New Watercolour – A Cache in the Slash

A Hidden Drawing

A few weeks ago I did a commissioned painting for a nice couple who wanted a larger, more expansive version of my watercolour painting “Pilot”.  This one was acrylic on canvas and was much larger (40 inches wide) than the original.  True to form and forgetful to the last, I managed to take this lousy photo of the preparatory drawing, but forgot to photograph the finished painting.

I don’t do a lot of prep drawings for my paintings – that is I don’t have much of a sketchbook and I don’t leave a stack of paper drawings behind me after each canvas.  Instead, I make my drawing direct to the canvas  and work it until it’s composed right and I’m satisfied with the result.  In these prep drawings, I look for only the basics of composition.  I usually don’t get too detailed, preferring to do that with my brush instead.  In the end the drawing vanishes, of course, leaving only a photo like this.

The scene is of the Pilot House inside the Ogden Point breakwater next to the Port of Victoria.  Behind it is the expansive tarmac of the port.

Watercolour: Russell Creek Camp

 

Le Connection Francais, Russell Creek, Ingenika

Another from Russell Creek in Northern BC, this time a favorite campsite.  The viewpoint is from the bridge in the image below this one.   If you would like to read more about this, I’ve added this image to the post entitled Planting Trees and Painting Forests.  There you can read the story behind this and other similar images from Up North.

Cheers, Jeff

Watercolour: Russell Creek

The latest from the studio entitled: The Bridge Over Russell Creek at its Confluence with Stelkuz Creek, Ingenika, BC.  Okay, so I don’t do romantic or efficient titles.  This image, plus many like it can be found in my other post entitled “Planting Trees and Painting Forests” below or in the side menu.  You’ll find more info there.

from A Book of Page Numbers

Just a few images from a little design project I have been playing with.

Victoria’s South Shore

I’ve always loved Victoria for its coastline.  The way the weather moves around here compared to other places I’ve lived, seems to make the views from Dallas road and Clover Point different every time I go.  I like the moodiness, the fog and haze of winter, and the bright freshness of the beach in the sunny months.  many people find the winter here to be a real downer, but not I, not really.  I like the closeness of the sky and the blanketed feeling one can get on a day in December.  I’ve made a few canvases of this south shore area and for the most part, I’m pleased with them.  Most of these are acrylics on canvas and are more of a study of the mood of the beach than anything else.  Some of these are gone, one I’m keeping for myself.  But I still have a few left.  If you like what you see, or would like to commission something similar to the images below. I can definitely accommodate you.  I’m at jmrode@gmail.com.  I hope you enjoy these paintings as well as those in the posts below this one.

Cheers!, J.

Driftwood House, acrylic, 2005.

Finlayson Point, acrylic, 2007

Pilot, watercolour, 2007

McNeill Bay, acrylic, 2006

Dark Weather on the Juan de Fuca, acrylic, 2006.  Sold

Red Log, 2006, acrylic.  Sold

Thorny Thicket, Acrylic, 2007.

Two Watercolours

Just a couple of watercolours I like to keep around.  The first is Senainus Island in Brentwood Bay, north of Victoria.  I had the pleasure of working up there for awhile which allowed me a constantly pleasing view.  The second is the Slocan River, at the bend where our friends Jen and Andy were married.  it’s one of my most favorite spots to go to when we’re in the Kootenays.

Farmer Plum’s Great Pumpkin Adventure

Farmer Plum’s Great Pumpkin Adventure is a book by John Hansen which I had the pleasure of illustrating.  I had never done watercolour cartoons before, so it was an interesting project and fun too.  All told there are 23 illustrations to go with John’s wonderful story about a Saltspring Island pumpkin farmer who has a few adventures and learns a few lessons as he takes his pumpkins to market.  The story is excellent and keeps kids engaged and the young ones enjoy the warm, soft illustrations too.  All the kids in our lives have a copy and it often ends up being the preferred choice at storytime.  For me, I guess, that’s the best part of the whole enterprise.

Anyway, here are a few sample pages.  If you’re interested in purchasing a copy, you can reach me at jmrode@gmail.com.  I can put you in touch with the author, or sell you a copy from my stock.  I’m not sure what John sells them for, but I think it’s about $12 Cdn.

Cheers, all! J.

