Falling in Place: Geoscience,Disaster,and Cultural Heritage at the Frank Slide,Canada’s Deadliest Rockslide

Abstract

Grounded in a case study of the Frank Slide, Canada’s Deadliest Rockslide, this article introduces a new perspective on disaster sites as socio-cultural entities by way of correlating the specific technicality of scientific research and management of disaster sites with a broader conceptual framework from within the social sciences and spatial theories. Heritage sites such as the Frank Slide are often understood as protected places that benefit the image of a sovereign nation (i.e., a “place-myth”). It is often assumed that heritage sites need protection from natural elements and from human interference. But the case of the Frank Slide is different, insofar as (a) it is a heritage site made out of the remnants of a terrifying disaster and (b) it is predicted to be further damaged when its ensuing rockslide follows (sometime between now and 5,000 years). This makes the case of the Frank Slide an intriguing one for an interdisciplinary study, since it is made up of various overlapping temporalities belonging to the measurement-time of scientific monitoring, commodity-time of the tourism industry, myth-time of national identity, duration-time of cultural memory, and the anticipation-time of further disaster. The analysis considers how these disparate activities contribute to the vitalization, devitalization, and revitalization of place, in such a way that challenges the “dark tourism” paradigm that has come to frame disaster sites. This article thus proposes a unique synthesis between these times and practices contained within them in order to elucidate and explore how various overlapping temporalities make up the visible and invisible materials of a place.

Keywords

The Frank Slide geosciences disaster sites cultural heritage spatial theory

Introduction

Fanning out east of the continental divide, north of the Montana/Alberta border, stretched over Highway 3 (the Crowsnest Highway), Google Maps satellite imagery reveals a small gray smudge of rubble and debris. Bulging as a “punctum” among the “studium” (Barthes, 1981) of the Rocky Mountain terrain, the Frank Slide, “Canada’s Deadliest Rockslide,” scars the digital imagery, which, when viewed in person, is as sublime as it is ordinary, dividing the Municipality of Crowsnest Pass, a quiet coal-mining consolidation of villages and towns with a growing population. Having collapsed on the town of Frank on April 29, 1903, at 4:10 a.m., killing somewhere between 70 and 90 residents, the slide is now a Provincial Heritage Site. Of course, in keeping with memorial sites and place-based memorial site literature (Degnen, 2005), it is a place-bound memory, but it is an easy-access tourist destination, a boulder-climber’s mecca, a geologist’s fascination, a Pika’s habitat, and, for cultural research (Ang, 2006), a place made of heterogeneous times and temporalities. It is, for the purposes of this article, a case study for trying a new “edge method” in social scientific research that traces the contours of representational frameworks.

The mountain that loosened the slide is known as “Turtle Mountain,” named as such because it moves incrementally every day (Benko & Stead, 1998); “the mountain that moves” constitutes part of the “place-image” (Shields, 1991) that runs from First Nations knowledge (Marty, 2011) to contemporary schoolroom education. The Frank Slide is also known to geologists as just partially collapsed, a prelude to more destruction, which may occur anytime between now and 5,000 years, and is monitored by seismic readers that respond to the slightest of movements. The Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, a historic resources management site, sits along the northwest edge of the fan, where activity from the slide’s monitoring stations are recorded and sent to research stations throughout Alberta as well as an international research station in Italy. Tourists are welcome to view the slide through several telescopes stations on a walking path around the center. “Scientists estimate that any major rockslide from Turtle Mountain is not likely to occur anytime soon if the mountain continues to move at its current slow, turtle-like pace,” the Centre’s website assures. “However,” they warn, “if movement begins to speed up, a major rockslide could happen much sooner. And, if an earthquake happens nearby, all bets are off” (Alberta Culture and Tourism, 2016).

