Avalanche at the Mine: Buried Under a Machine

In November 1985, 31-year-old Les Moreland, a mechanic at the Bessie G gold mine in Colorado's La Plata Mountains, was buried alive under fifty feet of snow after a massive avalanche struck without warning. He survived by digging upward for twenty-one hours, guided only by the sound of a toppled mechanical loader, then spent another night on the mountain before being rescued. This is the story of how he did it, and what it cost him.

The Warning They Missed

Les and his colleague Jack Ritter were racing to finish a snow shed over the mine's portal before a forecast blizzard hit. When they arrived at the worksite, the rest of the crew had already left. Jack asked Les if he wanted to try finishing the job themselves. "If you want something done right," Les recalled thinking, "do it yourself." Les operated a loader while Jack filled its bucket with timber, then Les raised the bucket ten or twelve feet off the ground so he could lay planks across the frame. At one point, a small blast of snow—about a pickup load—knocked Les down inside the bucket. Jack called up: "You alright?" Les said he was fine. "There was our warning we didn't take," Les later said. They kept working. A few minutes later, as Jack handed Les the final length of timber, the mountain rumbled. They didn't hear it coming over the loader's engine. The avalanche hit before they could do more than turn their faces