Colorful Writing

Do you remember the spotted owl? I was reading an otherwise decent but uneventful McClatchy article about their continued decline. There I ran across a single paragraph of really pleasant descriptive writing, not a usual find in journo prose. Here it is:

The owl remains an iconic symbol in a region where once loggers in steel-spiked, high-topped caulk boots felled 200-year-old or even older trees and loaded them on trucks that compression-braked down twisty mountain roads to mills redolent with the smell of fresh sawdust and smoke from burning timber scraps.

Author Les Blumenthal has a more-than-passing knowledge of logging and truck-driving. Environmentalists killed the tepee burner a long time ago. That description takes me back four decades to when I was a doctoral student in the Pacific Northwest.