Gallery Opening: Braving the Cut Blocks

Braving the Cut Blocks is an ongoing documentary photography project that explores the lived experience of tree planting in western Canada. Created from inside the planting world, this work honours the people whose labour quietly shapes the future of our forests while revealing the resilience, vulnerability, and transformation that emerge through a season of physical work in the wilderness.

For seventeen seasons, I worked as both a tree planter and a foreman. Tree planting became more than a job—it became one of my greatest teachers. It taught me resilience, discipline, humility, and the value of shared hardship. It also made possible many of the dreams that followed, including a career as a professional catskiing photographer at Keefer Lake Lodge. Yet despite nearly two decades spent in the cut blocks, I realized I had only one photograph of myself actually planting.

That realization became the foundation of this project. Tree planting is often represented through numbers: millions of trees planted, hectares restored, contracts completed. What is rarely seen are the people behind those numbers—the early mornings, aching bodies, muddy boots, quiet conversations, laughter at the end of exhausting days, and the subtle personal transformations that occur when people commit themselves to demanding work in remote landscapes.

Visit the Fernie Arts Station website for more details on this event and many other great events.