$1.25
your homegrown newspaper June 22, 2022
Vol. 18, No. 40
Yellowstone flooding hits home By Kristi Niemeyer for the Valley Journal
Circus pg. 5
Chalk pg. 12
Tournament pg. 14
When the Yellowstone River leapt out of its banks Monday morning, Polson resident Dayna McClure was in Gardiner with a group of friends and retired Yellowstone Park employees who call themselves the Ladies Hiking Group. The first she heard of the massive flooding was a text from her daughter, Erin. “I guess you’re not going anywhere,” the text read. “I said ‘what are you talking about?’” Outside the door of their vacation rental, where it had been raining steadily since Sunday morning, the river had already collapsed portions of the five-mile stretch of road leading into Mammoth Hot Springs from Gardiner. As McClure and her friends watched, it was busily gnawing away the foundation of a house rented by park employees, which eventually toppled into the river. The hiking group and thousands of others evacuated from the park were stranded in Gardin-
NPS / KYLE STONE PHOTO
A portion of the North Entrance Road from Gardiner to Mammoth, collapsed during last week’s historic flooding.
er until Tuesday, when a slow-moving caravan headed north on Hwy. 89 to Livingston, traversing parts of the road that were inundated with three feet of water just the day before. They passed the spot where the steel-truss Carbella Bridge on Tom Miner Creek Road had washed away early Monday. “Our son used to jump off the top of that bridge,” McClure recalled. Behind them, the town
see page 2
COURTESY PHOTO
Members of the McClure family (that’s Dayna in the foreground and Craig behind, to the right) during a visit to Yellowstone Park’s Lower Blacktail Patrol Cabin, demolished by flooding June 13.
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