Two Winters on Deadman's Pass

• Chapter 1 The Rising Gale (1894)
• Chapter 2 The First Descent (1884)
• Chapter 3 Iron in the Frost (1894)
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Whiteout (1884)
• Chapter 5 Ropes and Rime (1894)
• Chapter 6 The Shelter at Timberline (1884)
• Chapter 7 A Race Against the Barometer (1894)
• Chapter 8 Fractured Sledges (1884)
• Chapter 9 Shadows on the Ridge (1894)
• Chapter 10 The Ghost of Deadman's Pass (1884)
• Chapter 11 Frozen Lanterns (1894)
• Chapter 12 Consumed by the Drift (1884)
• Chapter 13 The Miner's Signal (1894)
• Chapter 14 The Last Ration (1884)
• Chapter 15 Crossing the Crevasse (1894)
• Chapter 16 Delirium on the Crag (1884)
• Chapter 17 Pickaxes and Powder (1894)
• Chapter 18 Abandoned at the Spire (1884)
• Chapter 19 Echoes in the Snowbank (1894)
• Chapter 20 Buried Voices (1884)
• Chapter 21 The Shaft Uncovered (1894)
• Chapter 22 The Long Night's Toll (1884)
• Chapter 23 Breath in the Dark (1894)
• Chapter 24 The Summit's Mercy (1884)
• Chapter 25 Breaking the Cold (1894)
• Chapter 26 Two Winters Cleared (1894)

The glass in the barometer on Caleb Thorne’s desk had dropped three-tenths of an inch in less than two hours, a plummet so sharp it read like a death warrant. Outside the Silver Plume dispatch office, the December evening was eerily still, but it was the kind of stillness that made a high-country man’s spine stiffen. The air tasted of slate and crushed pine, heavy with an unnatural density that muted the ring of iron wagon tires on the frozen mud of the street.

Caleb leaned over the brass oil lamp, his thumb tracing the worn edge of a telegraph dispatch that had arrived twenty minutes prior. The message was brief, penned in the frantic, jagged hand of the operator at the high-camp station three thousand feet up the shoulder of Mount Massacre.

TIMBERLINE CABIN CAVE-IN. FIVE MINERS TRAPPED AT THE STAR OF THE WEST SHAFT. BLIZZARD CLOSING FROM THE NORTHWEST. S.O.S.

"It’s a bad night to go up the pass, Caleb," said Eli Vance, standing by the potbelly stove with a mug of black coffee held in both gloved hands. Eli was fifty-two, ten years older than Caleb, with a gray-streaked beard trimmed short and eyes that had seen enough high-altitude corpses to lose their appetite for heroic gestures. "The wind off the Divide is already humming in the telegraph wires. You can hear it from the porch."

"If we wait until dawn, those boys will be frozen solid," Caleb said, pulling his sheepskin coat from the wooden peg behind the door. "The Star of the West cabin sits right in the draw above the notch. If the drift catches them down in the timber without firewood or cover, the cold will do the work long before the air runs out."

"We took six men off that notch ten years back," Eli said quietly, his gaze shifting to the frosted windowpanes. He didn't say the rest of it. He didn't need to. Everyone in Clear Creek County remembered the winter of ’84, even if nobody spoke of it over whiskey if they could help it. The old team had gone up into a storm just like this one, led by Thomas Miller, a man who thought grit could out-wrestle a Rocky Mountain gale. Only three of them had walked back down, and none of them had brought back the miners they went to fetch.

"That was Miller’s run, Eli," Caleb said, cinching his leather belt tight over his wool vest. "And Miller didn't have the heavy rope or the new iron tackle. We aren't making his mistakes."

"Nature doesn't care whose tackle you're carrying," Eli replied, but he set his mug down on the stove top anyway and reached for his oiled canvas trousers.

