A walk through the woods....

There's a nice little walk up the road from us...just a little notch off the side of the road and if you're not looking for it, you won't see it.
I go up there with Griffin once in a while to have a look at the creek and the few big trees still left there.
On the way up the trail, the fiddle heads are unfurling as graceful as ever...

Then I find this old broken windshield from a car wreck many years ago...

Kind of a pretty mosaic disappearing back into the earth...

Not that I approve of garbage in the bush, on the contrary. It disgusts me to no end, but that's another story.

Look at this gorgeous fungus...
It's called turkey tail.

Then its up the trail, between what I call the gate. These 2 trees are but a few of the big ones left behind from logging 70 or 80 years ago.

I once heard someone say that when you're harvesting trees, you never cut down your biggest ones.
They are your strong lifelines with the good DNA.

The large horizontal cut mark at the bottom of this stump, was made from what was called a springboard.
Back in the day when logging was done by hand, notches were cut into the base of a tree where planks of wood were inserted for the loggers to stand on to work a crosscut saw and axes to cut the tree BY HAND.

For some reason, logging in those days seemed more honorable.
A real manly man job.

I mean, the conditions these men worked under, were rough and brutal.
No giant machinery to come in and plow down the forest in a week.
No sirree...these men would come in at the break of dawn with horse and oxen and work their fingers to the bone to cut down a few trees a day.

Death was a common side effect in the industry as well as life altering, disabling injuries.

...and none of this flying in and out of fancy camps by helicopter...conditions were wet, cold and primitive.
How about those ladies, cooking in camp with their long dresses and tiny pointy shoes!
Don't get me wrong...logging is still one of the most dangerous jobs around but with mechanization and technology, things became much easier.

The woods are quiet now and the undergrowth is lush and strong.
The echoes of the logger have long been silenced.
The creeks and the birdsong are the music of these forests now.