Some postcards have a real dark vibe

This one was difficult to make out but I gave it my best shot. It was postmarked December 3, from Halifax, NS and addressed to Miss Shaw in Oakville, ON.

Dear Girty
You might write before you here from us from [poss. Liverpool]. We are [anserins poss. anxious] to here, from you, how are you managing with the chick. Tell the boys to help you [et] but it else [high] they will with with out me telling them.
Mother xxxx

One can imagine that Mother is on a holiday in Nova Scotia and has left a new chick in the care of her daughter. She wonders if her sons will help without being told by her. All in all, a lovely letter from an attentive parent. Which makes the ACTUAL postcard photo all the more terrifying:

What bleak vision of the Endtimes are you promulgating here? God himself has turned his face away from this cursed city! Mother– how can you look upon this postcard without feeling a chill in your very soul? What has Girty done to hurt you?!

Even more puzzling is a barely-visible detail in the top right corner. I adjusted some of the levels to make it clearer:

Hope: it’s not always the thing with feathers.

On Saturday, January 9, 1965 at approximately 4 a. m. Johnson’s Peak broke in half and plunged 4,000 feet into the valley below. The Hope-Princeton Highway #3 was covered approximately 300 feet deep and a mile and a half long. The slide is about 10 miles east of Hope and 105 miles from Vancouver.

If you look closely above the “A” in “Highway” you’ll see a tiny red and white station wagon for scale. Now you’ll probably notice that the row of some 20 pebbles running from left to centre are also vehicles.

“The slide completely displaced the ice 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.”(1)

What the postcard doesn’t say is that the landslide killed four people, two of whom remain buried here. It is unclear what triggered the slide; there were two earthquakes but they were deemed seismically too small. There had been a period of sustained cold weather and it has been posited that frozen water may have cracked up the felsite layer.

Curiously, the mountain was the site of further tragic and strange events. On August 13, 1965 a small aircraft crashed into Hope, killing the pilot. Less than a year later, on April 23, 1966, a RCAF Grumman CSR-110 Albatross went into the slide. The plane was stuck in low clouds and didn’t see the mountain until it was too late. Of the crew of six only one survived when a fireball from the ruptured fuel tank blasted him through a hole. “The force of the fireball countered the forward momentum of the aircraft so that I was not smashed to bits by the force of hitting the rocks on the mountain.” (2)