Last summer, on the ride back from Seattle to Pennsylvania, I saw a whole lot in a very little amount of time. One of the things that stuck in my head was Montana’s means of marking road fatalities.

Here’s what I wrote back then…

One way to tell if you’re on a Montana road is that they mark their highway fatalities with white crosses. Each cross represents one fatality. They’re placed in the “exact” spot where they died (or where they were hit before being taken to the hospital where they died). It’s kind of creepy.

Usually, there were one or two crosses, signifying one or two fatalities. Those were all over. You could hardly go ten miles without seeing some.

This might have something to do with US 2 being a 70mph two-lane winding its way through hills and along cliffs. Maybe?

But I saw one that really made me pause. Actually, it made me turn around to make sure I saw what I thought I saw.

And I was right. 17 fatalities in one spot, probably in one accident.

As macabre as it might seem, I’d really like to know what happened here. I think it was near Kalispell. I could be really wrong about that, and I doubt anyone would really know (anyone who reads this, I mean). But 17 fatalities in one spot can’t be a good thing.

And while 17 fatalities wouldn’t be a good thing, I just learned from a commenter on that old post that it’s not really as bad as you’d think.

“The 2 clusters of 17 crosses on US Highway 2 were placed there after a 10 mile section of highway was reconstructed and dozens of fatality markers were removed from the roadside. They represent the fatalities whose makers were removed from that stretch of highway.”

That’s sort of better, I guess. Apparently there are two clusters of 17 crosses in one ten mile stretch. That would mean that 34 people have died in separate accidents over ten miles of one really windy road.

Ok, so that does seem kind of worse when I think about it.

Putting up crosses to memorialize the dead is a nice thing. But doing something so that 34 more people don’t die in this short bit of road would be even better.