Consistent with the research conducted at other disaster sites, the Frank Slide is monitored using geological sensors that respond to the otherwise imperceptible vibrations. NavStar Geomatics Ltd. installed eight Differential Global Positioning Satellites that signaled movements based on their relational position with one another, 14 Periodic Global Positioning Site Readings at two particularly fragile locations (the “saddle zone” and between the Third and South peaks at the eastern face of the mountain); and one Ground-Based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar to scan the scar of the slide every 8 minutes on a continuous cycle (Alberta Energy Regulator, 2016c). This last technology is the only operative technology now, since the others are broken due to regular wear and human interference.

After its collapse, influential studies concluded that the disaster was the consequence of bad mining practices (McConnell & Brock, 1904; Sharpe, 1938; Terzaghi, 1961), but mining has since been reduced to a negligible contributing factor (Cruden & Martin, 2007). Turtle Mountain was long unstable, a mountain made of limestone overtop of shale, with an uneasy base attributed to a vast overhang. The Frank Slide, to offer an accurate but grossly simplified account, is the result of unstable and incompatible edges converging with one another.

For the purposes of this article, the concept of “edges” is a useful interdisciplinary method, since there are many other edges (aside from naturally occurring ones) that must be taken into account when theorizing such a place as the Frank Slide: it is a tourist site, a Provincial heritage site, it is a subject of popular culture, the site of Alberta’s most diverse bird population, located around some of the best river trout fishing in Western Canada, is situated in Alberta’s only historically known 1930s Communist-led municipality (Harrison & Friesen, 2015), and is the fascination of journalists and scientists and artists alike, as well as people who “boulder.” It is made of multiple times, speeds, and temporalities. And, I contend, these times and temporalities are constituent participants whose intersections with one another contribute toward the production of place.

A major component of the more geographically informed cultural studies is a turn toward place and placemaking, since places are bound, finite, discernible based on their inclusive/exclusive kinds of operations and the multiple times, speeds, scales, and durations that people who inhabit them produce and experience. Places are at once singular, physically, and multiple, subjectively. But the latter does not disavow the former. Rob Shields writes on the topic of place that the “organizational ends of places are not merely the result of a sense of place but the effects of more virtual cultural topologies.” Instead, the “question of place raises problems of definition and of locating both spatial and social limits as well as the powers given to boundaries as limit- and edge-conditions” (Shields, 2017, p. 540).

This article proceeds with a survey of the historical and contemporary geoscientific assessment of the Frank Slide. It follows with an examination of the cultural work that goes into the area as a tourist destination and as a site of fictionalization and imperceptibility. The analysis takes into account how these disparate activities contribute to the vitalization, devitalization, and revitalization of place, in such a way that challenges the overly simplified “dark tourism” hypothesis has come to frame disaster sites. The article then states its conclusions with a mention of the resonant temporalities, speeds, and time-horizons that go into the making of place.

Time-Measurements and the Scientific Monitoring of the Frank Slide

In 1903 a catastrophic rock slide at the North Peak of Turtle Mountain buried parts of the town of Frank, killing between 70 and 90 people. Since that time extensive geological studies have been conducted to determine the likelihood of another slide, and have reached the conclusion that the potential exists for another devastating slide from the North, South, or Third Peak of Turtle Mountain. (Government of Alberta, 2017, p. 5)

To monitor a disaster site successfully, as the literature on disaster preparedness demonstrates (Hernández-Moreno & Alcántara-Ayala, 2016; Sassa, 2016; Sassa & Canuti, 2008; Smith, 2013; Wachinger, Renn, Begg, & Kuhlicke, 2013), the site needs continuous scientific monitoring as well as efficient communication and evacuation plans. The development of automated technological monitoring systems has thus improved the prediction rate of landslides (Stähli et al., 2015), though historically researchers have creatively used a vast array of instruments. Monte Arbino, for instance, was monitored continuously using a trigonometric network, involving routine surveying from 1889 to 1928, when finally the land fell on October 2, 1928, and 14 households were successfully evacuated (Bonnard, 2011). Routine photography of a potential disaster site also produced reliable monitoring results, such as the post-slide photographs of Elm in Switzerland (Melosh, 1986). After the Frank Slide, volunteers monitored the fissures at the south peak created by the disaster until 1931, when a government-funded research project isolated a “danger zone” and ordered residents in that zone to move from the path of the next slide (Wilson, 2005).

