PASSENGERS ARE STILL HELD FAST
An additional twenty men were dispatched from Everett today to fight the snow that continues blockading traffic on the Cascade Division of the Great Northern, making an army of more than 400 laborers and skilled rotary plowmen now pitting their strength against the worst storm that has visited the Cascade Range for years.
—Everett Daily Herald
Sunday, February 27, 1910
Wellington
Morning
On Sunday morning the Reverend James M. Thomson, an Irish-born Presbyterian minister from Bellingham, held a church service on one of the day coaches of the Seattle Express. Understandably, the impromptu worship drew a large congregation of both passengers and railroaders, packed shoulder to shoulder in the airless, much-lived-in coach.
“Quite a number present,” old Mrs. Covington wrote with approval in her diary, taking note of “the reading of Psalm 17 and 27, songs and preaching.” That the reverend chose to organize his service around two such fortifying Psalms (“The Lord is my light and salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”) is perhaps significant. With the storm howling outside as wildly as ever, some spiritual reinforcement among those trapped at Wellington was certainly in order. And when the service culminated with a strangely beautiful rendition of “To the Holy City”—sung by what one Pullman porter called “a rough-looking fellow with a fine bass voice”—the effect was cathartic. “It helped those in need,” brakeman Ross Phillips later recalled of the service, “for a time.”
For a time. But that time was soon past, and it wasn’t long before discontent was again seething among the passengers. Edgar Lemman and several other men went looking for O’Neill after the service, but the superintendent had disappeared yet again. The previous night’s slide at Snowshed 2.2 had taken down the telegraph wires, so O’Neill had been forced to hike down to Scenic early that morning to find a working key. Although the superintendent’s trip had been unavoidable, the passenger delegation couldn’t help feeling that their concerns were simply not being taken seriously by those in charge.
Meanwhile, news of the failure of rotaries both east and west had by now reached the passengers. Sometime on Saturday night they’d learned of the trapping of the double on the west slope near Snow-shed 2.2; but by this morning they’d also heard about the stranding of the single rotary on the east slope. Harrington, Clary, and a dozen other men from the X801 were now at Wellington, having spent most of Saturday on a monstrously arduous trek back from Gaynor to Cascade Tunnel Station. A trip of only nine miles, it had consumed hours in the storm-lashed night, each man taking turns breaking trail in the deep snow that had fallen in the brief interval since their own rotary’s last run. The effort had nearly finished the already fatigued men. “As soon as I got into the depot [at Cascade Tunnel Station] I was completely exhausted,” Clary would later recall. “I just fell on the floor and I slept there for about 8 hours with my rain clothes on, boots and everything else.” For the passengers, the presence of these men at Wellington this morning was an ominous sign, bearing mute testimony to the hopeless blockage of the line in both directions. Even conductor Pettit was no longer talking about an imminent escape from the mountain.
These new setbacks seemed to call for some sort of concerted response from the passengers, but no one could decide what that response should be. “Everybody was making suggestions and plans of their own,” Henry White would later recall. They were “talking over the matter independent[ly] with the conductor and anybody they could meet—it was the only topic of conversation.”
One female passenger—Libby Latsch, the fashionable young hair-accessories entrepreneur—came up with the idea of going over O’Neill’s head. According to White, “She made the suggestion that we wire the Chamber of Commerce, or the newspapers, or somebody of importance in Seattle. … She thought if there was anybody who was influential enough on the train, we ought to do that.” There were no immediate volunteers, and in any case the telegraph wires were down at the time. So White merely patronized her: “I assured her, more to calm her than anything else, that just the minute the wires were up … I would wire my house and get them busy in the matter.”
Other passengers, less willing to wait for outside assistance, began exploring further the possibility of hiking out. Solomon Cohen, who had originated the idea, talked about it with locomotive engineer Antony Blomeke. The engineer offered to guide Cohen and another passenger down the mountain, but insisted that the trip would require significant effort on their part. “I told them I would not carry them out,” Blomeke later explained. He also assured Cohen that they were perfectly safe on the passing tracks, but “if they wanted to come up and sleep in the bunkhouse at Wellington where I stayed, that they were welcome to it.”
Certain Wellington residents were more emphatic in discouraging any exodus on foot, convinced that spending several hours out on the trail would be far more dangerous than staying put. When asked by passenger George Davis whether it was worth trying to walk out with three-year-old Thelma, one of the engineers on the electric motors, Charles Andrews, advised him not to attempt it. “His chances with the kid,” Andrews insisted, “would have been poor.”
