Hope Slide

The Hope Slide was the largest landslide ever recorded in Canada. It occurred in the morning hours of January 9, 1965 in the Nicolum Valley in the Cascade Mountains near Hope, British Columbia, and killed four people. The volume of rock involved in the landslide has been estimated at 47 million cubic metres.

Prior to the landslide, a small avalanche had forced five people to stop a few miles southeast of the town of Hope, British Columbia—150 kilometres (93 mi) east of Vancouver—on a stretch of the Hope-Princeton Highway below Johnson Peak.

Two earthquakes were said to have been recorded in the general area of the slide. One quake occurred at 3:56 am and the second at 6:58 am. The slide that obliterated the mountain's southwestern slope was discovered when members of the RCMP detachment at Hope BC were dispatched to what were first reported as a couple of small rock slides. The first news reports of the slide were from CHWK Radio in Chilliwack where morning news reporter Gerry Pash and later news director Edgar Wilson filed voice reports with Broadcast News and Canadian Press.

The slide completely displaced the water and mud in Outram Lake below with incredible force, throwing it against the opposite side of the valley, wiping all vegetation and trees down to the bare rock, then splashed back up the original, now bare, slope before settling. Recent research shows that these impacts against the opposite valley sides produced the seismic signatures interpreted as earthquakes.

The slide buried a 1957 yellow Chev convertible that had become stuck in the first slide, an Arrow Transfer oil tanker truck, and a loaded hay truck that had stopped behind the tanker under a torrent of 47 million cubic metres of pulverized rock, mud, and debris 152.4 metres (500 ft) deep and 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) wide, which came down the 1,220-metre (4,000 ft) mountainside.

Norman Stephanishin, the Arrow truck driver, had stopped behind the stuck convertible. Stephanishin, unable to turn his rig around on the narrow and icy road, tried to talk the four others into walking the five kilometres back to Sumallo Lodge. Unable to convince them, Stephanishin walked east to Sumallo Lodge to phone the Highways Dept. In a short distance, Stephanishin flagged down a Greyhound Lines bus traveling to Vancouver and persuaded the driver, David Hughes, to return with him to Sumallo Lodge. Hughes turned back and is credited with saving his passengers from a tragedy.

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