yellowstone’s. Some scientists argue that the Yellowstone blast could have been over three times larger still. If true, it would be the largest volcanic eruption known to science.

The forces behind this mega-eruption also had other critical effects on the landscape. The “hot spot” that provided a pathway for molten magma to travel from deep inside the earth to the surface also allowed magma to accumulate beneath Yellowstone, creating a massive 300-mile-diameter bulge that pushed the entire Yellowstone Plateau upward nearly 1,700 feet. This abnormal rise in elevation not only produced Yellowstone’s long winters (and ice cap during the last ice age) but also served to fracture and deepen existing geologic faults in the region. Consequently, the 1959 quake was much more severe than it otherwise would have been.

Since that first super-eruption, there have been two more of comparable size, roughly 1.3 million years ago and 630,000 years ago. If this trend continues, with mega-eruptions taking place every 600,000 to 700,000 years, then Yellowstone is due for another major event. But whether it happens tomorrow, in 50,000 years, or never transpires, no one can say. What we do know is that Yellowstone’s volcanic geology not only refashioned the landscape but also continues to power the geysers, hot springs, and mud pots that attract so many visitors to the park each year.

All told, twenty-eight people lost their lives to the 1959 earthquake, either during the night or afterward at the hospital, like Myrtle Painter, who succumbed to her injuries four days later. News of the Yellowstone quake made many in the country acknowledge, for the first time, a fundamental truth: the park was more than just a vacation destination or national symbol. It was also home to a unique and powerful geology that, despite its dangers, also helped to explain thousands of years of human history in the region.

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Excerpted from A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park by Randall K. Wilson. Copyright © 2024 by Randall K. Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.