Sunday Stills ~ Fire

 

 This week’s Sunday Stills Challenge is Smoke or Fire or both. Extra points for being creative.

Being as it’s summer and we’ve been lucky to not have any fire to photograph in our area, I decided to go for the creative spin instead.

On Thursday my kidlets and I took a hike in the Albuquerque Bosque, where there was a very high fire danger warning posted that day. 

 Ironically, the area and park that we chose to hike in was devastated by a fire in 2003. Trees and vegetation were destroyed and native wildlife were killed in the fire and many others lost their natural habitat.

But today that bleak, burned out landscape has changed. Rather than uprooting the dead trees, this park has been turned into an unusual sculptural showcase, through the chainsaw artistry of Mark Chavez.

Chavez was one of the firefighters who fought the Bosque blaze. Now retired to pursue his love of wood carving, Chavez took the charred hulks of the burned trees and made them into owls, coyotes, turtles, and birds.

 

 

There’s also a firefighter with his foot on a vanquished dragon that was carved in honor of the men and women who quelled that blaze.

 

 Chavez also carved a beautiful eagle escaping the fire, with large wings spread wide.

 

“You take this big, barren, burned chunk of wood that doesn’t look like it's good for anything except maybe to cut it up and burn for firewood, and you start chiseling away at it, and, little by little, something starts forming. And in the end, something beautiful is made out of something that other people might see as worthless. I feel like our lives are shaped that way,” said Chavez.

Just like the proverbial Phoenix…out of this tragic Bosque fire, something pretty amazing was created.