The Frank Slide disaster was for a long while attributed largely (though far from exclusively) to the Canadian American Coal and Coke Company mine at the base of the mountain that was in operation since 1900. “In hard, jointed rocks resting on softer rocks,” geologist Karl Terzaghi (1950) wrote,

A decrease of the cohesion of the rock adjoining a slab may occur on account of creep of the softer rocks forming their base . . . the limestones, forming the bulk of the peak, rested on weaker strata which certainly crept under the influence of the unbalanced pressure produced by the weight of the limestone and the rate of creep was accelerated by coal-mining operations in the weaker strata. (pp. 95-96, emphasis added)

The Frank Slide was by no means the first mountain landslide perceived as being partly caused by industry. The 1881 Swiss Canton of Glarus was attributed to bad mining practices, for instance (Stahr & Langenscheidt, 2014). There was no sense amongst the miners in the town of Frank that the “mountain-that-moves” would collapse due to the placement of the mine as research now shows the mine was strategically placed (Cruden & Martin, 2007). Ultimately, the miners working under the mountain during the slide were unharmed and dug themselves out (Cruden & Lan, 2015). Accordingly, Cruden and Martin (2007) argue that, based on contemporary and historical analysis, the Frank Slide was not caused by any one determinant. The majority of scholarship devoted to it now point toward an unstable assemblage of conditions, which makes the mine and the town connected to it, simply in the way of terrible luck (Charrière et al., 2016; Haug, Rosenau, Leever, & Oncken, 2016; Humair, Pedrazzini, Epard, Froese, & Jaboyedoff, 2013). The latest geological research argues that the Slide was attributed to an assemblage of (a) geological conditions, (b) fluvial erosion, (c) hydrometerological and hydrogeological conditions, (d) weathering processes, (e) seismic loading, and, finally, (f) anthropic influence (Charrière et al., 2016).

Better remote sensory technologies have been installed into pressure points on Turtle Mountain, starting in the 1980s (Fraser & Gruendig, 1985). The Turtle Mountain Monitoring Report (Alberta Energy Regulator, 2016a) indicates that remote sensors were divided into primary, secondary, and tertiary sensors. Primary sensors worked year-round to monitor easily detectable movements and vibrations using various tiltmeters, extensometers, and crack gauges. Secondary sensors measured movements but take environmental factors into consideration, the resultant information of which was fed into the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre by GPS devices. Tertiary sensors, meanwhile, were capable of detecting deformations beneath the surface of the mountain (unlike the other two) using a vibrating-wire piezometer and thermistors positioned to measure pore-pressure in the rocks to determine movement and vibrations beneath (Alberta Energy Regulator, 2016b).

The publicly funded instalment of more high-definition remote sensors has been crucial for the accurate prediction of another slide; indeed, high-definition remote sensors are a universal necessity for all disaster sites (Pesci et al., 2007; Tarchi, Casagli, Moretti, Leva, & Sieber, 2003). Remote sensors take what was once a site’s potential for further disaster, and access the possible, identifying the approximate date and speed of such disasters and allowing time for a proper evacuation. Indeed, what is most imperative for disaster sites (especially ones that are also cultural heritage sites) is simply to anticipate and to communicate such anticipation.

Landslides are certainly the easiest of disaster sites to monitor, with a high rate of prediction outcomes and forecast outcomes (Sassa & Canuti, 2008): the speed, efficiency, and real-time analysis of changes to the surface of landslide sites has greatly benefited communities with warning times ranging from anywhere between 6 hours and several weeks (Alexander, 1991). But lately people are able to receive the warning in real-time because information from data loggers are capable of uploading alerts directly onto people’s smartphones and directly into email accounts. (This is, indeed, the most imperative tasks at hand within the sensor innovation technology as well as geotechnical developments, with regard to wireless systems that communicate effectively and quickly without running out of battery life; Nguyen, Thanh, Nguyen, & Huynh, 2015).