Planting Trees and Painting Forests

Some years ago I found myself planting trees up in the  north of the province.  I was fresh out of art college and wanted to make some landscape paintings that were more interesting than the ones we had made on the golf course next to the school.  Planting seemed like a good way to get paid to observe nature. In truth, I didn’t get paid very much – I’m not that good of a planter – but the whole two years’ experience was a real feast for the eyes.  We camped in lush, thick forest a lot, but we saw our share of ugly, torn-up places too.  It didn’t really matter, though – there was always something to look at, even if it was just a little stream or dry, distant ridge.  Even the clearcut impressed me visually.  Living in the city I had been taught that a clearcut is a massive dead zone, a hole in the ecosystem.  This latter point is undoubtably true, and I’ve seen the mudslides that prove it, but a clearcut is also an incredibly vibrant place, filled with plants and animals that thrive on ecological collapse and do their best to bring renewal.  As a planter, I got right into the soil of the mountainside.  I learned about how trees lean.  I saw what water does with itself and the things it encounters.  And through all of this, I could almost always look outward and see something macroscopically amazing in the landscape around me. At first, I’d thought about making a few sketches whilst making a little money.  Soon, though, I decided that the experience wanted some sort of documentation, a record of events, in a way.  So I made these paintings and every once in awhile I sit down and add one more to the series, based now on memory and my original drawings. A Field of Fireweed, Ingenica, 1997  Watercolour, 2000

This image is of an old cutblock that was originally logged in the 1970’s and which lies in the Ingenika Valley north of Lake Williston, BC.  It didn’t take long for this place to gain the name “The Vietnam Block” – the overgrowth was unbelievable.  My planting partner, Nadeau,  and me found ourselves in this wide hollow filled with Balsam trees and more fireweed than any planter ever wants to see.  With the fireweed reaching past our heads in some cases, the job soon became ridiculous.  We were losing sight of each other, though we were often not more than a few metres apart.  By mid day we were howling with laughter at the absurdity of planting in this jungle while still trying to maintain some sort of logical planting plan.  Good thing the quality checkers were too afraid to ascend the mountain of doom. I recall the day with crystal clarity.  The sky was warm and blue, a breeze blew through the Balsams and filled the air with a sweet scent.  I can still smell it.  All around us, life was thriving.  It seemed like we were lost for the entire day, but I can recall few times in my life when I have had so much pure fun.

Blair Flips Out on the Rookies, Vanderhoof, 1996,  Watercolour, 2001

Here is a scene that can only be played out by treeplanters : absolute blind rage met with absolute indifference. We were on loan to another camp, working out of a logging camp near Vanderhoof, trucking daily to the slimiest, most bug infested place I have ever been.  The loggers had destroyed a riparian zone (fancy term for a creek) and sent the water spilling out down this section of the mountain.  This had the effect of creating an instant swamp as the water trickled down the slope.  Not afraid to fight stupidity with stupidity, the logging company decided to fix the problem by digging  metre-deep holes all over the cutblock, spaced about 3-4 metres apart.  Beside each hole was the soil removed from the hole, lying in a mound.  It was on the mounds that we were instructed to put our trees.   The idea, i was told, was that the hole acts as a reservoir for the tree planted into the mound.  Over time the mound settles back down into the hole and the tree takes hold there.  Sadly, this tends to make trees grow sideways, I’ve learned. The holes soon filled up with water, which created the de facto swamp and each mini-marsh soon became filled with wriggling mosquito larvae.  Black flies flew up in clouds from the soil we cracked open with out shovels.  Deer flies followed us and ravaged our necks and hands. Great ferns grew up past our heads, confused our sense of direction and put us off our plan.  Oh, and the temperature was over 30 degrees C.  It was horrible.  Leslie fell bottom-first into one of the wriggling holes.  Graham spent an hour rigging up a type of helmet using a t-shirt, ski goggle and some duct tape.  It covered his whole head but it still wasn’t enough.  Paulie grew ever despondant and eventually quit rather than continue. Moreover, we did a lousy job of planting this wretched swamp, and we were ordered to replant.  When we heard about this, Blair, the guy freaking out in the painting, became irate and launched his nearly-new super speedy shovel into the swamp where it vanished forever.  Not to worry, he borrowed another one from Jonny. We radioed to camp that we were going to finish the replant that evening, but the supervisor said no;  he wanted to make an example of us and said as much.  So when we refused to wait until the next day (when we could be properly humiliated by the Super who liked us to call him “Rambo”) he told us that there would be no supper waiting for us when we got back to camp. OK, so he was a jerk.  We were used to that.  But this was our last day on the contract and we all just wanted to get away, back to our own, friendlier show.  So we resolved to ignore the boss, get ‘er done and light out before we could get an earful from the jerk. At this point, however, Blair really lost it.  he had been going hard all day and, I suspect, was having a few blood sugar issues.  He hopped up onto a stump and called us every dirty name in the book, threatened us with all kinds of violence, broke into a long string of broken profanity, insulted us some more, then launched his borrowed shovel into the swamp, where it too vanished forever.  Then he stomped off to sulk in the van.  We all laughed later, but at the time, I’m sure most of us thought he might well tear us all apart.  Blair was rather a large fellow who seemed to enjoy his intimidating demeanor. Blair sulked all evening, but we got the job done.  Arriving back at the logging camp, we begged the cook for a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter – a poor dinner after 14 hours of work!  The next day, Paulie, seen in the foreground of the painting, quit and went back to T.O.  We piled in the van and said goodbye to the swamp.

