The Book of Mormon That Stayed Dry in the Teton Dam Flood (Sugar City, Idaho, 1976)

In June 1976, when the Teton Dam broke, a wall of filthy, muddy water carrying logs, debris, and a dead horse smashed through the Sugar City, Idaho, home of Wilson and Isabel Walker. The flood pushed through the front door, ran four feet high down the long hallway, broke out the back door, and left three feet of mud in the basement and six to eight inches on the main floor.

Several days later, seventeen-year-old Kristine Edlefsen (later Kristine Edlefsen Day) arrived with her family to help clean up the condemned home. She and her aunt and cousin were pulling books off the front-room bookshelf — books that had sat submerged in three to four feet of slimy flood water, warped beyond recognition, pages impossible to separate. Among them they took outside two large books of exactly the same size, to see if either could be restored.

One was an encyclopedia, so saturated that its pages were fused into a solid block. The other, to their astonishment, had no warped cover and opened with ease despite the mud on its outside. It was completely dry. Every page could be turned and thumbed through. Kristine, a lifelong Latter-day Saint, glanced over the dry, readable pages — each verse numbered — and read the name Alma at the top of the page, not yet realizing what book she was holding, until her Aunt Joanne cried out in delight, 'It's the Book of Mormon!'

Of the several dozen books on that shelf below the waterline, none other was completely dry. Her aunt pulled out her film camera and photographed the dry Book of Mormon beside the ruined encyclopedia — photographs Kristine Day still publishes today. 'I knew that day that that book had its own power, even physical power over the elements,' she writes. 'I knew that only the power of God could do something like that with a very unordinary book.' She signs her name to the experience as a living witness.