Busy for any long weekend. The tourists and second home owners from Alberta are out in force.

I set out early this morning to get a few pictures of the valley. It’s rainy and the colours are saturated.

My trip on the highway was eventful with Albertan after Albertan passing me on slick roads, regardless of me traveling 5 over the speed limit, trying to get home, no doubt, before the weather grew worse.

Plenty sirens of emergency vehicles heading into the pass. I learned later multiple accidents had closed the highway.

The highway turned my mood and I thought about all the places the tourists refuse to look either from being blind, or not wanting to acknowledge what is part of the natural local, like staff houses in the worst parts of town, or the end of grey streets overlooking dark second homes on the east side.

Invermere has become gentrified, right down to $4 cups of coffee, art galleries selling shit wallhangings, a moose made from rusty car parts and the District brass trying extra hard to provide tourists more places to take Instagram photos, completley forgetting about the small town that attracted tourists in the first place, caring little for the people who work and live in the town.

It is sad really how short sighted our District Council and the business folk and realtors are.

Perhaps not so short sighted if your only goal is to line your pockets with money. Unfortunately these are the folks that make policy. In their eyes the bigger the line up through Sinclair Canyon the better. Tourists smashing into each other is music to their ears.

Grey day all around.