Hope Slide Viewpoint

In January 1965, a mountain came down on Highway 3 — the scar and debris field are still plainly visible from a viewpoint 18km east of Hope

The Hope Slide is about 18 kilometres east of Hope on Highway 3, just past Nicolum Creek. There is a small pullout and viewpoint on the south side of the road. What you see is a massive grey-brown scar on the north face of Johnson Peak where rock face collapsed, and below it a debris field that still looks raw and chaotic despite 60 years of revegetation at the edges. The scale is genuinely hard to process — the pile of rock debris is taller than most buildings in Vancouver.

The viewpoint has an interpretive panel explaining what happened and showing a photo of the slide taken shortly after. It is worth stopping here even briefly. BC has other slides and washouts, but few on this scale with this clear a view of both the source and the deposit. The surrounding mountains along this stretch of Highway 3 are steep and unstable, and the slide is a stark reminder of what they can do without warning.

things to do sight
A story
It happened at 7am on January 9, 1965, triggered either by a small earthquake or by internal instability in the saturated rock face — geologists still debate the cause. In roughly 30 seconds, 46 million cubic metres of rock and debris buried a 2.4-kilometre stretch of the highway under 75 metres of rubble. Four people were killed; two cars were never recovered. The highway was rerouted around the slide zone within weeks, and the scale of the debris made excavation impossible. The mountain just stays there.