In the following section, I explore the cultural themes that underlie a disaster/tourism site, since disaster sites tend to invite the “tourist gaze,” as John Urry wrote, “Structured by culturally specific notions of what is extraordinary and therefore worth viewing” (Urry & Larsen, 2011, p. 59). The cultural life is not an addendum to the science and history of the Frank Slide. Rather, culture is entwined deeply within, and the edges of human activity embrace the contours of the scientific and the natural disaster, transforming the disaster into several overlapping intensities and temporalities, which become a point of entry for leisure and for meaning-making. Landslides and natural disasters are often taken as interrupters of cultural heritage, not necessarily sites of cultural heritage themselves (Bromhead, Canuti, & Ibsen, 2006; Canuti, Margottini, Fanti, & Bromhead, 2009). Disaster sites, and places generally, are meaningless without the culture or politics that are invested in them (Guggenheim, 2014). In understanding this, sociologists have turned more recently to the tools, technologies, and conceptual apparatuses that are needed for understanding the entwined local, national, and international lives that bring meaning to disaster sites.

Time-Duration and the Cultural Productions of Frank Slide

Disaster sites are an increasingly popular area of inquiry for the sciences and the social sciences, and with such attention their risk and severity has diminished, mainly because death prevention has improved greatly through such research (Guggenheim, 2014). But the cultural aspect of disaster sites tends to attract a special kind of attention with the name of “dark tourism” attached (Bowman & Pezzullo, 2010). Part of the cultural allure of disaster sites is the safe proximity that one may experience with death. As John Urry wrote with Jonas Larsen (2011) on the allure of death in tourist destinations:

These places of death, disaster and suffering have come to be performed as places of leisure, often charging an entrance fee, providing interpretation and selling various other services and souvenirs. Many of these places developed and continue because of well-organised enthusiasts and fans [ . . . ] These enthusiasts perform “work” involving reciprocity and mutual aid [ . . . ] Organized fans or enthusiasts bring this experience of death and disaster into the public eye, to make the world witness it through a public commemoration. (p. 219)

The Frank Slide is itself a unique site that resists such a designation; however, because as much as it is a disaster site, it is also a heritage site as well as a municipality. Thus, the cultural perspective has much to offer in getting at the more generalizable characteristics of vitality in disaster sites, and a politics of multiplicity in time, space, and life beyond that which is theorized as “dark.”

This is not to deny that the Frank Slide is popular with tourists, of course, who visit the Interpretive Centre regularly, and who stand by the highway turnouts to inhabit a broad range of perspectives and sensations, snapping selfies or gliding panoramas over the image-surface of bone-crushing destruction. This adds a dimension of pleasure to the site, much of which engages the destruction and the awe: “The destruction on the valley floor is jaw-dropping,” writes one Yelp reviewer. “Pity to the unfortunate souls who lived in the path of this event of gruesome raw power” (Corey, 2009).

The poetic imagination also come to represent the Slide. From Robert Gard’s 1949 Ballad of the Frank Slide, to famed singer Stompin’ Tom Connors’ boot-stomping 1969 How the Mountain Came Down, to the 2008/2009 Frank AB by the Rural Alberta Advantage, the Frank Slide, as it is commemorated within such fictionalizations, stands as a prescription for living in that space, understanding it, and producing it, a spatial code that is more than just reading or interpreting.

“In times of natural disaster,” according to Katie Gough (2012), “we are not often asked to consider what embodied cultural memory means, or how and where it may exist,” since we have less time to contemplate than to mourn over the “pictures akin to an apocalyptic crime scene alongside a body count” (p. 103). Gough writes that cultural memory and performance rituals are intended to circumvent the tendency for nature to appear in its bare “state of emergency”; the culture of disaster is then erected in order to prevent nature from entering into a “zone of exception” that Agamben (2004) considered central to contemporary politics. Thus, songs such as Frank AB by the Rural Alberta Advantage have a poetic buffer that prevents us from accessing the Slide’s terrifying reality. Anthropomorphizing ecological disaster places the will and human reason as much as a strategy for anticipation as do the remote sensors and government and industry funding.