Morning at Km. 72, Russell Road near McKenzie.  Watercolour, 2008

This is a portion of  the first camp in my treeplanting career.  it was not too far from MacKenzie, off the Russell Road, near a stream that was swollen with spring melt.  The first camp was the hardest for me; people were still a little guarded and the weather was terrible.  The first night my tent flooded.  The second night the rain turned our camp to pure mud.  Still, it didn’t take long before we were all making friends and I was learning how to plant.

Rookies, watercolour, 2001

The best thing about being a second year planter is that you are no longer a rookie, which means you can now make fun of the newbies.  Our crew that year was made up of mostly new planters and they looked to Nadeau and I for a little guidance. I found the lot of them one day, standing around in a circle, poking listlessly at the dusty soil with their shovels and whining like children.  “It’s too hot….!  My hands hurt…!  This is stupid…!” – that sort of thing. OK, that’s fine, treeplanting is hard work.  But someone’s gonna get heatstroke just standing around here in the sun, I thought.  So I formed them into a line and got them planting side by side toward the road.  A couple of the rookies still had a lot of trees in their bags, so I began taking bundles from them, planting out their trees for them.  I mean, who cares, right?  Just planting a few friendly trees.  This was fine until the other shattered rookies saw me doing it, then whined again, insisting that I plant an equal amount of trees from everyone, as it was unfair of me to help some and not others.  At this point I suggested that it might be a good idea for them to shut up and deal with the reality of the job they’d chosen.  It didn’t make them happy, but we got to the road with a minimum of fuss. I decided to do a painting to commemorate these groaners, picking a few of the most noteworthy characters.  Here they are, at the end of the day.   The fellow on the left is the one who thought planting trees meant sitting under a tree reading Yeats and Shelley.  He found out that there is no romance on a clearcut, just toil, followed by a bulky meal and a little nosepicking.  Next to him is the fellow who, try as he might, couldn’t keep from falling over into ditches and streams.  Poor guy was always filthy.  Next to him is the girl who got heatstroke every single day, and would end up at the tree cache a little after mid-day to throw up and pass out under the tarp.  She learned that she could make as much money as a good planter by helping out in the cookbus.  The two girls in the rear were two of many who came out looking for a boyfriend.  The last fellow, on the far right is the guy who spent each evening talking obsessively about how he wanted to be the first rookie to plant 2000 trees in a day, but spent each morning coming up with newer and lamer reasons why he couldn’t go to the block that day.  After three weeks, the company sent him and some others to the Yukon border for a three week show in which they were planting in close proximity to a dozen bears or more.  He went home after that.

Northern Lights at Green Lake, near 70 Mile House, Watercolour, 2008

This is a more recent one, there might be a redo coming here, I’m not totally satisfied.  One night in mid April we were at our camp at Green Lake, near 70 Mile House, when the Northern Lights came up and filled up the entire sky with brilliant red.  I’ve never seen it’s match since, it was truly a magic experience, completely surreal. I recall that there was a small floating dock next to the lake and everyone from our camp stepped aboard to get a better look at the sky.  Of course with 60 people crowded standing on it, the dock threatened to submerge.  There were no casualties, however, just an amazing show.

