Highway signs

So I'm settling down a bit after the trip and trying to gather my thoughts. I thought I'd post a couple more images of things that caught my eye. This time around the images aren't so pretty. Maybe even disturbing. They show how nature and development can clash.

On the one hand there are the many dead animals thrown violently to the side of the road where carrion birds, scavenging mammals and insects feed on their corpses. The grassy corridor cleared along the highway grass eating animals with it's good grazing and clear visibility of any approaching predators. The predators follow their prey. For them the open road seems to offer the quickest escape route.

On the other hand there is the shaggy guard dog loping through the rusting hulks of the abandoned asbestos mining town Cassiar. He seems to belong neither to the encroaching wild nor to the silent, broken machinery. This once active mining town is rapidly receding into a memory. All housing has been removed. A church and a couple of out buildings remain. The residential streets have been chewed up and vegetation is pushing up through the broken pavement. There is a chain link fence and distant equipment is moving scrap metal. A sign on the chain link fence warns us to wait for the guard to return before entering. The guard will not be returning. We drive through and back into wasteland. Free range horses raise their heads, blink and return to grazing. We photograph rusting remains, toys, a flattened chair, a door without a room, a couple of scolding squirrels. A few pairs of boots remind us it was a working man's town. Money was made and spent. There were problems with drugs and prostitution. Now there's a website to help one time residents find each other again.

The new residents are the old residents from before the humans arrived. At least some of them, the squirrels, the chipmunks, the whiskey-jacks, chickadees and ravens. On the side of the green slagheap a sight that was so odd I couldn't even believe my eyes so I didn't photograph it - the skeleton of some large mammal - a horse? Laid out with all it's bones in position but completely separated and fallen in - flat against the jade colored mound of dust. Why didn't I photograph it? I thought initially someone had assembled it there and I scornfully rejected taking a picture of this deliberate graffiti. Then I thought, 'who in his right mind would cross a muck filled pond to climb onto a mound of poisonous asbestos dust to assemble the bones of this skeleton just to catch the possible eye of some passer by like myself?' I guess no one.