There is also an architectural component involved in constructing a heritage site out of a landslide, or rather into a landslide—the Frank Slide Interpretive Center sits comfortably at the northwest curve of the fan, hosting tourists (but rarely local residents) to a range of learning activities related to all the scientific and cultural aspects of the Slide. The three floors are built to resemble collapsed shale and limestone, and contain technologies from seismic reading sensors to pull, push, and jump on, to puzzles and drawing rooms for children. Other disasters known to the Crowsnest Pass, such as the Hillcrest Mine explosion (that claimed the lives of 100 miners) are also commemorated, and the very last exhibit is a replica skull of “Black Beauty” (Currie, 1993), the pure black Tyranosaurus Skull that was found some 15 km in the Crowsnest Pass riverbend.

Snaking around the Interpretive Center is a 10-km path through the rocks. It becomes clear on the walk that these are not “rocks” like one finds near a riverbed or in their back yard, but two-story chunks of mountain face, that a century ago loomed 3,000 feet over the earth, for millions of years never touched by anything but the elements. Today, they are walked through, touched, and climbed on, as they are popular for “bouldering,” a sport that has become so sought-after in the slide that local boulderers have held a “Tour de Frank” annual bouldering competition amongst the jagged rocks.

The area is also home to the Pika, a medium sized mountain rodent that only lives between boulders usually distributed across mountain tops. Recent research is suggesting that, as a reaction to climate change, the rodents are going into an “upslope range retraction” toward cooler temperatures (Moritz et al., 2008)—but on the Frank Slide floor, the Pika are unaware that the top of their mountain is, for people, the base. By chance, they remain capable of caching food sources, which has a place in the Slide by virtue of having been placed there.

Similar to other cultural heritage sites built around natural disasters like New Orleans’ post–Hurricane Katrina bus tours or the city of Pompeii, the co-constitution of science, industry, and culture are pinnacle for tying together the various time-scales of the past, the present, and the possible. As such, disaster sites easily become overwhelmed with their own past that their temporal surplus spills into the future as something that is constructed as foreseeable, thereby making the site rationally explicable. While this describes the “emergence” that many of these sites are intended to create, their representational aspects or recreations have to do more with the recreation of the event than with the virtuality of the emergence. That is, as Ekström (2016) writes, disasters such as Pompeii are heavily mediated at their tourism sites with movies, twitter feeds, and other sites of “remediation” that are intended to recreate the event. This offers us a clue as to how the re-temporalization of events causes us to note the necessity for how the past, present, and the possible (or even inevitable) fan out before our gaze.

Vitalizing Disaster

In the context of the Frank Slide, and in such a manner that is generalizable for other cultural heritage disaster sites, there are three temporal modes of vitalization that tie together the empirical data discussed above: vitalization, devitalization, and revitalization. Together, they create a place-based rhythm of vitality. Not any one of the activities addressed in the empirical section of this article may be placed exclusively in any one of these categories—they are rather concrete abstractions all at once whose realities are lived out in place.

