Reprint of this story from the February 7, 1903 issue of the Dillon Doublejack brought to you courtesy of Grandma’s Cabin, Encampment, Wyoming. Preserving History - Serving the Community.
Many Snow Slides
A snow slide occurred on January 29th on the mountainside above the Jolly Tar Property. It was not a large slide but it came with great force and caught in front of it the blacksmith shop at the Jolly Tar. Not even a trace of this shop has as yet been reported. The snow from the sides of the slide completely covered the mine tunnel house and piled considerable snow even upon the bunkhouse. No one was injured in the slide.
From reports made by miners traveling through the hills it is believed that a least a dozen small snow slides have occurred here since the recent heavy snow. It is said that a slide of considerable size occurred at the head of Spring Creek, above Spring Creek Lake, also one on Bridger Peak near the Battle Lake tunnel site. Cow Creek is given credit for more than a half-dozen slides, and the Haskin’s gulch has been awarded one.
The old shaft house of the Ferris-Haggarty, the one that was a landmark in the Battle Lake district the one that was the best known object of interest to all sightseers is gone crushed literally out of sight beneath a mighty weight of snow. It had stood the sieges of four long winters, and had served as a kind mantle to the hundreds of miners in their work of taking nearly $1,000,000 worth of ore from the mine, but it finally had to succumb to the Snow King.
Next summer, when the sight-seer at the Rudefeha shall try to point out from the hillside the old log building “with a history”, he will point in vain, for its logs are flat to the ground.
The concentrator at the mine: the one that was built over three years ago by Salt Lake people - the one that used to be run in extracting copper from the mine dump is now a wreck! And the cause of its passing is snow! snow! snow!
An Avalanche Sweeps
Linemen Into Eternity
An avalanche, in the Rocky mountains is familiarly known as a “snowslide”. It is an excessive weight of snow and ice, obeying the laws of gravity by hurrying down a mountain side. It goes with a roar and throws up a cloud of snow as it goes, and carries trees and rooks and everything before it. It is a tornado of snow and sweeps a mountain side within its path as clean as a boulevard and piles all its gatherings in one mighty heap below.
The Head-of-Cow Creek snow slide, that has filled with horror every soul in Wyoming’s greatest mining district, and has caused hammers and picks to be thrown aside and the sound of dynamite to cease, was the first snow slide of any great importance that has occurred in the Sierra Madre mountains.
There are but three or four places favored by nature for snow slides in all these mountains, and the Head of-Cow-Creek is chief of these. In no other place in the Battle Lake country are the mountains so precipitous as on the south side of Cow creek by Station No. Three. Here, the tramway goes over a brink nearly seven hundred feet from the first floor below and over 2,200 feet from the first spot that a tower could be placed to support the steel cables. This is the longest span on the tramway; this is the highest wall of rock in this country, and this is where the snow slide occurred on Jan. 20th. A mighty bank of rock extends along the south side of Cow creek canyon for more than a third of a mile in almost uninterrupted grandeur; and so precipitous is this masonry in places that to try to scale it would be like trying to climb a perpendicular wall 1,000 feet high.
Above this awful chasm is a bench or gently sloping mountain side, which in the recent snow slide served as a reservoir for holding thousands of tons of snow, at the very brink of an eternity below.
And so strange is nature, and so equally balanced are her works, that this immense reservoir of snow paused at that very brink, when a stone cast from a child’s hand might have jarred it from its holdings and sent it thundering below!
Upon this bench of snow, Peter LeMieux and C. G. Comer, the linemen, tread carelessly with their light web shoes on January 20th; and quick as thought, the mountain side began to move, and then to fly and they were lost in a Niagara of snow and trees and rocks, and were landed lifeless in the pit below!
It was Death’s trap, and they pulled the trigger! An ocean of snow laughed sardonically around them, and their shroud was snow!
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