THISTLE, Utah — It has been 40 years since a landslide was triggered in Spanish Fork Canyon, destroying the small town of Thistle.
If you head down Highway 89, you may miss the town as you drive by. All that remains now are just a few foundations of structures, a telephone pole and even a house, with only the roof visible above the water.
"You can see roofs of old houses still perched on the hillsides," said Bill Keach, Utah Geological Survey Director.
Keach was an undergraduate student in geology at BYU in April of 1983.
"We came up here and actually watched the slide," said Keach.
He vividly remembers the massive landslide that was triggered, near where highways 6 and 89 intersect in Utah County.
Utah had dealt with record snowfall, coupled with heavy rains and a fast-melting snowpack.
"If you see this kind of light-colored ridge with snow on the right side and steep rock on the left and you look down to the bottom where it's got a steep slope and then it flattens out, that is the slide," said Keach.
That moisture caused the mud from the slide to take out the railroad.
"The economic impact was huge for the railroad, they were losing a million dollars a day," said Keach.
Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement's Senior Public Historian Brad Westwood, the railroad frantically built tunnels in order to get to the east and into Denver, adding the slide blocked off everything from Salt Lake City to Denver for months.
The mud also spilled over the highway. Keach says it was moving at about 3.5 feet an hour.
"It was moving pretty good, created a dam here about 200 feet high as it butted stuff against and it formed a big old lake behind it got to 160 feet deep," said Keach.
The landslide resulted in the first-ever presidential declared disaster area in the Beehive State.
"It's between $250-400 million in damages which today in 2023 would be about $750 million," said Westwood.
Westwood says before the flood waters destroyed the town, Thistle was a small, tight-knit railroad community.
"There were a few people who were kind of holdouts from when it was a juncture town for the railroad, for the Rio Grande and Western railroad," said Westwood. "By the 1970s, it was largely private homes that were in a little well of trees adjacent to the highway."
He says residents were given enough time to get out before the flood waters engulfed the town.
"There are stories of people who pretty much-lost everything and others who are able to at least get their personal effects and some of their, you know, nicer things in, in cars and trucks before it all happened," said Westwood.
With the residents gone, Thistle ultimately became one of Utah's many ghost towns.
"I call it the Thistle Monument and, it's, it's like its own little organic monument for the last 40 years," said Westwood.
For those who were there and witnessed the slide take place, like Keach, he spoke about what sticks with him, 40-years later.
"The resiliency of the people is an impressive lesson for me, the ingenuity of the folks that deal with the disasters probably is the other thing that stays with me," said Keach.
40-years later, the landslide in Thistle is still considered the costliest landslide in United States history.