Jungle Trail, Ingenica, 1997.  Watercolour, 2001

This painting is of the same “Vietnam” block depicted above. Just accessing this cutblock was a job unto itself.  Leaving camp, we’d drive about a kilometer to a landing where a helicopter took us across the valley and mid-way up the mountain.  From the helicopter we could see that the massive clearcut had been bombed at either end with a chemical defoliant that killed leafy things while leaving needley things to grow.  But they had left the centre of the block untouched and it was there, in a small clearing in the massive tangle that the helicopter dropped us with our gear.  Later it would return to various cache sites across the block to deliver giant netfuls of boxed seedlings. From the forest landing, we then proceeded to follow the overgrown trail shown in the painting, which was little more than a line of flagging tape leading upward through the thick trees and bush.  We followed the line uphill through the snarb for better than a kilometre until we reached a long ridge that more or less traversed the entire block, a distance of perhaps six kilometres from end to end.  The trail came up through the middle of the block, so depending where one’s assigned piece was, there was up to another three kilometres hike before one arrived at work.  By the time we reached the ridge, it was time for Second Breakfast! We were on this block for a few weeks, so I got to see the whole thing.  The centre of the block was a jungle, filled with head-high fireweed and twisted stands of fir and spruce which had either fallen over due to erosion or had been poorly planted  and grown sideways. The government had been overseeing the mismanagement of this block for more than twenty years and the place was an overgrown hodge-podge of old and new growth plus a great deal of pure snarby bush.  Everywhere there were stands of old Balsams that had been left by the original loggers. The North end of the block, however, was a total blast zone.  It had been sprayed with something like Agent Orange and now the whole area was nothing more than twisted frames of bleached out trees, fallen over and pushed into great slashpiles.  The bugs were thick here.  The land was utterly dessicated.  The south end of the block was worse.  It too had been hit with the Agent Orange and now everything was dead, save some long stretches of fireweed.  Worse, it seemed the entire south end had been infested with termites and fire ants – everywhere we went, we saw massive colonies and pillars and to stand still for too long in one spot was to invite a crowd of ants into your trousers.  Most unpleasant.  We did a lot of line planting here, kicking our trees into the lifeless dust.  Moreover, we had to descend a deep, rocky gulley, then climb back out through some nasty thickets just to get to this bug-bitten wasteland. At the end of each day we would fly back to the camp, then sit around looking at the block from across the valley.  Even from that distance, the block was huge and ominous.  We managed to have a lot of fun in this place, despite the horrors it presented. But looking back, it really was a horrible place that inspired the kind of laughter one employs to keep from losing one’s mind.

Sketch from a sketch, Watercolour, 2005

Block 15, near 70 Mile House.  Watercolour, 2008

Morning on the Banks of the Finlay River, 1998.  Watercolour, 2001 In my second year, we camped on the banks of the Finlay River, a truly remarkable place.  Our camp was a few kliks from Seh Keh Dene, a reserve village on the north shores of Lake Williston. The mosquitoes were particularly bad here, particularly for their enormous size.   Still, we spent most of our evenings sitting on the 3 metre banks, swatting the little beggars, watching the glacial water speeding by and taking in the view.  The camp stretched out along the banks and so a path was made along the edge of the river.  Sitting there meant you could usually see everyone in camp, as most people used the trail.  It was good for our sense of community. It was HOT while we were there and the planting was grueling.  At the end of each day, the van would drop us at camp, then take anyone who cared to go upstream about a kilometre or so.  There, overheated and made torpid from the temperature, they jumped into the river which was, by contrast, absolutely freezing.  The Finlay is fed by glaciers, it runs fast and very very cold.  Personally I couldn’t bring myself to swim, though the painfully icy water was good for cooling the feet.  However, these deranged souls who had jumped in upriver rode the freezing currents back to camp, screaming at the top of their lungs all the way.  By the time they got to camp, they were well cooled, if not a little lightheaded and confused from the temperature shock. The fellow in the foreground was named Remy, my neighbour on the banks.  The guy with the green jacket is me and the fellow behind me is Alistair, our camp medic.  We made a song one night about a guy who loses his girlfriend to the foreman while camping on the Finlay: By the breezy banks of the old Finlay river, I sat down and I started to quiver, The girl I loved, hurt me deep in my liver, By the easy, breezy banks of the old Finlay River! Graham Gets Busted.  Watercolour, 2002 Try as he might, Graham had to spend more time on his butt smoking joints than working on his piece.  one day the foreman tore a strip off him, to very little effect.

End of the Piece,  Watercolour 2001

What can I say?  It just… ended.  Watch your step.

