I forgot to blog about this because I was so freaking pissed off about the last few days, but I’ll blog about it now: when we were driving up here, we drove through the aftermath of a disaster called the Frank Slide.

Back in 1903, when Alberta was still part of the Northwest Territories, there was a little mining town called Frank. It sat next to Turtle Mountain where—as you might guess—a lot of mining occurred.

On the morning of April 29 1903, a huge section of the mountain slid down onto Frank, burying its east side under 90 million tons of limestone within 100 seconds. A whole bunch of townspeople and non-town miners were killed.

And when I say we drove through the aftermath of the slide, we literally drove right through it on the highway. Piccy from the Frank Slide Wiki page:

In addition to the mining, the mountain’s anticline formation was unstable to begin with. Also, for several weeks before the incident, there had been very warm days and vary cold nights, causing water in the cracks of the mountain to freeze, melt, freeze, melt, repeat. ALSO, there were tremors near the base of the mountain that miners had felt for a few days.

So yeah. Cool but freaky.