Horse Logging in New Hampshire's North Country | Joe Klementovich, Editorial Photographer
Preserving the Old Ways — Extended Photo Collection
Rick Alger lives at the end of a dirt road in Milan, deep in New Hampshire's North Country, with two aging draft horses, a patched harness, and a quiet refusal to let something worth keeping disappear. When I first drove out to photograph him and his mare Emma, I didn't know exactly what I was walking into. What I found was one of those rare assignments where the story and the light just line up.
Horse logging is essentially obsolete. The skidders won that argument decades ago on pure economics. But watching Rick work — the way he reads Emma's breathing on an uphill pull, the way the chains sound like wind chimes moving through a stand of hardwoods, the way man and horse navigate a four-foot trail without disturbing the trees on either side — you understand pretty quickly that what he's doing isn't about efficiency. It never was.
That's what I try to find with a camera: the moments where someone's relationship to their work, to the land, or to an animal tells you something true. Rick gave me a lot of those. The North Country in January doesn't make things easy — flat light, cold hands, everything moving at the deliberate pace of a 1,700-pound mare — but that pace turned out to be the whole point. You slow down. You watch. You stop trying to force the shot.
The images here go beyond what ran in the print story. I wanted to share the fuller picture of a day in those woods with Rick and Emma — the quiet stretches, the small details, the kind of light that only happens when it's cold enough that the snow squeaks underfoot.
You can read Erik Eisele's full story at New Hampshire Magazine