George Loveberry, the owner of a hay and feed store in Georgetown, Washington, even offered $20 to a local trapper named Robert Schwartz to serve as mountain guide on the trip down. Schwartz demurred, citing a very persuasive reason: Unless the hikers wanted to follow the gradual descent of the railroad tracks the whole way down, which would involve taking a seven-mile detour loop through a long, lightless tunnel, they would have to leave the right-of-way at Windy Point and make a sharp one-thousand-foot descent to Scenic below. The slope in question was too steep to hike down, so they would have to slide to the bottom on their backsides—and probably kill themselves in the process. According to Loveberry, the trapper claimed that “he would not take a bunch of tenderfoots down there for anything.”
The urgency of these efforts only increased when the shortage of coal began to hit closer to home. By late Sunday morning it was announced that the remaining locomotive on train No. 25 was down to its very last ton of fuel. If that supply ran out, there would be no heat on the train, and so it was decided that some of the coal from the Fast Mail’s engine should be transferred to the Seattle Express. After much digging out of the second passing track, the shorter mail train was shifted just enough so that coal could be shoveled from one engine’s tender to the other. This expedient would alleviate the problem for a time, but the implication was clear: The coal would not last forever, and soon the passengers and railroaders might have to scavenge the surrounding mountainside for wood to heat the coaches.
John Merritt, weighing all of these new developments, decided that he didn’t like the looks of the situation. He and Lewis Jesseph had been tramping around in the storm all morning, checking the line down the mountain, and had been struck by the extent of the blockage. “I did not figure that they would open that track for three or four weeks,” Merritt would later testify. Faced with the prospect of being out of commission for so long, the two lawyers began to feel unbearably restless. Their supreme court hearing may have been history but, as Jesseph explained, “we had a March term of court on at home. … I had several [other] cases for trial and I was not prepared to try those cases.”
The two lawyers decided, therefore—against all advice to the contrary—to organize an escape party. Over the course of their five-day imprisonment they had become quite intimate with several of their trainmates. According to Merritt, “Mr. Jesseph and I and Mr. Loveberry and a young boy who was going to school at Portland, Mr. Horn, had got very well acquainted with a number of passengers on the train: Mrs. Latsch, and Mr. Barnhart I had known a number of years, and I knew Miss O’Reilly who was a nurse, and we were joking around with them a good deal.” This group—probably the “smart set” whose drinking and slang talk Mrs. Covington disapproved of—had often played cards together during the long hours of waiting. They had even started calling each other by nicknames. Libby Latsch was dubbed “the Merry Widow” (probably because her husband, a traveling salesman, was gone so frequently), while Nellie Sharp, the would-be chronicler of the West for McClure’s magazine, was “the Wild West Girl.” John Rogers became known as “Seattle” and R. H. Bethel, with his small white beard, was playfully referred to as “Colonel Cody.” Soliciting this group for likeminded others, the lawyers found in Loveberry, at least, a man as desperate to get away as they were. Their resolve was only strengthened when they heard that O’Neill himself had started out on a hike down to Scenic. So while the superintendent would surely have discouraged them if he’d known, the three men decided to follow him down the mountain.
’All the passengers on the train laughed at us,” Merritt later reported. “[But] when they saw we were in earnest, they urged us to stay.” Some of the women begged the lawyers not to leave, convinced that they would never make it to Scenic. After five days of inaction, though, the men would not be dissuaded. They were getting out: “We returned to the train, packed our bags, delivered them to the porter, instructed him what to do with them on reaching Seattle, and quietly left the train.”
Q: Did you have any difficulty in walking to Scenic yourself?
A: Yes sir, we had considerable difficulty.
—James H. O’Neill
Sunday Morning
At the very least, he had gotten some sleep. In the small hours of Sunday morning—for the first time since the storm had begun on Tuesday—James H. O’Neill had actually been able to peel off his boots and climb into bed for more than a quick hour’s nap. In the comfort of his snow-swaddled business car on the coal-chute track, he’d attempted to disengage from the ongoing crisis and retreat for a few hours into oblivion.
Exhausted as O’Neill was, however, he could not have had an easy night’s rest. The situation was simply too dire. The stranding of the double rotary on Saturday night, he knew, would require a radical rethinking of his entire time frame for getting the trains to safety. With only one rotary still working on the mountain, freeing the line would now be a matter of days or even longer. Other rotaries were on their way—one from the Northern Pacific’s fleet and one from the GN’s own Kalispell Division—but until they arrived, the X808 was all he had left to work with.
