Crowsnest Pass

At about four in the morning on 29 April 1903 around thirty million cubic metres of limestone broke off Turtle Mountain and covered part of the town of Frank in about a hundred seconds, killing an estimated seventy to ninety people, most of whom were never recovered. The boulder field still lies across the valley floor and the highway runs through it. The mountain is monitored continuously because it remains unstable. The valley also holds the Hillcrest mine, where an explosion in 1914 killed one hundred and eighty-nine men, the worst mine disaster in Canadian history, and the Bellevue mine runs underground tours.

History

Stone tools found on a ridge outside Frank date back some 11,000 years, to the Clovis culture, and the pass is the richest archaeological zone in the Canadian Rockies, with chert quarries on the Livingstone ridge from about 1000 BC. Michael Phillipps of the Hudson's Bay Company crossed it in 1873 and reported coal, the Canadian Pacific Railway opened its line through the pass in 1898, and coal mines and towns grew along it from 1900, Frank among them; during prohibition in Alberta, from 1916 to 1923, rum-runners carried liquor over the provincial boundary here (Wikipedia, Crowsnest Pass).

The main sights

• The Frank Slide boulder field - limestone blocks covering the valley floor.
• The interpretive centre - the 1903 disaster and the mountain's continuing instability.
• The Bellevue mine - underground tours with lamps in a former working mine.
• The Hillcrest cemetery - graves of the 189 men killed in the 1914 explosion.

When to go

May to September for the mine tours and full opening; the Frank Slide centre is open year-round. Highway 3 is a busy truck route through the pass.

Things to know

Walking on the slide is on marked trails only; the rest is a grave site and unstable footing. The Bellevue tour is cold, wet and dark. The valley communities are small with limited services.

Nearby

Fernie lies west in British Columbia; Pincher Creek is east.

Key facts