Sidebar by Catherine Lutz
Snowslides – December 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
Mining lore by its very nature must have some element of exaggeration, embellishment, or outright lying. Which of the following stories are completely true? Nobody really knows.
When an avalanche hit the Magna Charta Tunnel in 1884, two men were working in the blacksmith shop. Legend has it that one of the men was shot out of the shop like a cannonball, hurtling through a partition and landing fifty feet down the mountainside in a snow bank, unhurt.