Without worrying about modesty, they dried themselves around the fire. There were 17 in the party. It cleared, and then clouds obscured the moon. The ground kept shaking. With almost every new tremor came sparks and puffs of dust, and the terrifying, crashing echoes of another avalanche across the valley, and the realization that the valley side above them might go any time. The air was full of dust and the sickening smell of mud and torn fir trees. All through the night they heard the haunting cries of “Help, help—we’re freezing,” from the Grover Maults, who’d been marooned on top of their trailer and by this time were hanging onto a tree. They worried about forest fires, and sang hymns to keep up their courage. At 3:00 A. M. there was a thunderstorm and a light, continuing rain. They huddled under the plastic tarp—all 21 of them—and wondered what would happen next. [Illustration: Water rescue.] An elderly couple, the Grover C. Maults, a 72-year-old retired decorator and his wife, Lillian, 68, of Temple City Calif., had parked their trailer at the scenic Rock Creek Campground for a week before the especially beautiful, bright moonlight night of August 17th. There were lots of bears in the area, and like many other campers, when the first jolt hit them, they figured that the bears were trying to get into their trailer. “No, it must be an earthquake,” Mrs. Mault said. Looking out through the trailer window, the moon made it seem like daylight. Everything was going upside down. An instant later their trailer was tossed end over end, landing, miraculously, on its wheels. Then it seemed as though something picked the trailer up and hurled it into the water. Mault got his “nightie-clad missus” out of the trailer and lifted her on top, and went back into the trailer to get sweaters or something. It suddenly turned dark. The moon disappeared in dust. The water had risen to Mault’s chin by the time he got out of the trailer. By the time he’d crawled on the trailer roof, put on trousers, a shirt and sweater, and wrapped clothing around his wife’s legs, the water was beginning to cover the trailer roof and rising fast. They prayed that the trailer would drift toward a nearby tree. It did. The first branch broke as Mault grabbed it. He barely had time to get one arm around the tree and hold onto his wife with the other when the trailer was swept out from under them. “It was horrible,” he says. “As I tried to pull the missus up the limbs kept breaking off. I tried to grab higher limbs and cling to the missus with my legs. The limbs still kept breaking off. Finally we found a limb that would hold. “We were surrounded by deep water. Through the night we hollered and hollered for help. People tried to get to us with ropes, couldn’t reach us, and yelled that we should hang on, they were going for a boat.