Vitalization

The notion that a disaster such as the Frank Slide happened in the past, and that it will happen again, misses the mark for how an event is a unique production atop a surface that is continuously changing; as mentioned above, the slide is always moving, as geologists and residents in the area agree that there is no stasis in the mountain; this is not to deny Urry’s (2003) influential mobility/mooring dialectic, but to simply nod at the fact that remote sensors extract movements that are imperceptible to the naked ear or eye (though one can easily hear boulders and debris cascading down Turtle Mountain’s empty face on a normal day). This alludes to an important point about the severity of a disaster such as the Frank Slide and its continuing resonance, a form of “bare nature,” which I import from Rob Shields (2013) but with a slight variation: whereas Shields constructs the term to frame the manner in which resource extraction excludes nature from a semiotic framework, the sense of bare nature here is a suddenly sublime event involving a pure force of nature, which, in its own event, excluded itself; its inclusion in the semiotic system by making sense of it is what places it beyond our capacity for understanding. Vitalization is thus relatively connected, through its place, to the technologies that render its imperceptible movements observable. The ground-based ISAR is a small and ample, but globally connected, technology whose geoengineering might spark the perennial fear of social scientists about the control of nature, environmental governance, and the fashionable “revenge of the Anthropocene” (Rickards, 2015). However, as Nigel Clark (2013) contends, a new “geologic politics” is one which urges social scientists to resist the enduring narrative of “defensive and reactive responses to geoengineering,” and to vitalize the ecology by learning “to think creatively and speculatively around interventions in earth systems—as well as engaging critically. They must be willing to reengage, in new ways, with a long human history of active, hands-on intervention in valued physical systems” (p. 2331). It would appear as though, with the one-dimensional lens of “dark tourism,” that the Frank Slide makes a spectacle of tragedy. But such a framework is but one temporality of many that make up a cultural heritage disaster site.

Devitalization

The Frank Slide would certainly be included in the annals of “Dark Tourism,” a “thanatopic”-based industry (Seaton, 1996) founded on the fascination with human- or naturally caused disaster and death (including Auschwitz, New Orleans, 9/11, and so on; see Potts, 2012). It seems obvious that the Frank Slide is thus more than a “Heritage Site.” As a “post-modern” subset of the tourist industry, “dark tourism” is oftentimes framed as a fetishization (both commodity and sexual) of the abject: it is assumed to have a negative and one-dimensional connotation. Paul Antick’s (2013) innovative fictionalization of the Bhopal Disaster site’s conversion into a tourist destination apostrophizes the tragedy-cum-profit that unforeseen disasters can bring to a global and local economy. But this designation reflects spectacular sites of disaster-commodification, such as 9/11, which Tracey J. Potts (2012) argues ignores the broader context within which “the circumstances of reception and consumption need to be accounted for in order to deal adequately with the matter of politics” (p. 245). These “extreme objects” of dark tourism (Potts, 2012, p. 246) are related to John Urry’s aforementioned discussion of “tourist kitsch” (Urry, 2003, p. 8), where disasters “are no longer there as such and can only be seen through their images” (Urry, 2003, p. 55). But in the case of the Frank Slide, which mixes tourism with education and scientific research, such a place could be intended instead to reshape encounters with death, by associating those encounters with hope, possibility, and reinvention. Thus, as “Dark Tourism” assumes a negative and one-dimensional experience a la Marcuse, the possibility of connecting death to resilience, memory, and community resonates strongly in such a habitat as the Frank Slide. It is not just an optically fascinating site, but is one which takes other non-ocular senses and sensations into account, such as the force of the slide’s collapse, its thunderous sound, its duration, or its tactility. It stands as a unique heritage site insofar as it is non-ocularcentric in its representation, inviting visitors to play on seismic sensors, to climb on the rocks, and so on. Thus, in opposition to a distal knowledge, Kevin Hetherington (2003) has proposed a “proximal construction of touch” that goes into spaces of representation and museums. In proximal knowledge, the tactile and the haptic that go into an embodied and performative knowledge production. A more fluid form of knowing, “Proximal knowledge is embodied, sensory and unsightly—it implies an out-of-the-way, out-of-sight approach to knowing the world” (p. 1935). Devitalization, a term which takes away life, makes the very experience of sudden and inexplicable death palpable, tactile, and haptic.

