The days of flooding in early June 1964 are nearly 50 years away, but for those who live and recreate along the rivers and streams that once were swollen with treacherous water, the scars of disastrous flood are still visible.
To this day, cars, tractors, debris piles and concrete left over from washed out dams and bridges remain in the flood plain.
Fay Stokes was a 24-year-old employee of Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company and worked at the Lake Frances dam in Valier when he was sent to warn people upstream after news came that Swift Dam had failed.
While helping a family move equipment, Stokes came face to face with a wall of water.
"You could hear this big, huge rumble," Stokes said. "There were trees (being run) over."
In the days after the dam break, Stokes helped look for survivors and victims south of Highway 89. A popular picnic area was nowhere to be found, and the creek bed was completely flattened, he said. The debris that had been deposited by the water also would become part of the landscape.
"It was many years before they finally got the debris cleaned up," he said.
Below the rebuilt Swift Dam, the landscape has not recovered. What was once a pleasant, wooded spot is gravel to this day.
In the days and years after the floodwaters of 1964 receded, changes to river channels became apparent, according to a 1967 report released by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The report acknowledged that, for people who were familiar with the waterways east and west of the Continental Divide, the differences in landscape would have been obvious, "but most observations cannot be verified quantitatively."
While monetary values were assigned to loss of property and livestock, no similar values were assigned by the USGS report to the loss of fish and wild game habitat along rivers and streams. But, for example, it was estimated by the U.S. Forest Service that 105 miles of main stream and 240 miles of tributary streams of the Flathead River were damaged seriously and affected fish and wildlife habitat.
On the east side of the divide, in the Lewis and Clark National Forest, 155 miles of major stream channels and 320 miles of minor stream channels were damaged, affecting most of the fish habitat there.
Generally, fish populations are able to recover fairly quickly after a large-scale flood, said Grant Grisak, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Region 4 fisheries manager. But sometimes recovery can take time, he said.
When flooding occurs, usually fish move out with the rising water. When the water comes down again, the fish are stranded and "(lost) to the population," Grisak said.
The rising waters also may deposit fish in off-channel backwaters or ponds, he said.
"It's a minor issue, but nevertheless it causes fish to become established in areas that they normally wouldn't be," Grisak said.
Habitat loss is another issue that comes with flooding. Nature has a tendency to right itself, but that process can take decades, Grisak said.
For example, the Middle Fork of the Flathead River still has not fully recovered from the 1964 flooding.
"You see these huge exposed slopes that just cannot re-vegetate, and they're still in that state," he said. "So you can see some major erosion that it takes a long time to reach equilibrium and to heal."
Sculptor Jay Laber sought healing in a different way.
Laber remembers very little about the 1964 flood. A young boy at the time, he only recalls hurriedly packing up and leaving his home in Babb with his parents.
They never returned to Babb.
Instead, they eventually moved to his father's native New Hampshire but returned every summer to visit his mother's relatives on the reservation.
Years later, Laber was commissioned to create sculptures at the north, south, east and west entries to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Knowing the history of the flood, remembering the stories told by his parents, he decided to seek out cars still buried in the floodplain for his sculptures.
"For me it was a personal thing to use as many vehicles from the floodplain as I could," said Laber, who uses old vehicles and junk to compose his sculptures.
And while he concedes some of the cars may not have been put there by the flood, he found many that date from that era with license plates from the late 1950s.
Laber dug the cars out of mud that was two to four feet deep. Some vehicles were impossible to dig out completely, so Laber cut off the exposed chunks.
As word of Laber's work spread on the reservation, ranchers began to point him in the right direction. The vehicles were down near creek beds, some covered not only by mud but also bushes that grow so aggressively near the water.
The end product, known as the Sentinels, depicts Blackfeet warriors guarding the reservation. Finished in 2000, the eight life-size guards also serve as a reminder of the event that claimed 30 lives on the reservation and changed the lives of its residents.
After the Sentinels were complete, Laber received a letter from a couple who lived on the reservation. They told him they often drove by a partially buried car put there by the 1964 flood. Passing the car was always a sad moment for them as they remembered the event. But one day the car disappeared, and they later learned about Laber's work. He had found the car and used it in his sculptures.
"It changed their perspective from a very sad story to a very good-ending story, and that kind of inspires me to do more work that way," he said.
Laber's work personifies, in a way, the wreckage of a flood that has become part of the landscape.
For Stokes, who went on to become head of Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company before retiring about 10 years ago, the debris that remained of the flood was a reminder of the rainy day in June when the contents of Swift Reservoir came rushing down Birch and Dupuyer creeks.
For years after, when he saw the debris piles, they reminded him of the flood, he said. Sometimes he thought about the bodies of the people who were never found, wondering if they had come to rest beneath the debris.
As the streambeds and fish population recovered, the physical and emotional scars remain.