1910 Rogers Pass Slide

Our next Brown Bag talk will be on March 4, 2009, the 99th Anniversary of the 1910 Rogers Pass Snowslide that killed 58 railway workers. John Woods, retired Chief Park Naturalist of Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Parks, and Cathy English, curator of Revelstoke Museum & Archives, will give the talk together. John will talk about the slide itself, the weather system that caused it, and the geography of the slide site, as well as previous slide research going back to the 1880s. Cathy will talk about the workers, 32 of whom were Japanese, and about the impact the slide had on the community. Revelstoke Museum and Archives has several pictures of the slide site as well as about 600 pages of original material from the Canadian Pacific Railway divisional records. The records include letters from family members of slide victims as well as receipts, telegrams and other correspondence. A committee has now been formed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the slide next year and a series of events will be planned. Watch for more details as we get closer to the date.