When the Mountain Fell, the Pass Stood Firm

It is not often the calendar and the press align this precisely. Today, as this edition lands in your hands, marks 123 years since the Frank Slide of 1903. At 4:10 a.m., on a cold April morning, Turtle Mountain came down.

For a community like ours, that is not just a date. It is a memory that never quite settles, a story that continues to shape who we are, and a visual reminder every time we drive between the communities that make the Crowsnest Pass.

I have been told over the years that I am a decent public speaker. That is usually followed by the question of how I became comfortable standing in front of a crowd. The answer is simple. I was lucky.

During university, I spent five summers working at the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre. I worked under Monica Field and Leanne Walker, two people who understood not only the history of this place but the responsibility of telling it well. They were the best mentors a young, naive girl could ask for. Those summers remain some of the best years of my life. I was young, in school, and largely without worry. More importantly, I had a job that never felt like work.

How could it? Every day, I stood in one of the most powerful landscapes in Canada, sharing the history of the Crowsnest Pass with visitors from around the world. I told them about the beauty of this place, but also about its hardships. I told them about the night Turtle Mountain came down, about the lives lost, and about the families and community left behind to carry on.

At first glance, it may seem strange to say that recounting tragedy could be something you love. But it is not the tragedy itself. It is what comes after.

Recently, I was on a podcast and was asked a simple question: what makes the Crowsnest Pass special? I did not hesitate. It is our history, and more specifically, it is our resilience. This is a place that has known hardship in ways many communities never will. Mining disasters, economic uncertainty, loss that runs deep through generations. And yet, it is precisely those experiences that have shaped the character of the Pass.

When bad things happen here, people do not look away. They step in. They show up. They take care of one another.

That is what the Frank Slide represents. Yes, it is one of the deadliest rockslides in Canadian history. Yes, it is a moment of unimaginable loss. But it is also a story of response, of neighbours helping neighbours, of a community pulling itself together in the face of something it could not control.

That lesson has never left me.

It is easy, especially today, to focus on division, on uncertainty, and on the voices, including special interest groups, that too often stoke that division for their own ends. But if you spend enough time in a place like this, you are reminded of something more enduring. Hard times do not have to break a community. More often than not, they define it.

We are fortunate to live where we do. I have always believed that the Crowsnest Pass is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I still do. But the beauty is not just in the mountains or the landscape. It is in the people, in the shared understanding that life here has never been easy, and that is exactly why it matters.

I often think about the generations that came before us. My own family, five generations back, came from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ireland and Scotland. They chose this place to build a life. They chose it knowing the risks, the uncertainty, and the hardship that came with it. And they stayed.

How lucky are we to inherit that choice?

On a day like today, we remember the lives lost in 1903. We remember the scale of the tragedy. But we also remember everything that followed. The strength, the perseverance, and the quiet determination to keep going.

The mountain may have fallen, but the community did not.

And more than a century later, that is still the story we carry forward.