To make matters even more desperate, O’Neill now had a full-scale revolt of snow shovelers to complicate his calculations. On Saturday night—at his lowest moment, right after losing the double rotary—the extra gangmen had decided to give the superintendent an ultimatum: Either O’Neill would begin paying them fifty cents per hour (an exceedingly high rate for unskilled day labor in 1910) or they would all walk out.
It was a foolish demand, and foolishly timed. Without a working rotary anywhere near Stevens Pass, there was little of significance that the shovelers could do to affect the situation of the two trains at Wellington. They couldn’t very well dig out the snowslides by hand, and anything short of that would have made little appreciable difference. Nor was O’Neill—a man who had once faced down three armed robbers on a day coach in Idaho, tossing them bodily off the train—the type of person to back down in a confrontation like this. Although he had later walked into their camp and offered them a raise to twenty cents per hour plus free board, the laborers had stood firm in their demand. “I told them I would not pay it,” O’Neill would later report, “and told them to get out.”
They had obliged. All but about ten or a dozen laborers had walked off the job, leaving O’Neill with a force barely large enough to keep the switches clear in the Wellington yard.
This walkout of useless snow shovelers, however, was something that O’Neill would have to worry about later. He now had more pressing business down at Scenic, and so, leaving trainmaster Blackburn in charge at Wellington, he buttoned up his heavy cardigan sweater, shouldered into his waterproof slicker, and started off down the mountain. With no prospect of freeing the trains for at least several more days, he knew he had to get emergency supplies up to Wellington to keep the stranded passengers warm and well fed. The relief train from the coast was due to arrive at Scenic that morning, but since there was no working telegraph connection, O’Neill would have to be physically present to deploy its cargo of food, fuel, and men. He would also want to check in with master mechanic J. J. Dowling, to be sure that the all-important X808—his last operational rotary on the mountain—kept working.
These two tasks were mission enough, but there was probably one other objective to O’Neill’s Sunday morning journey to Scenic. With no hope of opening the line soon, the superintendent had to be at least considering the drastic measure of evacuating the passengers off the mountain on foot. Obviously, this would be a dangerous proposition, considering the instability of the snow on Windy Mountain and the number of women, children, older people, and invalids to be carried. But the alternative—leaving them all at Wellington for days or even weeks more—was also unthinkable. So O’Neill would surely have wanted to get an idea of the feasibility of a full-scale evacuation. When the storm passed—as it must, eventually—it might be possible, with enough manpower and equipment, to get those people down to safety over the trail.
What O’Neill was experiencing on his own trip down the right-of-way, though, was hardly encouraging. The storm was still howling, its seemingly endless supply of precipitation falling now as a drenching mixture of sleet and rain that rendered the snow slushy and slick beneath his feet. The superintendent had enlisted two men to accompany him, a brakeman named Churchill and a bruiser of a trainman called “Big Jerry” Wickham. Thanks to the latter’s prodigious size (he was, as one witness later put it, “a giant… broad as a barn door”), Big Jerry was able to cruise through the high drifts with little trouble, but O’Neill and Churchill struggled along behind him. At times they could make no progress at all without scrambling. As O’Neill later explained, “I guess we crawled on our hands and knees for two thousand feet in the soft, heavy snow.”
But the newly moistened snowpack was not just more difficult to navigate—it was also more treacherous. Not long after they passed the stalled double rotary, the snowfield above the three men disintegrated into a fast-moving avalanche that came careening down the mountain-side without warning. O’Neill and Churchill watched in horror as the slide engulfed the form of Big Jerry Wickham a short distance ahead. Acting quickly, O’Neill sent a man (either Churchill or one of the men from the rotary) scrambling over the slide to see if Wickham had perhaps outrun the falling snow and gotten safely to the other side of the avalanche track. When no trace of the man could be found, they assumed that he must have been knocked from the right-of-way and carried down the side of the mountain. The superintendent was certain the man couldn’t have survived.
For O’Neill, this was another hope dashed, another possibility closed. Whatever options he had left for getting those people off the mountain, bringing them down on foot—at least until the rain stopped and the snowpack had stabilized—was not going to be one of them.
That was the most thrilling experience of my life. I was afraid I would never live to tell the story of that journey.
