I left the mine site in the snow but a few hundred meters lower down it was still autumn with yellow coloured deciduous trees highlighted against the dark green conifers. Further south the trees were already bare and it seemed like winter was just around the corner but a flight to Vancouver changed all that and I was back in late summer with fall flowers and green leaves. A crazy season, so dependent on distance north and height of land.
The red and orange coloured maple leafs of Quebec and Ontario symbolize autumn in the east, but here in the west the dominant colour is yellow. I tried to capture the magic of fall in the north, but failed miserably - you have to be there.
Upon leaving the mine site the first 60 km is on a gravel road that is VHF radio controlled. Vehicles travelling in a direction that is away from the main paved road call each km signs as " km in" and those heading towards the main road call "km out" (in this example km refers to a numbered km road marker). In other parts of the province radio controlled roads use "up or empty" for in and "down or loaded" for out.
On the main paved highway there is a lot of road work making a mess so vehicles are obliged to travel in a convoy, following a pilot truck. The convoy I wanted to follow passed the gravel road/main road junction just after noon and I got to the turn-off with two minutes to spare. As soon as all of the cars and trucks had passed me by I attached myself to the tail end and spent the next hour behind a camper van returning from a fall hunting trip. How did I know? The truck had two sets of moose antlers tied on to it's roof.
I couldn't stop to take any photos because that would mean losing my place in the convoy so I decided to take photos through the truck's windscreen. After the convoy part of the drive was over I continued to to take photos in this way because I was determined to make it to a shipping company before closing time. Then it started raining. Imagine, if you can, me driving at 120 to 130 km/hour, holding the camera in one hand and timing the photos so that they were taken just after the windshield wiper made a pass. Lucky for me there were no cars or trucks heading north because I didn't always stay on my side of the road.
I made one brief stop in the native community of Kitwanga or Gitwangak ("people of the place of rabbits" in the Gitxsan language). Many years ago I took some photographs of these totem poles and I wanted to see them again. A few (maybe all?) of the totems are over 100 years old and they are registered as a National Historic site of Canada. Many artists have painted the totems, including Emily Carr and A.Y Jackson, and I would have liked to learn more about them when I was visiting, but there were no signs, not even a sign on the highway letting you know they exist. I 
expected there to be a lot of information about these on the web but there is very little, the best site is a chapter in the digital collection named "To the Totem Forests".
Across from the totems is a little white church and an ornate wooden tower. No signs here either but one web site mentioned "St. Pauls Anglican Church was built by the Gitksan people of Kitwanga in 1893, one of the oldest surviving wooden churches in British Columbia". A few web sites mention that the wooden tower is a bell tower and it was rebuilt in 1974, perhaps that is why the architecture looks so different.
