CONNAUGHT, Saskatchewan — A group of strangers gathered on a chilly morning this week at a memorial on the highway where a junior hockey team’s bus and a truck crashed last Friday, killing 16 and robbing several young men and teenagers of their potential.

Bob Gallant, an oil worker from Saskatoon, stood at the junction, gesturing toward an oversize stop sign with a red blinking warning light. “How do you miss that?” he said.

“I came up here thinking that I’d see two little country roads,” he added. “But it’s wide open.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is investigating the crash, which has reverberated throughout the country, especially in rural communities where hockey is the glue binding people together. The bus had been chartered by the team, the Broncos, based in Humboldt, about 100 miles away.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Mounties said the inquiry will “take significant time,” adding that it had conducted “dozens of interviews” and extracted data from the two vehicles’ computers for review by its traffic reconstruction team.