Within half an hour, five men assembled in the cramped yard behind the livery stable. Beside Caleb and Eli stood Jonah Webb, a young blacksmith’s apprentice with shoulders like a draft horse and a nervous habit of whistling through his teeth; Silas Finch, an experienced prospector who knew every gulch and scree field between here and the Continental Divide; and Dr. Harris, a dry, sharp-tongued physician who carried a leather satchel lined with morphine, grease, and surgical saws strapped over his thick wool cloak.

Two pack mules, stubborn brutes named Jack and Barnum, stood shivering under heavy canvas packs. strapped to their flanks were coil after coil of thick hemp rope, iron pitons, short-handled shovels, kerosene lanterns, and two folding wooden stretchers wrapped in greasecloth to keep the moisture out of the joints.

"Keep the lanterns low," Silas grunted, tightening the cinch on Barnum’s pack until the mule blew out a wet blast of air. "The wind’s going to whip over Deadman’s Pass like a scythe once we clear the treeline. If we lose the flames, we’ll be navigating by memory and prayer, and I don't trust either after dark."

The party set out from Silver Plume at six o'clock, their boots crunching into the crust of old snow that lined the trail. For the first mile, the route followed the narrow-gauge railroad track that snaked up the canyon, a shelf of rock blasted out of the granite cliff faces forty feet above the creek. The stream below was already capped in thick, milky ice, roaring faintly beneath its frozen armor like a muffled engine.

Above them, the sky was a bowl of ink, completely devoid of stars. The storm had not yet hit the canyon floor, but high overhead, the peaks were screaming. A low, rhythmic roar—like the sound of a heavy freight train rolling over a trestle—echoed off the sheer rock faces of Deadman's Pass. It was the wind tearing over the high crags at seventy miles an hour, stripping the loose snow from the ridges and launching it into the dark.

"How long do we have before the front drops into the gulch?" Jonah asked, his voice tight as he adjusted the strap of his heavy haul-bag.

"An hour," Caleb called back over his shoulder. "Maybe forty minutes if the barometer keeps sliding. Watch your footfall on the shelf road. The ice is thick where the spring runs off the wall."

The trail narrowed sharply as they began the steep ascent toward Timberline Notch. The air grew rapidly colder, stripping the warmth from their lungs with every breath. Caleb led the way, a brass lantern held low to illuminate the treacherous narrow track. To their right, the mountain rose vertically into the black; to their left, the ground dropped off into a dark void that smelled of pine needles and damp earth.

As they rounded the spur known as the Maiden’s Elbow, the first gust of true storm wind hit them. It was not a steady breeze, but a sudden, violent wallop that threw Barnum the mule sideways against the rock face. The pack frame scraped against the granite with a screech of metal on stone that set Caleb’s teeth on edge.

"Hold the line!" Eli yelled, his voice barely carrying over the sudden blast.

The temperature dropped five degrees in as many minutes. Small, hard pellets of graupel—snow ice shaped like tiny iron shot—began to pelt their faces, stinging exposed skin and clicking against their heavy oiled coats like gravel thrown against a barn wall.

Caleb paused, leaning his shoulder into the wind to steady his lantern. Looking up into the swirling darkness above, he could see the faint, rhythmic flicker of a beacon light high up on the crag—the small oil signal the hoist-operator at the Star of the West had placed on the ridge before the main line snapped. It was a lonely, dying spark in a sea of rising white.

"We aren't the first ones to stand on this shelf in a gale," Silas said, stepping up beside Caleb and spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the swirling snow. "Old Miller’s team lost their second mule right about here back in '84. Slid straight off the ice ledge into the gulch. They heard that mule braying down in the dark for three hours while they sat tucked into a rock crevice, unable to reach it."

"We aren't losing any mules tonight," Caleb said grimly. "Pass the lead ropes back. Tie everybody to the main line. If one slips, the rest of us anchor into the rock."

Jonah hauled the thick hemp line from his shoulder, his hands already stiffening inside his wool-lined mitts. As the five men buckled themselves to the safety line at twenty-foot intervals, the sky above them seemed to collapse. The wind lost its rhythmic pulse and became a continuous, deafening roar, turning the night into a wall of blinding white powder that erased the trail, the mountain, and the men standing right beside them.

