When Brian told me about Gates Salvage Yard and how he and Craig Fitzgerald were making a run north to check it out, I was dying to go with them. Hey, for $500 per car, maybe luck would pan out, I’d find something worth dragging home, and the next thing anybody would know, we’d have a sweet machine with the kind of patina you simply can’t fake. Luckily, my instant reaction was tempered because this was far beyond a rescue operation. What Brian and Craig did was more along the lines of visiting a museum, where the vehicles sat, waiting to be seen, as they had been since whenever they were left in place. You don’t see older yards like this much anymore…everybody was in a rush to capitalize on high scrap prices a few years ago and now most of the yards are filled with late-model Tupperware. Finding a Forward Control Jeep, an early 1940s Pontiac, and more just doesn’t happen anymore, and that’s a shame. At least we got to lay eyes on one of the last good ones. Click through the gallery below and check out more photos from the yard in Vermont:
If you wanna see some old time junk yards, go to southeastern New Mexico. There’s one on the south side of Roswell that has a 55 Nomad gasser in the front row, at least it did when I left 4 years ago and it was there the 2 years I lived there,There’s a few more on the north side and several on the edge of town to the west.Now would be a good time to go cause the rattlesnakes are sleeping.
Nice chair lift!