The following August, the site of the incident was happened upon by John A. Randolph, an illustrator who worked for Harper's Weekly magazine. He discovered all five of the bodies at the foot of Slumgullion Pass, two miles southeast of Lake City, Colorado, in a pine-shaded gulch skirted by hemlock trees. They lay above the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River, now known colloquially as Dead Man's Gulch, which matched the description of where Packer had originally claimed that only Bell had met his end. The men would have been well within hiking distance of the nearby city had they descended the Lake Fork instead of traversing up it, especially in their alleged desperate situation, but Packer was the guide. The snow that had been covering the bodies and campsite had melted in the intervening four months. Randolph sketched the scene as he found it, and then alerted authorities in nearby Lake City. The story was covered two months later in the October 17, 1874, edition of Harper's Weekly, and included his illustration of the site.
