Street View Roadkill

This is a bit macabre. Squeamish readers might want to skip directly past this entry. Maybe check back in a couple of days when I post a new article?

Anyway, I received some great input from reader Ethan recently. He was kind enough to post another example of a state highway trespassing on the territory of an adjoining state. You can see his original comment and my response at the bottom of the “New York Steals Roads from its Neighbors” post.


Confirmed

Sure enough, there’s a little section of Minnesota Highway 23 that clips Wisconsin. It runs near Duluth, Minnesota – Superior, Wisconsin, as confirmed by Wikipedia. I wish I’d known that a couple of years ago when I visited Duluth. Certainly I would have driven through there for the sheer joy of it. Oh well, that’s another item to add to the “wish list” that I’ll never be able to complete in any given lifetime.


Uh Oh!

The segment through Wisconsin stretches only a half-mile or so, making it perfect for viewing remotely in Google Street View. You know how much I love traveling roads vicariously if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile. So, naturally I decided to give it a try this evening. Then I stumbled across a distressing site.

Road Kill. Screen grab from Google Street View; September 2008

I’m displaying this as a screen print rather than an image pulled dynamically from Google Street View. That’s because it will change the next time Google sends a camera through the area to update its imagery. I’ll be left stranded just like when I wrote about the last phone booth that’s now a concrete pad. Readers from the distant future will wonder if I have some type of mental impairment. If you absolutely must see the current imagery then go ahead and click here.

For the record, I don’t think the deer cared much that it passed away within a geo-oddity. Poor thing. Still, if a creature has to meet its maker unexpectedly, it might as well occur somewhere interesting.

That got me thinking, though. When something happens along a detached stretch like this, who deals with the consequences? What constitutes “maintenance” exactly? The local wildlife will take care of this particular situation in due time. However, what about traffic violations or accidents or anything other than keeping the road paved and passable?


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One response to “Street View Roadkill”

  1. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    The deer is still there, or I should say, it’s still the same photo, but the deer has been blurred out.

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