Earthquake Lake ghost forest
— a forest the river drowned in one night.
Not only on a wall.
“On August 17, 1959, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake shook the Madison River Canyon and sent eighty million tons of rock down the south wall, damming the river in a single moment. The new lake rose behind the slide and stood the pine forest in cold water. Sixty-seven years later the trunks are still there, silvered and bare, leaning at the angle the flood left them.
Earthquake Lake ghost forest, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Earthquake Lake, locally called Quake Lake, lies along US-287 about twenty-seven miles northwest of West Yellowstone in the Madison River Canyon of southwestern Montana. The lake formed on the night of August 17, 1959, when a magnitude 7.3 earthquake on the Hebgen fault triggered a landslide that dammed the river and flooded six miles of canyon. Twenty-eight people died, most at the Rock Creek Campground buried by the slide. The Forest Service operates a visitor centre on the slide itself.
The lake covers about 190 acres and runs nearly 200 feet deep at the slide face. Cold Madison River water keeps the drowned timber preserved; the standing trees, some over a century old at the time of the flood, still rise above the surface in long pale ranks. Engineers cut a spillway through the slide in the months after the quake to keep the natural dam from overtopping, and the modern lake level is held within a few feet of that spillway.
The canyon was a busy stretch of US-287 the night of the quake, with vacationers asleep along the Madison. Today the highway runs above the lake on the rebuilt grade, and a turnout lets visitors look down on the ghost trees from above. Most days the wind off Hebgen Pass moves through the dead trunks without finding any leaves to rattle. The slide face stays bare. The visitor centre interprets the night quietly, without overstatement.