Caleb thrust his boots into the drift, leaning hard into the slope. The ascent of Deadman's Pass had officially begun, and the mountain was closing its gates.

The air in the taproom of the Red Ore Saloon in 1884 was thick with the stench of unwashed wool, cheap rye, and the damp wool coats drying over the hearth. Thomas Miller sat near the stove, a stub of charcoal in his scarred right hand, tracing a crude diagram of Mount Massacre onto the back of a handbill for blasting powder. Outside, the December dusk was settling fast, turning the snowbound streets of Silver Plume into a blue, silent wasteland.

"The wire came through from the superintendent at four," Miller said, his voice like dry gravel grinding together. He did not look up from his sketch. "The drift crushed the timber framing at the drift-mouth of the Golden Fleece. Four men inside. Maybe five, if the night shift took shelter in the portal before the slope gave way."

Across the rough pine table, Arthur Pendelton adjusted his thin, wire-rimmed spectacles with a gloved thumb. Pendelton was thirty-two, an English-born surveyor who had come out to Colorado to draft claim maps for the mining consortia and stayed because he lacked the funds to buy a return ticket to Liverpool. His face was pale, almost chalky against the dark timber walls of the saloon, and his boots were polished to a standard that invited silent mockery from every hard-rock miner in the territory.

"If the portal is collapsed, Thomas, they have thirty feet of settled slide-debris over the tunnel mouth," Pendelton said. He spoke with a clipped, deliberate cadence that made the local teamsters narrow their eyes. "And the weather glass in my room has dropped below twenty-eight inches. We are looking at a hard gale before midnight."

"They've got three days of lard and oats in the tool locker," Miller snapped, flinging the charcoal onto the floor. "What they don't have is air, if the drift filled the exhaust vent above the notch. We go tonight, or we dig out corpses come spring."

The door of the saloon swung open, ushering in a cloud of fine, needle-sharp snow and a tall, stooped man wrapped in an oversized buffalo coat. Michael Flynn shook himself like a wet Newfoundland dog, sending bits of crust flying into the hearth fire, where they hissed against the hot iron. Flynn was forty-five, an Irish drift-miner whose left knee had been smashed by a falling ore car six years earlier. He walked with a heavy, rolling hitch, but his forearms were as thick as mine timbers and his eyes were clear, pale blue, and entirely unbothered by the cold.

"The wind's turned, Thomas," Flynn said, stamping his boots until the floorboards rattled. "It’s whistling out of the north through the canyon mouth. The horses won't haul past the lower toll-gate. If we’re going up to the Fleece, we're carrying the gear on our own backs."

"Where's Sam?" Miller asked, standing up and buckling his heavy leather belt over his thick frieze coat.

"Down at the livery, shoeing the pack mule," Flynn replied, pulling a tin flask from his pocket and taking a short, sharp swallow. "Though if you ask me, that mule has more sense than the four of us. He kicked the side out of the stall when Sam showed him the snowshoes."

Ten minutes later, the small party assembled in the freezing yard behind the freight office. Besides Miller, Pendelton, and Flynn, there was young Sam Cooper, a nineteen-year-old teamster’s son who had never been higher than the timberline in winter, but who could handle a pair of mule-reins with five-pound mitts on his hands. The mule, an old black beast named Caesar, stood shivering under a crude wooden packsaddle loaded with iron crowbars, two long-handled spades, three coils of heavy hemp line, and a wooden keg of black powder sealed in tallow.

"Keep your mouths shut while we walk," Miller instructed as he checked the lashings on Caesar’s pack. "Breathing that cold air deep into your chest will rot your lungs before we reach the spur. If you need to spit, spit behind you. We don't stop until we reach the old cabin at the Maiden’s Elbow."

