Several search and rescue outfits called, offering aid. A combined Army, Navy and Marine Corps Reserve unit from Butte gathered their medical equipment and ambulances and sped to the Ennis side of the slide as a voluntary, unpaid action. There were offers from the crack mine rescue teams from the famous Anaconda Company mines in Butte. When a call went out on the regular radio for housing for the Ennis evacuees, several hundred accommodations were phoned in to a local Butte station. Another abortive suggestion that men on horseback might be needed to search some of the impassable back country brought over a hundred volunteers in less than an hour. A Bozeman station was overwhelmed with offers in response to an announcement that station wagons would be needed at the airport to ambulance the wounded to the hospital. [Illustration: Road blocked by boulders.] Nurses, doctors, National Guardsmen, skindivers—they all called in wanting to help. At Great Falls, where the Montana Red Cross Blood Bank was holding a regularly scheduled drawing, when word came that they were flying blood to Bozeman to help the victims, so many volunteers showed up that the total exceeded 450 pints, and at closing time 150 donors were still in line. “We had special problems—distance from any sizeable town was one. I’d hate to think of the casualties if the quake hit in a really populated area,” Potter said. “The mountains, which obstruct short-wave signals and set up all sorts of radio blind spots, made it difficult to get any sort of ground radio communication going. It was impossible from the ground, to signal to Ennis or to Hebgen Dam from West Yellowstone. The radio amateurs did a tremendous job of helping those first few hours—they set up a standby network and kept it clear for emergency messages. One ham, Father Francis A. Peterson, (W7RKI), from St. Anthony, Idaho, one of the first to report the quake, loaded up his gear, drove to West Yellowstone, and by 7:45 A. M. the morning after the quake had set up radio control at the otherwise radioless West Yellowstone Airport. Another ham, Harold L. Beddor, (W7JPD), of Dillon, Montana, handled emergency communications from Dillon the day after the quake, then flew his equipment to the West Yellowstone Airport to help out too. “The problem was complicated by the multiplicity of wave lengths on which the various civilian and military agencies were operating. We discovered that the high frequency bands the Civil Defense uses (150 megacycles) are useless in mountain country, especially in the day time. Lower frequencies, 34.82 and 46.86 megacycles did get through. “All that first day or so, we relied on the Highway Department plane, which was radio-equipped, to get messages across the quake area. It stayed in the air all day.