British Columbia Vacation via The Crowsnest Pass - Frank Slide

Today I decided to share some of my pictures of the Frank slide. It wasn't our first stop but it was one of the first better known tourist sites that we visited. It gave me an opportunity to post a half decent picture of myself. Earlier on in my blog there is a picture of me playing frisbee with the dog. I was not planning on being in any of those pictures and was dressed accordingly.

In 1903 the town of Frank was buried in a rock slide while the people slept. The rock that made up the slide was 150 metres deep by 425 metres high by 1000 metres wide for a total volume of 30 million cubic metres. They think the slide was caused by a combination of mining operations on Turtle Mountain and the natural freeze and thaw cycles in the mountain rock.

The next picture is when we first came down from the parking lot area to the site of the slide. We're about to walk out over the town that was covered in the slide.

The rubble covered a huge area. We mostly stuck to the trail that ran through the rocks. We still had some miles to make that day.

This is my wife Toni. The parking lot is straight ahead and up above.

This picture shows the tourist resource centre at the top of the hill by the parking lot. We didn't even go in the resource centre. We were short on time and wanted to see the actual slide instead of spending our time in a building.

This is the view looking across the slide at Turtle Mountain. It's weird thinking we just walked over top of a whole town.

You can see a haze in the sky. Part of the reason we took the Crowsnest Pass is that there were several out of control wildfires in central British Columbia. The haze you see is from the smoke. The amount of smoke varied day by day but always seemed to be present to some degree throughout the trip.

I wish I had a better picture but there were little pockets of geodes in the cracked rock. If we had more time I would have tried for a better shot of a bigger geode. I still thought it was a cool find.

This is another shot of Turtle Mountain. The trail wound around away from the slide back up to the parking lot.

This is just another shot looking up the hill to the parking lot from the trail. That was the last shot from our tour of Frank Slide. If you're ever passing through on the Crowsnest Pass I recommend stopping and checking it out. I'm glad I did.