Stephen Rees's blog

via Photo Challenge: Chaos

This is the site of the 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 present scene shows some of the debris field: I chose this image as the panorama shows the present more tranquil site, with vegetation returning. No-one would have survived if they had tried to photograph this event as the description of it in wikipedia makes clear.  It was chaos of a high order!

“The slide buried a Chevrolet sedan with two occupants, another car and driver, and a tanker truck and its driver under a torrent of 47 million cubic meters of pulverized rock, mud, and debris 85 metres (279 ft) deep and 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) wide, which came down the 2,000-metre (6,600 ft) mountainside. This mass of debris 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.”