The town of Silver Plume dropped away behind them like a cluster of dark wooden boxes half-buried in salt. The road up the canyon was nothing more than a shelf hacked out of the quartz-bearing granite forty feet above the frozen bed of Clear Creek. The snow was knee-deep in the drifts, but Miller plunged ahead with a heavy, mechanical stride, his wide snowshoes crunching through the wind-crust with a rhythmic huff-thump, huff-thump.

Pendelton struggled behind the lead, his long, thin legs awkward on the webbing of his shoes. Every ten paces, his iron-shod walking stick would strike a hidden rock beneath the drift, sending a sharp jar through his shoulders that made his teeth ache. Above them, the mountain seemed to lean out over the narrow gorge, its gray crags lost in a swirling shroud of low, dark clouds that smelled of ozone and wet slate.

"Look at the ridge line," Flynn muttered, falling in behind Pendelton so his body would block the rising wind from the younger man. "The snow’s plume is fifty feet high off the crag. The mountain’s smoking tonight."

"It's just drift," Pendelton gasped, his breath instantly freezing into tiny white beads on his wool scarf.

"It ain't just drift when it sounds like a iron furnace blowing its valves," Flynn said dryly. "That's the top of Deadman's Pass tearing itself apart. I seen it in '78. It took three cabins down into the creek, logs, stoves, and men all together, and didn't leave enough scrap to build a doghouse."

By seven o'clock, the wind had veered from a steady quartering gust to an erratic, howling gale that drove the dry snow sideways through the trees. The spruce forest on the lower slopes offered little shelter; the ancient boughs groaned under the weight of accumulated ice, occasionally snapping with reports like pistol shots that echoed through the dark woods.

Caesar the mule began to balk, his iron-shod hooves slipping on the ice sheets where subterranean springs had seeped across the trail and frozen solid. Sam Cooper tugged hard on the halter, his boots sliding back with every step.

"Get behind him, Sam!" Miller shouted back through the gloom. His face was entirely obscured by a crust of white frost that had built up on his thick mustache and eyebrows. "Use the strap if you have to! If that mule goes over the ledge, our iron goes with him!"

"He's blind on the left side, Thomas!" Sam yelled back, his voice thin and high against the roaring gale. "The drift's hitting him right in the good eye! He can't see the path!"

"Then lead him by his ear!" Miller yelled back, not slowing his pace.

They reached the notch known as the Maiden’s Elbow just after eight. Here, the trail cleared the protective belt of lodgepole pine and emerged onto a narrow ledge carved into the naked rock face. Below them, the floor of the canyon was an abyss of swirling white; above them, three thousand feet of sheer granite rose into the screaming night.

The wind hit them like a physical weight, a solid slab of moving air that knocked Pendelton to his knees. His leather-bound notebook slipped from his coat pocket and vanished into the gray void below before he could even reach for it.

"Get down!" Flynn roared, dropping his heavy haul-bag and grabbing Pendelton by the collar of his coat to drag him back against the rock face. "Don't look down the slope! Keep your face to the stone!"

Cowering in a shallow recess in the granite cliff, the four men huddled together while the storm raged around them. The brass lantern Miller carried had blown out three minutes earlier, its glass globe shattered by a flying chunk of hard ice. The world had narrowed to the sound of the gale, the smell of damp wool and mule sweat, and the bitter, terrifying cold that seemed to sink directly into their bones.

"We can't get the mule past the shelf!" Sam cried out, his hands tucked deep into his armpits to regain some feeling in his fingers. "The ice on the ledge is six inches thick and sloped toward the drop! He won't take another step!"

Miller crept forward on his hands and knees, feeling along the frozen rock with his heavy leather mitts. The path ahead was barely two feet wide, coated in a smooth, translucent glaze of glare ice formed by the afternoon’s brief freeze-thaw cycle. Below the ledge, the drop was four hundred feet straight down into the boulder-strewn bed of the gulch.

