A landslide in June washed away six pillars beyond the viewing platform at Keillor Point, the Edmonton site informally known as The End of the World. The city closed part of the platform after monitoring found further deterioration in the slope beneath it, following record rainfall over the summer and heavy snowfall last winter.

The City of Edmonton announced the partial closure on Wednesday. On Friday, Braeden Holmstrom, the city’s supervisor for river valley parks, said the pillars had fallen in the slide. “There used to be six pillars, and those have slid down,” Holmstrom told CTV News Edmonton. “Those used to be connected to the ones that we’re standing on right now.”

The viewing platform is supported by remnants of a pile wall installed to stabilize part of Keillor Road in the 1980s and 1990s. The road was permanently closed to traffic in 1995 because of erosion. The city has carried out regular geotechnical inspections and monitored the area for years because it is prone to landslides.

Holmstrom said last winter’s snowfall and the record rainfall over the summer accelerated the problem. The city knew the pillars had fallen, he said, but put up fencing after observing more erosion. “We knew that [the pillars] fell, but then as we saw more erosion happening, that was when we recognised that we needed to put up the fencing.”

Trails are not permitted in the Keillor Point portion of the river valley because it is an active landslide area, including during years with less rainfall. Holmstrom said the timing of slope movement is unpredictable. “We don’t know when it will happen. One day overnight, the concrete pillars can fall and we don’t know about it until they do,” he said.

The city tracks movement using monitoring technology and reports from the public and staff. “Our geotechnical teams and our engineers have monitoring stations throughout the river valley in areas that we know that there are landslides or active slumping or active zones, and those monitors can tell us that there’s shifting movement,” Holmstrom said. “We also rely on the public letting us know that things are happening within the park space, but we also have teams of staff who come to our lookouts and let us know what the consistent condition of them are.”

The End of the World was a popular but unsanctioned viewpoint for years before the city built the current lookout in 2018. Before construction, the area was a dirt hill, and visitors sat on the pillars that now support the platform. Holmstrom said the city built the lookout after people were injured at the site. “It was very dangerous. There were lots of injuries, so we turned it into this lookout to give people an opportunity to enjoy the view, but make it a little bit safer.”

Holmstrom said the part of the platform that has not been barricaded remains safe for visitors. “This area remains safe,” he said. The fencing marks the area of concern and is intended to keep people away from it, while visitors can still come to the site.

The barricades will stay in place throughout the winter season and into next year. Holmstrom said the city will adjust them once it has a plan to remediate the site or otherwise make the area safe. Work to determine how to proceed is continuing.

Slope movement has affected other parts of Edmonton’s river valley this year. Holmstrom said trails on every side of the city have been affected. On the west side, trails in Whitemud Park and the Whitemud Ravine have experienced slumping; on the east side, a closure is in place on some granular trails in Capilano.

Renato Macciotta, a professor at the Geotechnical Centre in the University of Alberta’s Civil Engineering Department, said slopes across the river valley are continually shifting. “Most of the slopes, if not all, are moving in some way or another. It’s just a natural balance of nature between erosional processes and the stability of our slopes,” he told CTV News Edmonton on Friday.

Macciotta said the North Saskatchewan River’s banks have a long record of landslides, documented in several research publications. A notable event occurred in October 1999, when a house in Riverbend slid into the valley and other homes were left hanging over the edge.

While landslide activity varies from year to year, Macciotta described 2026 as particularly active in Edmonton and across Alberta. “It’s been a very active year to say the least, and not just here in the city, but province wide,” he said. He added: “I’d say we’ve had several occasions where we had already been studying them in terms of landslide events, rockfall events, and our measurements this year have indicated that the frequency of them and the magnitude of them have definitely increased.”

The report included files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nicole Weisberg.

Based on reporting by CTV News Edmonton.