We pulled up to a little cache somewhere in the Mugaha Valley.  The cache sat on a high bank at the edge of the road, overlooking a wide flood plain which lay below us some dozen meters or more.  a few of our crewmates were already planting on the flood plain, digging at the ground and planting near the river bank beyond.  I looked up the road and saw past a remnant copse of trees to an endless sea of jumbled slash that looked, well, like Hell, actually.  Now I had a choice to make.

The slash had been spread out all over the rising slope and was, for all purposes, a gigantic obstacle course made of snagging, unstable logs.  The planting would be slow there and painful.  Moreover, it looked pretty muddy under all those jumbled logs and where there is mud, there are often flies.  Down on the flood plain however, the people were fighting with the stickmat.  Stickmats are wide areas filled with broken sticks left behind when the machines remove slashpiles.  The logs go, but the little sticks, twigs, branches and splinters stay behind like a thick carpet over the soil.  Sometimes the stickmat can be two feet deep which can make for a lot of difficult, deep digging.  The rules state that all trees must be planted in soil, not sticks, and so one must undertake the proverbial quest for China to put the trees in.  With a heavy sigh I filled up my bags and headed for the slash.

The slash was difficult and I took a few nasty spills and the mud was indeed filled with flies which flew up annoyingly with each shovel strike in a massive attempt to eat my eyeballs.   Still, I made my way to the rear of my slashy piece, sweating and probably cursing in the 30 degree heat.  There were trees still standing there, which usually means you don’t plant there, but this day they wanted us to put a few plugs into the wooded area as there seemed to be room for them.  off I went, happy to be out of range of the flies and in the relative cool of the trees.

When one is planting, it’s easy to succumb to tunnel vision; indeed a planter spends most of his/her time scanning the ground looking for microsites.  It’s easy to lose track of the macrosite.  At one point I looked up and found myself standing on the edge of this 50 meter chasm with the river running below.  I guess if I had been looking behind me or shuffling backward, I might have gone over the edge, but it didn’t feel dangerous.  More, it was like a pleasantly awe-inspiring surprise and a reminder that just behind the devastation still lies great natural beauty.  I looked around and saw Lindsay Brown, doing more or less the same as me, staring out over the canyon, feeling the same feelings.  We had a good laugh and watched the river go for awhile.  In the end we planted out our pieces and took a cliffside path (of sorts) down to the flood plain below where we spent the rest of the afternoon hacking enormous holes in the stickmat with a dozen other sun-fried souls.

Bad Naturals, watercolour, 2009

This was an interesting block near Mackenzie, BC, though don’t ask me to find it on a map.  I don’t recall whether we were sent there or if we were diverted there, but it was essentially an overflow block that the Company had been trying to plant for more than fifteen years.  Someone said that the snowpack was too great and killed the seedlings over the winter, but if you ask me, it was the grassmat.  it was a no-screef job but I suspect that had we hacked back some of the grass, the trees would have done much better. The block was filled with “bad naturals” – trees that had come from wild seed instead of a greenhouse plug and had been twisted and warped by the wind and snow.  Apparently our trees were engineered to grow straight and fast, so they stood a better chance once the 9 months of snowpack decended and buried them.  The naturals, by contrast didn’t grow as fast and were thus more vulnerable to the weight of the snow, which caused them to grow sideways. It was easy to see how this came to be; this little block was insufferably hot in summer, bitterly cold all winter and was devoid of any cover, even slash, to block wind or hold heat.  Everything was being choked out by the grass and I can imagine the winter winds of Northern Canada lashing through this little opening in the forest. Our mission, then, was to plant one plug for every natural and fill in the spaces.  We did this at our leisure, enjoying a pleasant but breezy day.

The Bridge Over Russell Creek at the Confluence with Stelkuz Creek,  Ingenika, BC.  watercolour, 2009.

Russell Creek is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.  Really, it was little more than a simple bridge near the joining of two creeks, but there was something in the lushness of this place that has kept it firm in my memory for all this time.  It was a place of thick, mossy forest and stillness, despite the logging road and the camp of treeplanters.  It was home base for a good long time and the scene of a lot of fun and weird experiences. Russell Creek ran back to its source  somewhere on the mountain.  It was clear and cold and it sprawled and narrowed over a wide bed of white boulders.   Stelkuz Creek was thinner and deeper and it ran along the little valley bottom, draining Stelkuz Lake some two kilometers north of us.  It was muddier, silty.  For some reason we drew our cooking and drinking water from this one rather than Russell Creeks sparkling glacial water. (typical treeplanting snafu)   Above us was a series of rising bluffs that afforded a great view of the camp and the forest around it.  I recall climbing on these bluffs and being surprised at how fast we gained altitude.

