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.

My photographs are not intended to romanticize hardship or create heroic portraits. Instead, they invite viewers into moments of honesty. They acknowledge both the physical demands and the quiet beauty found in perseverance, friendship, and purpose. Working from within the community allows me to photograph with trust, familiarity, and respect, revealing moments that would be difficult for an outsider to witness.

Tree planting has long served as a rite of passage for many Canadians. It is a place where students finance their education, adventurers fund their passions, newcomers build community, and countless people discover strengths they never knew they possessed. It is a culture built on shared effort, sacrifice, and an understanding that is difficult to explain unless you have lived it yourself.

With Braving the Cut Blocks, I hope to create a lasting visual record of this community while giving planters something many of us never had: photographs that reflect not only what we did, but who we became while doing it.

These images are an invitation to slow down and recognize the human stories behind reforestation. Every reforestation begins with someone carrying a bag of seedlings across a cut block. Every tree has a human story at its roots.