Cal Cumin, Yellowstone County parks director, snapped this photo with his cell phone as the rocks went tumbling down Monday afternoon. He was standing on the Rims above Zimmerman Trail when the second rockfall of the day occurred.
Daniel Neber, left, with the engineering firm Terracon, talks with people from GeoStabilization International, the company hired to deal with problem areas on the Rims above Zimmerman Trail.
Cal Cumin, Yellowstone County parks director, takes a photo of where he was standing on top of the Rims when another cluster of stone fell Monday afternoon.
Daniel Nebel of Terracon, in the green vest, is reflected in the window just above where a small boulder hit the house of Scott Kinne and Annette Stone.
Daniel Nebel, left, and Adam Lewis, in the black sweatshirt, a project engineer with GeoStabilization International, look over the damage caused by a Monday-afternoon rockfall.
This ravine was the scene of two major rockfalls Monday, one about 2:30 or 3 a.m. and the other about 1:15 p.m.
Editor’s note: Don’t miss the video of the rockfall, posted by KTVQ. A link is at the bottom of this story.
In the story posted just below this one, City Engineer Debi Meling predicted that another giant slab of sandstone would be falling off the Rims near Zimmerman Trail, hours after enormous boulders came down early Monday.
She was right. About 1:15, another huge panel of rock came tumbling down, and this time a small boulder — just 300 pounds or so — hit the home of Scott Kinne and Annette Stone, at 3439 Timberline Drive.
The overnight fall of rock detailed in the story below missed their house by about 150 feet.
By chance, several representatives of the company hired to help stabilize the Rims above Zimmerman Trail had just arrived on the scene and witnessed the falling rocks.
Jamie Addison, the project manager with GeoStabilization International, said he and his associates were picked up at the airport a little after 12:45 and drove straight down Highway 3 to Zimmerman Park atop the Rims.
They had just stepped out onto so-called Monkey Rock above Zimmerman Trail when they saw rock shooting out from the bottom of a cliff face just to their west. Soon the entire enormous slab peeled away and fell down the talus slope below the Rims.
“It was awesome,” Addison said. “It was Mother Nature at her finest.”
They also heard the smaller boulder slam into the house on Timberline Drive. Just after they heard the thud of the rock, they heard a blood-curdling scream. They found out later it was unleashed by Stone, who ran out of her house just before it was struck by the rock.
Her husband, Kinne, had just arrived back home, after hearing from his wife that engineers thought more rock would be falling Monday. He was on the south side of the house when it was hit on the north side. He said the whole house shuddered from the impact.
The rock did put a divot in the house, but it didn’t even break a window just above the point of impact. Also, Kinne noted, “It just missed my grill.”
Cul Cumin, the Yellowstone County parks director, was with the GeoStabilization crew, having picked them up at the airport, and he snapped a photo of the falling rock with his phone.
While Addison and city officials were conferring about the most recent event, standing just inside the gate closing off Zimmerman Trail, Daniel Nebel, with the Billings engineering firm Terracon, arrived on the scene.
Terracon did the preliminary work on which GeoStabilization’s contract is based. Nebel said to Addison at one point, “We were hoping it would wait until you got here.”
“Well, we were here,” Addison said with a laugh.
Watch an incredible video of the whole thing, captured by a police dashboard cam and posted on KTVQ. At the end of the police video, there is a bit of footage shot by KTVQ from on top of the Rims. That scream you hear after the rocks settle is Annette Stone, whose experiences were described above.
