Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
There’s not much doubt as to how Santa Claus Rock got its name.
A huge column of sandstone that towers over Sixth Avenue North is not going to be blown off the Rims with dynamite, as the “Monkey Face” formation over Zimmerman Trail was.
City Engineer Debi Meling said it will be pulled over backward to lie on the rock shelf on which it is now perched.
“It’ll still be there,” she said. “It’ll just be a reclining Santa.”
Generations of Billings residents have referred to the formation as Santa Claus Rock because of its resemblance to popular depictions of that mythical figure. Meling refers to it as Chimney Rock.
It is known by still another name to Rich Clawson, an artist and builder who used to have a studio on the slope of the Rims a bit west of the rock. Years ago, when he was having the property blessed by a Crow Indian friend, Clawson said, he was told that the formation used to be one of seven standing rocks known to the Crow as the Sentinels.
Clawson said they were called that because they were thought to be guardians of the dead who were laid to rest in burial grounds on top of the Rims. The other six Sentinels supposedly were lost in an earthquake, Clawson said. The one remaining formation was named Santa Claus Rock by early settlers in the Yellowstone Valley, he added.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Seen from near the Lockwood exit off Interstate 90, Santa Claus Rock stands out prominently from the Rims to which it is attached.
Clawson said his efforts to find out more about the Sentinels have been in vain, but he’s hoping city officials can be persuaded to leave the last one standing.
Meling said she hasn’t heard from anyone else with concerns about the formation, and that no one in the Parks and Recreation Department, nominally responsible for the face of the Rimrocks, had ever heard anything about the Sentinels.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
The formation seen from below, on Sixth Avenue North.
Last Best News was likewise unable to find out anything beyond what has been communicated by Clawson. We would love to hear from readers who know anything about the subject.
The city started looking into doing some preventive maintenance on the Rims above Sixth Avenue in conjunction with the emergency project to stabilize the Rims above Zimmerman Trail, the scene of several large rockfalls this winter and spring.
Dan Nebel, senior project geologist with Terracon of Billings, which also did the preliminary engineering on the Zimmerman project, recommended taking down the unstable Santa Claus Rock and also trimming off some problematic portions of the Rims a little east of Santa Claus, which is just above North 10th Street.
GeoStabilization International, the Colorado company that finished up the Zimmerman project this week, is going to start in on the Rims over Sixth Avenue next week. The new project will cost the city $360,000.
Meling said the plan is to close Sixth Avenue from the Sixth Avenue Bypass to North 12th Street Friday through Sunday, June 20-22, detouring traffic down First Avenue North. During that closure, work will be down to shave off problem formations east of Santa Claus.
After that work is complete, Sixth Avenue will be closed again for an undetermined time to bring Santa Claus Rock down. Meling said it can’t be toppled over forward because the Rims under it are almost perpendicular and it would fall directly onto the roadway.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
One more view, taken from the west.
Nebel has estimated the height of the formation at 25 to 35 feet, with a weight estimated at 150 to 200 tons. Meling said the city doesn’t want to take it down, anymore than it wanted to remove Monkey Face, but it does present a danger, as well as a liability against the city if it were to fall and injure or kill someone.
She said the plan is to attach two steel cables to the rock and then use a couple of bulldozers to pull it toward the Rims and “lay it down” on the broad shelf of rock on which it stands.
Clawson is still trying to gather more information of the formation and its fellow Sentinels, hoping somehow to save it.
Beyond what the formation means to Native Americans, Clawson said, it holds personal significance for him. When he was growing up near Hardin, he said in an email, Santa Claus Rock was an important landmark when the family drove into Billings.
Coming over Hogan Hill, east of Billings, in the 1950s, he said, his father would always ask his children “Do you see the giant? Has he gone into the cave yet?”
As Clawson explained it, “an optical illusion, still mostly seen today even with the interstate, would give the visual illusion of the standing stone going into the cave.”
The giant formation is hard to see from most vantage points because it blends in with the sandstone Rims behind it. But if you know what you’re looking for, it can easily be seen from Lockwood and even father east, as we hope the accompanying photos will make clear.
UPDATE: One of the most remarkable things about the formation is that it looks a lot like Santa Claus from both the front and back, as you can see by looking at the first and last photographs above. How can that be?
