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.

Other places in Things to Do