I can still remember the day I made this image back during the early seventies. Shortly after chopping up and splitting some wood for the wood stove, a blizzard roared through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and it dumped at least a foot of fresh snow on top of what was already on the ground.
The seventies provided me with many fine winter images, but the winters were already in the process of warming up and the snow storms became less severe. Today, we use the term Global Warming. And it is a perfectly natural sequence of events which takes place between ice ages. Unfortunately, Homo sapiens is much to blame because we have been pumping far too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I first noticed the change in temperatures when I was a young boy back in central Virginia. Now, it is starting to present a major problem as glaciers are rapidly disappearing and the Greenland ice cap is in the process of a rapid meltdown.
I've been repeating the same wood cutting process at our new home here at the 7,000 foot level along the Uncompahgre Plateau in western Colorado. We cut the wood with a bow saw, and the ax and chopping block still serve as the primary support props. Life is good up here in the high country, but the weather has also changed here. We have noticed the gradual changes since we moved to the Rocky Mountain area in 1997.
It's images such as you see here which bring back old memories and remind us of how different things were when we were much younger. I was well into my photographic documentary of the Appalachians when this image was made.
We had our first snow of the season a couple of weeks ago, and I have one posted on this blog. It was one of those nice heavy sticky snows that every outdoor photographer loves to capture.
Enjoy!
To view a larger image of the chopping block, left click on the photograph.
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