"Unlash the heavy tackle," Miller ordered, his voice remarkably flat, as though he were discussing the delivery of firewood in town. "We leave the black powder and the big spades with the mule. We take two ropes, the short picks, and whatever dry rations we have in the bags."

"Leave the powder?" Flynn asked, leaning in close so Miller could hear him over the roar of the wind. "Thomas, if that drift at the Fleece is frozen solid, we'll never break through with hand picks. We need the powder to blow the portal clear."

"If we try to drag thirty pounds of blasting powder across that shelf in this wind, we'll all be at the bottom of the gulch before we reach the five-hundred-foot mark," Miller said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a short length of hemp cord. "Sam, tie the mule to that stunted spruce by the crevice. Leave him his oats in the bag. If we aren't back by noon tomorrow, he's clear to break his halter and head down-mountain."

"He won't survive the night out here, Mr. Miller," Sam said softly, his eyes wide with a mix of fear and protest.

"Neither will those men in the Fleece if we stay here arguing about a three-dollar mule," Miller snapped. "Pass the lead line. Pendelton, you're in the middle. If you start to slide, drop flat on your stomach and sink your pick-iron into the ice. Don't try to stand up."

They tied themselves together with twenty feet of three-quarter-inch hemp rope between each man. Miller took the lead, his heavy body hunkered low to reduce his profile against the gusts that whipped off the ridge. Behind him came Pendelton, then Sam Cooper, with Michael Flynn bringing up the rear, his bad leg dragging slightly in the deepening snow that was already filling their fresh tracks.

The crossing of the Maiden’s Elbow took forty minutes of painstaking, agonizing movement. Every step required Miller to clear a small notch in the ice with his hand pick before planting his boot. The wind screamed through the rock fissures with a high-pitched, musical whine that sounded horribly like human voices crying out from the dark.

Halfway across the shelf, Pendelton’s left foot slipped.

He didn't scream; the breath was knocked clean out of his lungs as his hip struck the hard granite ledge. His snowshoe skittered over the edge, swinging uselessly in the void, while his hands clawed wildly at the slick stone wall. The rope snapped taut between him and Miller, jerking Miller back two feet before the old miner could plant his heel against a frozen outcrop.

"Hold!" Flynn bellowed from the rear, driving his pick deep into a crack in the rock and wrapping his end of the line twice around his forearm. "I have him! Sam, grab his belt!"

Sam scrambled forward on his knees, his face pale as death, and hauled Pendelton back onto the narrow shelf by the shoulder of his coat. The English surveyor lay there for a long moment, gasping for air, his nose bleeding from where it had struck the stone. His spectacles were gone, lost to the dark gulch below, leaving his eyes wide, unfocused, and filled with a sudden, overwhelming terror.

"My glass..." Pendelton whispered, his voice trembling so violently he could barely articulate the words. "I can't see the ledge..."

Miller crawled back along the rope until he was squatting right beside the shaking surveyor. He grabbed Pendelton by the front of his heavy wool coat and dragged him up until their faces were three inches apart.

"You don't need to see, Arthur," Miller said, his gray eyes cold and unblinking behind a mask of frost. "You just need to put your feet where I put mine. Watch my boots. If you look at anything else tonight, I'll drop you off this ledge myself."

Pendelton swallowed hard, wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his sleeve, and nodded once.

They resumed the crawl. Ten minutes later, they rounded the sheer rock buttress and stepped into the relative shelter of the high timber, where the ancient, stunted pines grew low to the ground, twisted into strange, bent shapes by decades of continuous gale.

The old cabin at the timberline station—a rough shelter built six years earlier by the stage company—was barely visible through the swirling white. Its roof was half-caved under the weight of previous winters' snow, but its four log walls still stood against the storm.

Miller kicked open the heavy oak door, which hung crookedly on a single iron hinge, and the four men tumbled inside, collapsing onto the dirt floor as the wind slammed the door shut behind them, plunging them into a thick, frozen darkness that smelled of moldering straw and old ash.