—John Merritt,
on the hike down to Scenic
Midmorning Sunday
Shortly after 9:30 A.M. John Merritt, Lewis Jesseph, and George Love-berry set off westward down the railroad right-of-way. With their hats pulled down over their ears and the collars of their overcoats drawn tight around their necks, they at first found the going relatively easy. The rotaries had last cleared these tracks the night before, and only two feet of wet, slushy snow had fallen since. Not far down the line, they came across two other passengers. Edward Rea and Milton Horn, both eighteen, had been on an excursion to see the snowslides and were now on their way back to the trains. When they heard that the three older men were going to attempt to hike out, they decided to go with them. Horn was overdue back at his school in Portland and, according to a letter he wrote to his mother, was afraid that if he didn’t get out soon, “I never would get there.”
Now five in number, the party continued down the mountain, straight into a strong, piercing wind. “The snow was wet and heavy,” Jesseph would later report. “It stung our faces and clung to our clothes.” When they reached the shelter of the first major snowshed—probably Shed 2—they began to reconsider their decision to leave. “Silently, we stood there [at the far end of the shed], watching the snowflakes fall, and listening to the wind chanting a dirge in the tops of the evergreens. We were debating, each with himself, whether to proceed or return to the train.”
“This doesn’t look too good to me,” Merritt said.
Jesseph was inclined to agree. But Loveberry was absolutely determined to continue, and so they went on, leaving the shelter of the snowshed and stepping out again into the furious storm.
Before long, the five men reached the first of the snowslides blocking the tracks, and it was here that the real difficulties began: “Many times we sank up to our waists,” Jesseph later wrote, “struggling desperately to get out and on our way again. Twice Merritt sank up to his armpits. Then his age and weight were heavily against him, but putting up a heroic battle each time, he succeeded. Once, in helping him, I broke through, and we both wallowed in the snow in search of a better footing.” Now that they were out in an actual slide, they could understand why the rotaries had had so much trouble clearing them. The snow was ridiculously deep in places, with windblown drifts as high as thirty-five feet. At one place, the men stepped around what they thought was a stump but then recognized, with amazement, as the top of a buried telegraph pole.
On the other side of the avalanche track they encountered the trapped double rotary, its skeleton crew of men keeping the steam engines alive with scavenged wood and melted snow. Here the hikers heard about Big Jerry Wickham’s mishap with the avalanche, a story that left them “feeling pretty sad—and, to be honest, pretty thoroughly scared.” According to Merritt: “We could look up the mountain as far as we could see … and we could look down below, and we did not know what minute the weight of ourselves was going to start a slide that would take us off the side of the mountain and bury the whole bunch of us.”
A little farther down the right-of-way, they encountered two linemen who were attempting to repair the telegraph and telephone wires. Refusing to mince words, the linemen warned them that it would mean “instant death” to go any farther. So again the hikers considered turning around, but only for a moment: “Slides that fell after we had passed made it as impossible … for us to go back as to go ahead,” Merritt explained. ‘And [so] we took our lives in our hands and started on.”
Finally, after almost four hours on the trail, they reached a long snowshed over the tracks near Windy Point. They entered it—the abrupt transition from stormy clangor to cavelike quiet as eerie as a sudden dive underwater—and hiked through the dim, dripping shed to a place where a small escape hole had been cut high on the wall facing the canyon. Rolling up their trouser cuffs, they climbed the wooden scaffolding and peered out of the hole. Far below, the lights of Scenic glowed faintly through the falling snow. The slope seemed even steeper than they had feared, following an avalanche path almost one thousand feet down the side of Windy Mountain. But they knew that this was their only way out, their only feasible escape from the paralysis of the past five days. So they plunged ahead. “We drew our overcoats between our legs,” Jesseph wrote, “squatted on our heels, and let go.”
Their descent was fast, wet, and anything but controlled and orderly. Partway down, Jesseph and Merritt both lost their balance and began tumbling. If not for the covering of deep avalanche snow that had buried all obstacles, they would surely have collided with a tree or a stump.
After a minute or two of helpless thrashing and rolling, all five slid to a stop at the bottom of the slope—battered and plastered with snow but safe. Getting to their feet, they took a few “thumping drinks” of whiskey from Merritt’s hip flask. “Here’s to happier days,” Merritt toasted grimly, and then they brushed themselves off and trudged the last few hundred yards to the Scenic Hot Springs Hotel.
