Two groups of hikers narrowly escaped death on the Pulpit Rock trail just outside Nelson on April 17.
One of those hikers was Jenna Arpita Shea, who was on her way up the trail with her seven-year-old son Oliver. They were passing beneath the rock bluff about halfway up the trail when her son looked up and said, “Gee, Mom, that looks like it could slide.”
They met a couple coming down the trail and the group stopped briefly beneath the bluff while their dogs got acquainted, then continued.
When Shea and Oliver were about 20 seconds beyond the bluff there was a loud crash behind them.
“It was so loud, it sounded like thunder,” she said. “You could hear a tree breaking and rocks rumbling. We ran away in the other direction and when I looked back I saw there was no more bluff.”
Shea said if she and her son had been beneath the bluff they would not have survived.
“We would have been crushed and killed. There is no way anyone would have survived that.”
Shea yelled to the couple below the slide, who replied that they were all right. Then she and her son continued to the top. On the way down, they crossed the rock fall with another hiker.
By that time there were emergency responders on the trail, but there were no injuries.
Derrick Bint, a trail builder who sometimes works for the Friends of Pulpit Rock Society, visited the slide and says he was surprised by the magnitude of it.
He said the rocks that fell were the size of freezers, and that there is still an overhang that might be more dangerous than before the slide.
He said the society, with the help of some firefighters from the Ministry of Forests, plans to build an alternative trail above the slide and they hope to have that done by the weekend.
In the meantime, Bint said, it would be dangerous for hikers to try to cross the rock slide. The trail will be closed until the detour trail is complete.
bill.metcalfe@nelsonstar.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter