New York Times / January 27, 1886
Durango, Col., Jan. 26. -- Another snow slide tragedy is reported from the extreme southwestern part of the State. Leonard Sutton, who has been at work in the Silver Lake basin in the La Plata Mountains, reached Durango last night with the account of a slide which wrecked the cabin at the Daylight mine on Tuesday last. While he was sitting in the cabin with Henry Thomas, his partner, a fierce storm raging outside, a slide from the mountain side struck the building and demolished it. Sutton says he was hurled some distance and buried 15 feet under the snow. He managed to dig himself out and set about to discover Thomas, whom he found buried about 10 feet deep, with his leg broken and injured otherwise so badly that he could not sit up. Thomas begged Sutton to kill him and put him out of his misery. Sutton refused to do this, and then Thomas begged him to leave at once and save himself. Believing Thomas would not live more than a few minutes, he finally consented to leave him to his fate. Before his departure Thomas requested him to return in the Spring and bury his body, and send his money and other property to his sister, Miss Hannah Thomas, who resides in New-York.
Riverside Snow Tunnel, August 1882. A stage on the Ouray-Red Mountain toll road in southwestern Colorado. The road was used to haul ore to the mills; the snow tunnel ("400 feet long") goes through a snow slide from the winter of 1881.