At the chalet-style resort they found a scene of hectic activity. The relief train from the coast had arrived late that morning, and O’Neill, who had reached Scenic himself by now, was frantically arranging to deploy its cargo of men and supplies. The passengers were also amazed to find Big Jerry Wickham at the hotel—alive, if not quite well. The brawny trainman had somehow survived his fall into the canyon with little more than some cuts and bruises and a dislocated knee, but the story he told of his fall was harrowing.
“I thought, as I was going down, that if I hit one of those trees a little further down it would be the end of Jerry,” he said. “But I guess luck was with me, for I sailed between them as clean as a pin, and the next thing I knew I was hanging on the trunk of a tree while the snow and rocks and trees were sliding by me. My clothes were pretty well torn off. I had a knee out of joint and I felt a bit dizzy, but otherwise seemed to be none the worse for the journey.”
As soon as he caught his breath, Jerry crawled on hands and knees down to the creek at the foot of the slope. Then he slowly and agonizingly made his way to Scenic. “My knee bothered me a bit, but I put my foot in the crotch of a tree and wrenched it back in shape to go on again.”
This tale (particularly the last part of it) may have been embroidered for effect, but it was frightening enough to drive home to Jesseph’s group just how lucky they themselves had been. Knowing now the considerable perils of the trip, Merritt found a telegram form and wrote out a message for the people who’d remained behind in Wellington—a message that, because of the downed telegraph wires, would never reach them. Addressed to “Colonel Cody, Wellington,” it contained a terse but unambiguous warning: “ARRIVED SAFE, DON’T COME.”
For the two lawyers and their companions, however, the ordeal was over. Before dark all five had boarded a small work train headed back toward Skykomish, where they caught another train to the coast. “After a long delay from mudslides caused by coastal rains,” Jesseph later wrote, “we arrived in Seattle at midnight Sunday, fourteen hours after leaving the train.” He and Merritt would learn the fate of those they’d left behind only later, after the rest of the world did—when the news reached them on a train in Vancouver, Washington, some thirty-six hours later.
4:30 P.M. Cas. Tunnel reports worst day we have had so far: 32° above, snowing hard all day, about 2’ of snow and it is wet snow; wind has been blowing hard and trees falling all around; can hear slides coming down.
—J. C. Devery,
Operations Diary
Wellington
Early Sunday Evening
Sometime around 4:30 P.M. the linemen working on the wires near Windy Point restored telegraph and telephone service to Wellington, reconnecting the small station with the outside world. Second-trick operator Basil Sherlock, who had come on duty at 4:00, took the opportunity to make contact with division headquarters. While working at the telegraph key with an Everett-based dispatcher named Carl Johnson, Sherlock saw—through the rain-blurred windows of the small telegraph office—a snowslide roaring down the mountain west of the old switchback. It was the first avalanche Sherlock had ever witnessed as it occurred, and the spectacle alarmed him. He was especially concerned since the slide had come down a slope similar in steepness and forest cover to the one standing above the two trapped trains. “I told dispatcher Johnson about it,” Sherlock would later write, “and that I thought the trains were in a bad place.”
It should be noted that Sherlock is not the most reliable of witnesses. His unpublished Wellington memoir was written fifty years after the events described, and in it he tends to attribute to himself a heroic competence that strains credibility. But if his account is to be believed, Johnson, after hearing Sherlock’s concerns, left the wire open for several minutes and then returned with a message for conductor Joseph Pettit, signed by chief dispatcher G. W Turner. The telegram, a handwritten version of which still exists, read: “PETTIT: USE EVERY PRECAUTION NECESSARY FOR SAFETY OF PASSENGERS AND IF NECESSARY BACK TRAINS INTO TUNNEL.”
This was all but useless advice under the circumstances. There was at this time so much drifted snow on the tracks between the trains and the tunnel that it would have been almost impossible to move the trains even a few hundred feet back from their current position. But Sherlock carried the message to Pettit anyway. Finding him in conversation with several passengers, he pulled the conductor aside and handed him the telegram. “We both walked down the track,” Sherlock later reported, “and looked up [at] the mountain [above the trains]. … Mr. Pettit said, ‘This is putting it right up to me. If I do not move the train and they have a slide, I will be to blame for it. And if I do move the train and they do not have a slide, and I use up all the coal we have moving the train … I will be to blame for that.”
