The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates is written as a series of vignettes based on twelve days in the life of the main character, which include personal moments and historical events, both famous and lesser-known. One of these happenings is an avalanche that Isaac survives at the age of eight with his sister in the town of Bingham, Utah. This event appears to be based on a real-life disaster that occurred on February 17, 1926.

Bingham, Utah was a popular miners' community in southwestern Salt Lake County, situated in a canyon of the Oquirrh Mountains. Mormons Thomas and Sanford Bingham settled there in 1848, and ore was soon discovered, but it was only in the 1860s that the area began to develop as a mining city. Even then, the remote location and the cost of transportation made moving ore and equipment difficult. However, this situation changed rapidly in 1873 with the completion of a railroad branch serving the region, resulting in a copper boom by ...