Revitalization

Place is made in part through its ongoing fictionalization, which, in the case of the Frank Slide, includes film (one on-site film that retells the event of the slide and one on-site slideshow presentation on the history of Alberta industry), music (several well-known Canadian songs that go from the literal retelling of the slide, in Stompin’ Tom Connors, to the metaphoric ballad of the Rural Alberta Advantage), and literature (including graphic novels and local works of fiction). It is also part of the geological research, which uses digital technologies to recreate what the Slide might have looked like before the fall, and incorporate in learning material types of engagement that make a story. Revitalization requires the work of living. There are three modes of revitalization discussed above in this article: human (boulderers), non-human (Pikas and their climate), and un-human (rock and debris). There is, finally, in contrast with the representational function of fictionalization, the direct relationships to the slide that are intended toward the imperceptible. The imperceptible is an act performed by the bodies that hug the contours of the boulders by climbing, on paths otherwise concealed from easy viewing. Imperceptibility also applies to the Pikas, who invade inhabit the slide, well fed on their natural food source that otherwise grows on mountain tops. For these living bodies, the rocks respond in habitat, at once alien but habituated and inhabited. Here, we see a continuous process of “falling” less as a politics of failure and more as conjoining with the living logic of the disaster. The boulderers, for instance, immerse themselves in what Sally Ann Ness (2013) calls an “ecology of falling,” less a consequence of climbing than an inevitability of it. Boulderers, for instance, generally anticipate falling, but are not held close to rock by a belay; they instead fall directly onto strategically placed foam pads while peers are poised, arms extended, ready to “take” the fall away from the climber. On the Frank Slide the prospect of falling is more ubiquitous, with boulderers warning that “Frank will eat your stuff if you drop anything” and that the “ground is not stable and will move around”, warning repeatedly that “you are falling into a pile of jagged rocks; not soft sand” (Vallee, 2018). And at the start of the Tour de Frank, after the boulderers waited at a meeting table for instructions for their competition, they dispersed amidst cheers, one laughing at the rocks twisting and creaking under her feet: “It’s all going to fall out from under me.” And they disappeared, imperceptibly, into a winding crevasse of rock, into the silent trails concealed beneath the tourist designated pathways. A place is thus not singly determined, as though the Frank Slide’s “tipping point” was the now disproven “bad mining practices” deep within its recesses (indeed, the mine was one of the few parts of the emergency zone which withstood the collapse), but is instead issued forth through a series of unforeseen happenings, or “ontogenetic lines” that cut into one another, spring new assemblages, many of which seem more “dwelling like” than the rapid and irrational speed at which the Slide exploded onto the town below. Place is an ongoing, epistemic, and diversified network of possibilities, and the technological innovations that go into making movements of the place possible (such as the case of the Frank Slide, the positioned telescopes on the path to allow tourists to gaze on the peaks of Turtle Mountain), are embedded within a place’s vitalization, devitalization, and revitalization.

Concluding Remark: Time in Place

One of the purposes of this article has been to demonstrate, by way of a brief and partial sketch of the Frank Slide, how place conjoins multiple temporalities and time-horizons (the stretch of time-representations for science, the imperceptible time-practice of human/nonhuman encounters). The article did not attempt to construct any new definition of place, nor claim that place is now dominated by a new ideological narrative. However, it is increasingly clear that places are never singular, are multiple, and insofar as they are multiple, require a “resonant sensibility” so as to locate their dynamic and continuous variation, including their deformations and their mutations. Such a perspective resonates greatly with the cultural topologies that are appearing in the annals of cultural theory (Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012), which are highlighting a great deal of importance in the notion that space’s essential features are retained despite the continuous mutations between the elements that demarcate its boundaries. But, as argued above, every place is its own place, made of smaller other places—a place for boulderers is influenced by the Frank Slide, while boulderers are only marginally interested in the slide “itself.” If the “place-myth” of the slide is sublimated into the nation by its “place image” (i.e., “Canada’s Deadliest Rockslide”), it stands to reason that there are resistances. Instead, we have a continuous variation on a theme: here being vitality. But there is something more temporally involved in place-making, including memorial activities and anti-memorial present-focused activities, and activities that have only the future of the present as a memory in hand (such as a selfie by the rocks). The visitors, the tourists, boulderers, and of course the researchers and the interpreters all maintain a relationship of finitude to such a place of crisis-awe, an “epiphany of catastrophe.” There is no denial of the future, nor any denial of history; rather, overlapping temporalities maintain powerful relations to place.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was generously funded by the Canada Research Chairs program.

Author Biography

Mickey Vallee holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Community, Identity and Digital Media at Athabasca University.

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