In all, we stayed here twice for a total of perhaps six or seven weeks – we got to explore the area well.  We saw massive mushroom growths and moss 8″ thick, huge trees that were hundreds of years old.  We drank from the Russell Creek.  We cooled ourselved in both creeks and I myself fell into each one a few times over.  Some guys even tethered a sheet of plywood to the bridge and surfed on the current  (or tried).  Summer solstice here saw grey light shining through the treetops at 2am.  Earlier, the nights of spring had been cold and frosty, suddenly dark and kinda spooky.  We wandered down the road in the evenings, explored the creek and the forest on weekends.  Some young lovers even pitched their tents on the broad shoals in the middle of the stream.  We had a blast here and it ended up becoming one of those special places.

Sadly, the entire area, save the immediate riparian zones next to the creeks, was logged out the following year.

Le Connection Francais, watercolour, 2009

Our camp of seventy-odd treeplanters had definite and distinct neighbourhoods.  On the little tip of land where Russell Creek met Stelkuz Creek, all the college kids and teenagers had crammed their tents into an approximation of dense urban living.  These were mostly anglo kids from Toronto, Winnipeg and a few places in the Maritimes.  They called their end of the camp “The ‘Burbs” .  Out behind the cookbus was a conglomeration of wierdos and they didn’t call their neighbourhood anything; they just took a lot of drugs and spent their evenings batting rocks with their shovels.  For a time, much of the French side of the camp was centered around an old tent trailer that, owing to its relative comforts and its limited space might just as well have been a Versailles of the North.  Entry was by invitation only and one had to provide some sort of service or gift to get in.  There were other little neighbourhoods and for the most part, French and English didn’t mingle very much.  There was plenty of good will, but I think the language barrier was too difficult for most;  after a long day of planting and a heavy meal, trying to decipher another language can seem like a chore.

Our end of the camp was not like that, though; we rather liked fraternizing across cultures and we encouraged it as we were all keen to improve our language skills.  We set ourselves up across the bridge and on the far side of the creek and called ourselves the Connection Francais.  Nadeau and I were joined by Francois, who set up his miserable little pup tent in the bushes for extra protection.  Karin and her boyfriend Stephan rounded out the regulars, but there were others.  Like the two young guys who set their tents up too close to the water’s edge right in the middle of an obvious flood zone.  One night the banks spilled over and washed at least one of their tents down the creek.  Or the Motorcycle Hippie who rolled with a wooden case of wine strapped to the back of his bike.

We spent a lot of time exploring the area, crossing the creek for fun and occasionally falling in.  Francois climbed the mountain in the background of this painting – and lost his handset radio.  The next day they sent him back up with another to retrace his steps and listen for the sound of his own voice. Here Jean Francois and Marie-Eve moved out together onto the rocky shoals in the middle of the stream – a lover’s isle, though it couldn’t have been too comfortable.  Here the Motorcycle Hippie nearly burned off all his hair by passing out at the fireside and rolling closer and closer to the fire as it died down.  Here we saw moss thicker than I’ve ever seen since and whole landscapes of mushrooms and bizarre fungi.  And here, fueled by alcohol and a powerful case of bush madness, Francois woke up the camp by assailing Nadeau’s tent by the light of the Solstice night.  He threw a number of rocks, filled the night with profanity, then passed out on top of his tent in the bushes.

This is my favorite of all the spots we camped.  The people were good, it was away from the generator and there was fresh water a few steps away and a great fire pit.  I think I liked it then because it was the opposite of the cutblock where we spent our days.  The block was ruinous and dry, but our spot by the creeks was lush, cool and peaceful.

Last Tree – at a cache in the slash.

I planted my last tree about 1/2 km from our Russell Creek camp, in an overflow block off the side of the Russell Road.  The entire place was filled with enormous slashpiles, piled up like haystacks.  Still we spent a leisurely hour putting away the last few boxes, then ambled back to the camp for baths all around and one heck of a year-end party.

More scenes to come – stay tuned!   I’ll likely add to this in the coming year.  If you’re interested, watch for the eventual repost.  if you would like to contact me about these or any other works, I’m at jmrode@gmail.com. Cheers!  Thanks for your interest! J.