MAPPING HISTORY: MAPS AND GIS ANALYSIS OF EVENTS RELATED TO AVALANCHE VICTIMS INTERRED AT HILLSIDE CEMETERY, SILVERTON, COLORADO

In 1996 and 1997, Freda Carley Peterson published the two volume set, The Story of Hillside Cemetery, documenting, with mini-biographies, the lives of over 3300 individuals interred at the small cemetery in Silverton, Colorado. In 2003, Peterson published a selection from her original work that highlighted those killed in snowslides, a common occurrence for the miners working in the high mountains surrounding this isolated southwest Colorado mining town.

The book is a fascinating read. “The two exhausted, nearly frozen men and their animals stopped at the Highland Mary Mine that evening and waited for Joe Sellers, the mail carrier whose route was from Silverton to Brewster’s, a way station on the Stony Pass route. They knew Sellers was familiar with the trail and could safely guide them over perilous Stony Pass.” For someone not familiar with the Silverton area, though, these descriptions do not paint the kind of picture that they do for someone familiar with the area. The book needed an accompanying set of maps.

I used ArcGIS and a combination of Peterson’s documentation, published mining histories of the area, historic photos, historic and contemporary maps, and GPS data of mine locations in the Silverton Caldera complex to produce detailed 3D maps showing the possible routes traveled, snowslide locations and rescue/recovery attempts of some of the 108 documented fatal events associated with snowslides between 1875 and 1952 in the Silverton, Colorado area. I also digitized maps from Miller and Armstrong’s 1976 Avalanche Atlas, and these overlays clearly show the relationship between the historic events and recurring avalanche activity in the area.