Historical Note

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mining town of Frank sat just east of the Crow’s Nest Pass at the foot of Turtle Mountain. Most of the inhabitants were asleep at 4:10 AM on April 29, 1903, when the north face of the mountain collapsed. It took only one hundred seconds for ninety million tons of limestone to sweep through the valley, leveling houses, shacks and tents. Once the choking white clouds of limestone cleared, the official death count stood at seventy-six persons.

But no one knows for certain how many people really perished, for another fifty or so men were said to be living in tents in the valley as they looked for work. If so, these transient workers would have died along with the townsfolk in the most catastrophic landslide in the recorded history of the Rocky Mountains.