BC | wordsfromanneli

The West Edmonton Mall is known as the largest shopping mall in North America. I have never seen it, but if I’m ever in Edmonton, Alberta, I will definitely visit it. Knowing that it is famous and amazing, I could not resist taking this picture of its distant poor relation as we passed through the tiny gold mining town of Hedley, BC. Someone had a good sense of humour when they named this run-down building “The West Hedley Mall.”

In fact the building is so run down that, to the best of my knowledge, it is not there anymore. I took this picture last year after driving for many hours through dust and insects. The windshield tells the story. I thought it fit well with the contents of the photo, so I didn’t try to clean it up. This year I looked in vain for The West Hedley Mall to try for a better photo. It’s gone. Or, I might have blinked and missed it….

You can find wonderful images of the real West Edmonton Mall here.

About 100 miles east of Vancouver, BC, lies the town of Hope. From here the highway winds through a beautiful stretch of hilly country for 82 miles to the town of Princeton.

Just about 10 miles east of Hope is a viewpoint where I took some photos of the second largest landslide in Canadian history. The Hope Slide came down the mountain on January 9, 1965, burying several vehicles and killing four people. The bodies of two were retrieved, but two others remain buried beneath tons of rock.

I quote Wikipedia here: The slide 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.

I see no indication of an Outram Lake on modern maps, but there is an Outram Mountain nearby.

About a mile and a half of the highway was covered in rock, so a gravel road was constructed as a detour until a new section of highway could be built. A portion of the old highway still lies under the slide.

One sweet thing about this whole sad story is that beside the viewpoint, masses of wild strawberries are growing in the moss that covers the gritty gravel beside the road.