For Pettit, a man not likely to take such a responsibility lightly, this was an agonizing conundrum. Assessing avalanche danger was well beyond a conductor’s normal scope of duty. Even so, the conductor could take comfort in the fact that it was trainmaster Blackburn who was the ranking GN official at Wellington in O’Neill’s absence. Any decision to move the train would ultimately have to lie with him and superintendent O’Neill.
It was Blackburn himself who came to the telegraph office later that evening to talk to O’Neill on the telephone. Sherlock heard only Blackburn’s side of the conversation, in which (he claims) the trainmaster informed his superior about the passengers’ fears of remaining where they were—without mentioning a word about the recent slide on the switchback slope. After some further discussion, the two seemed to come to a decision: “I assume Mr. O’Neill said leave the train where it was,” Sherlock wrote. He added, however, that the superintendent was “making his decision when not on the ground, [judging solely] from the way it was put up to him. … [I] have often regretted I did not call him back on the telephone and give him my version of the situation.”
Even if Sherlock had called O’Neill—not a very plausible scenario, given the relative insignificance of a second-trick telegrapher—the same arguments for keeping the trains on the passing tracks still applied. And the whole issue was largely academic. There was simply too little coal, too little motive power, and too little manpower to make that course of action feasible. For better or worse, the trains were staying where they were.
Back on the cars of the Seattle Express, meanwhile, morale was reaching new lows. “A lady borrowed a phonograph and we had some music,” Mrs. Covington wrote in her diary, “but people are getting very blue.” Judging from several letters she was writing, the old woman’s sense of unease had returned in recent days, stoked by the increasing frequency of slides around them. She was nonetheless putting on a brave front, even comforting Anna Gray and Ada Lemman when they threatened to become hysterical. Only in her diary and letters did she reveal her growing sense of fear and loneliness: “Some of the ladies have children,” she wrote, “and I am practically alone.”
It did not ease her mind when a second group of passengers started talking of escape on foot. Earlier that evening John Rogers had witnessed the same snowslide that Basil Sherlock had seen. Although it had been a minor slide—one that extinguished itself harmlessly on the empty flat below—it had been impressive enough to convince him of the awesome power of a Cascades avalanche. And there were now other worrying developments to think about. “It was getting warmer,” Rogers later testified, “and on Sunday night I heard the quaking of timbers. … I called my friend’s attention to the fact that a slide might occur anywhere.”
Perhaps the most ominous portent was a white cornice hanging near the top of one of the surrounding peaks—“an enormous cap of snow hanging precariously on the side and clinging to the sparse timber. … The menace of that immense snow cap was a pall on all our spirits,” Rogers noted. Although the cornice was not hanging directly above the trains, it was causing serious misgivings among many of the passengers. “It didn’t look to me that there was any safe place there [at Wellington],” he concluded. “I knew it was time to act.”
So he decided to follow Jesseph and Merritt’s lead and hike out the next day. Several others agreed to go with him, but James McNeny, the man he was traveling with, refused. And there were people like Mrs. Covington who had no choice but to remain on the train. Her only conceivable course of action was to pray, which, in her own way, she did, scrawling a few lines of a familiar prayer in her diary: “If I should die before the night, I pray the Lord my work’s all right …”
Toward midnight, conductor Pettit announced that he himself would be attempting the trip down to Scenic the next morning. Food was running short, and he wanted to personally oversee the delivery of supplies brought in by the relief train. The trip would also give him firsthand knowledge of the condition of the trail, enabling him to judge the feasibility of evacuating the other passengers that way. Lest anyone think he was abandoning them, though, he would attempt to go and return on the same day, so as not to leave his charges alone for a night.
One passenger—R. M. Laville, an electrician from Missoula, Montana—had been trying to decide whether to go out over the trail with the next day’s group. After most of the other passengers had already gone to bed, he approached Pettit in the observation car to solicit his advice. The conductor responded by asking him to step outside to the vestibule of the car. As the two men stood together in the cold, rainy night, Pettit gestured toward an ominous-looking break in the snowfield about twenty or thirty feet above the train. He assured Laville, first of all, that the specific break they were looking at was not a serious threat to the train, but said that it was an indication in miniature of what they were likely to encounter on the way down to Scenic. “You can judge from this,” he said, “what may be expected out on the trail, where slides usually occur.”
No record exists of Laville’s reaction to the sight. It’s known only that, by the next morning, when Pettit and his party were making ready to leave, Laville was not among them. For whatever reason, the electrician had decided to remain with the train.