Way Up There

This folks, is a shot of a real live tree logger. I never knew people still did this for a living....

I have a book called "Rhode Island - Off the Beaten Path" and every now and then Kiki and I get bored and try to find some of the unusual landmarks and out-of-the-way touristy-type things mentioned in the book. (Once we spent a whole day looking for a landmark called Devil's Footprints and mistakenly wound up in a trailer park where Satanist's lived due to horrible directions in the book and a misguided police officer, but that's a whole other story for another day.)

So, as usual when we play tourist in our own state using the directions from this book, we were lost and driving aimlessly around hoping to stumble on a place to have lunch. Lo and behold, in the short distance we see a tree fall gracefully to the ground. We decide to stop and see if more trees fall, sensing there could be photographic opportunity or at the least, relief from boredom.

Come to find out, some homeowner had hired this tree logger to cut down a bunch of trees on the property. A tree logger is like a forest cowboy, for the uninitiated. They attach ropes to themselves and climb trees with running chainsaws hanging from their body, and "limb" the trees on the way up. Once they get near the top, they "top off" the tree by cutting it down while they are still attached to it. We got to watch the whole thing and shoot to our heart's content - tree limbs and sawdust flying all about - it was fantastic.

This guy was a real hoot to shoot.

(c) 2006 by A1275