By Dan Pence, Dillon, MT The call came to my Forest Service
office in late June of 1987. Johann Von Trapp, then-owner of the Snow Crest Ranch, made the call. A massive land- slide, or “mass failure,” had occurred on Cream Creek in the Beaverhead National Forest’s Snow Crest Range. Johann had delivered a Peruvian
sheep herder to the Dillon bus stop to start his long trip home to South America. The herder had been camped with a band of sheep on a Forest Service grazing allotment the night the mass failure occurred. He abandoned the sheep in the middle of the night and walked (and probably ran) some ten miles to the ranch headquarters where he reported in Spanish, “God made the earth to move and growl at me as a sign that I must go home.” They rushed a replacement herder out to tend the sheep and found that about a section (640 acres; one square
Mass Failure
mile) of land had simply slid off the mountain, depositing the base of the slide right at the edge of the herder’s camp. The herder could have been buried if he had been camped a few feet higher on the mountain.
Mass failures or landslides are not
an unusual geologic event on parts of the Gravelly and Snow Crest Mountain ranges, where sedimentary deposits over- lay a layer of decomposing slate. Saturate the sedimentary layer down to the slate layer on specific slopes and the earth can move. The mass failure normally devel- ops a small basin, frequently hosting a small pond or swamp behind a wall of earth surrounding the basin. My concern as staff officer responsi-
ble for range, wildlife, soils, watershed and minerals management was whether the Forest Service needed to take some action such as reseeding to help reduce immedi- ate environmental impacts from the slide. At the time, I was breaking a leggy,
red roan (supposedly) gelding the chil- dren had named Strider after the hero in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. The horse still needed a lot of work, so I decided to saddle him up and check the area. I rode up Lewis Creek on the
Ruby River side of the range and dropped into the head of Cream Creek where the slide had occurred. I got to see some new country while approach- ing from the Ruby side, and figured it was about as close as a person could drive in any event.
The trail across the head of
Lewis Creek had been reconstructed the previous fall and still contained some very loose material on the tread. Pocket gophers had obviously enjoyed undermining the new work while it was under a significant snow pack throughout the winter. Strider did fairly well in spite of
his inexperience. His tendency to pay continued on page 34
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