The Mountain That Moves

Canada's Deadliest Landslide

"The Mountain That Moves: Canada's Deadliest Landslide" by Glen Munro

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Prologue

We called it Turtle Mountain, for the way its great, rounded back broke the skyline of our valley. To us, it was a silent sentinel, a provider of the black coal that warmed our homes and filled our pockets. We slept soundly at its feet, content in its shadow, deaf to the whispers of the land.

The old peoples, the Kutenai and the Blackfoot, had a different name for it. They called it “the mountain that moves.” They spoke of it not as a thing of stone, but as a slumbering beast, and they gave its slopes a wide and respectful berth. We, in our modern certainty, paid them no mind. I was a man of science then, a believer only in the geology I could see and the stability I could measure.

I know now that a mountain has its own ancient life, its own slow, inexorable thoughts. I know that its patience is not infinite. I write this so that the world may understand how quickly, and with what terrible finality, a guardian can become a tombstone.