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College athletes make old-time logging their sport of choice |
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Standing on the 14-inch log, her stance wide, Sara Hutchins focuses on the large V penciled on the wood between her feet. The official counts down. At the word “Go!” Hutchins brings the ax above her head and swings it in a fluid, downward arc. Blade meets wood. Chips begin to fly. In 38.85 seconds, it’s all over.
Hutchins has been competing in this event, called the underhand (or horizontal) chop, for the past four years as a member of Colby College’s Woodsmen Team. The collegiate club enables undergraduates to compete against other college teams at fall and spring meets, or conclaves, throughout the Northeast. It’s not for the faint of heart.
The underhand chop requires well-honed precision, as competitors must hew through an area mere inches from their feet, while hunching over and pivoting their hips left then right to hack out the V on one side before turning around to do the opposite side. Chain mail socks or aluminum shin and foot guards (think Tin Woodsman) are often worn to prevent injuries, and axes are stayed only when the log is completely severed, forcing the competitor to hop to the ground.
Hutchins, who double-majored in art history and studio art at Colby—a small liberal arts college in Waterville, Maine—is unperturbed by the risks. And, after spending two summers on AMC’s Maine Woods trail crew cutting ski and hiking trails, she says she also feels quite comfortable wielding a chain saw, as she does in the stock saw event following the underhand chop. Hutchins is competing in the STIHL Timbersports Northeast Collegiate Challenge, which is held in conjunction with the 62nd Annual Woodsmen Weekend at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. STIHL, a chain saw manufacturer, began its collegiate series—five regional challenges held throughout the country—in 2003. More than 50 colleges and universities compete in the series.
Dressed in hunter-orange chaps lined with cut-resistant material, her brown hair tucked behind a backward baseball cap pinioned by orange earmuffs, Hutchins rotates each arm in wide sweeping circles to loosen up before placing her hands on the 16-inch diameter white pine log. The chain saw sits idling by her feet until the official’s call starts the heat. In 16.53 seconds, Hutchins has picked up the machine, revved it, and made two cuts (one downward and one upward), creating a “cookie” of wood, no thicker than 4 inches, that falls to the ground. She is faster than the eight other women she is competing against.
Hutchins and the rest of Colby’s co-ed woodsmen team have spent two days at this annual spring meet going up against nearly 200 other competitors from 10 Northeastern colleges. These young lumberjacks and jills have traded iPods, cell phones, and computers for axes, cross-cut saws, and chains. They have portaged and paddled canoes, thrown pulpwood into piles, and rolled behemoth logs with peaveys, the same type of long-handled hookand-spike tool that loggers used more than 100 years ago.
And they appear to be doing it in greater numbers than before. Over the past half decade, members of college woodsmen teams will tell you, there’s been an uptick in interest in a sport that may seem arcane and outmoded, not to mention dangerous. Many of the students picking up the axes are similar to Hutchins. They are psychology, history, and business majors with no prior exposure to logging, and they train right alongside those who do major in forestry or have backgrounds in chopping and cutting. In an age when the digital divide creates chasms between generations and makes virtual playgrounds more popular than actual ones, these college students are choosing outdoor skills long since abandoned by modern, large-scale logging operations—and they are relishing the physical challenge, the camaraderie, and the chance to spend time outdoors. Not unlike, perhaps, their predecessors a century ago
Origins
Events like the single buck, or “misery whip”—in which woodsmen cut through 18 to 20 inches of white pine with a single person cross-cut saw—took root in remote logging camps, where men lived for months with little in the way of entertainment. “Long before there were formal competitions, there were many informal ones,” says Don Quigley, AMC member and professor of forest technology at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). “By reputation, guys in the logging camps [were known as] the best chopper, the best sawyer, the best filer—and legend would go from camp to camp.”
Quigley—a member of the UNH woodsmen team during his undergraduate years in the 1970s and a professional competitor for about 30 years—now stages events for the STIHL Timbersports Series. He says the first formal meets in the Northeast likely began in the 1930s when woodsmen from Civilian Conservation Corps camps organized competitions and traveled from one camp to another for carnival-like events. There were foot races and boxing demonstrations, but sawing and chopping became major draws.
In May 1947, the first collegiate Woodsmen’s Weekend was held at Storrs Pond, on the Dartmouth campus. Only three schools participated, none of which had a forestry program—Dartmouth; Kimball Union Academy, a private secondary school in Meriden, N.H.; and Williams College, a small liberal arts college in Williamstown, Mass. Ross McKenney, Dartmouth Outing Club woodcraft adviser, is largely credited for starting the tradition after it was noted that most students lacked wilderness survival skills. In a May 1953 issue of Time, McKenney, a veteran Maine Guide and woodsman, is quoted as saying backwoods expertise “gives a man self-confidence. When he sleeps out and cooks his own meals, he learns not to be confused when he runs into a problem.”
As a result, collegiate woodsmen competitions evolved to feature not only lumberjack prowess but also those skills deemed necessary for survival in the backcountry. Splitting wood and chain throwing were done alongside packboard relay and fire building.
Steel Attraction
Hutchins has always liked building fires. Prior to college, she spent her summers at a camp in the Adirondacks. One of the events during the camp’s annual olympics, she says, was building a fire and boiling water. When she learned of the woodsmen team from her freshman orientation leader at Colby, she discovered there was a fire-building event in which—with only an ax, knife, and matches—competitors must bring a pot of soapy water to a boil.
That was the initial bait. What kept her hooked and going to practices three to five days a week was, in part, a desire to be outside. A hiking and backpacking leader since her teens, Hutchins says the club “seemed like a good way to be outdoors, and a good way to learn about Maine,” given its rich history in forestry.
It was also a handy way to pick up the skills she needed for her stint on AMC’s Maine Woods trail crew. She applied for the position after Travis Kendall, an AMC staff member and then one of the Colby Woodsmen team captains, recruited her and two other Colby students to join the crew. “I had never really picked up a chain saw before I came to Colby,” Hutchins says. “I learned how to use it at woodsmen first, and then, when I worked on trail crew, I was pretty much using a chain saw every day.” Megan Bujnowski, a senior at UNH this fall, finished the stock saw event in 16.62 seconds, just hundredths of a second behind Hutchins. She’s been using a chain saw since she began competing in high school meets, and stock saw is one of her favorite events. “Every saw is different,” says Bujnowski. “Being around them for so long, you really learn to listen to the RPMs—when there’s too much pressure or too little. [It takes] skill to get that equilibrium. I love to continue learning on them and figuring out more.”
Bujnowski is majoring in forestry at UNH, which has had a woodsmen team since the early 1960s. During the school season, she practices twice a week at the university and four times a week with a professional lumberjack who lives nearby. Those extra sessions
ready Bujnowski for the summer, when she competes on the New England professional fair circuit, hitting about 15 to 20 fairs before school resumes.
“I think I enjoy it as much as I do partly because it’s something that you can never really perfect,” she says. “You’re never too good to get better and learn from someone else.”
Splintered Stereotypes
Bujnowski enjoys breaking stereotypes. “If I were a guy in the sport, I wouldn’t have tried half as hard as I have as a woman,” she says.
At the Dartmouth spring meet, few stereotypes are left intact. Women wearing tie-dye spandex leggings, camouflage tank tops, or pink hair ribbons and makeup stand alongside women dressed in Carhartts, T-shirts, and baseball caps. Bujnowski, Hutchins, and the seven other women in the STIHL challenge—a standalone event after the intercollegiate meet—were the first to compete in the challenge’s inaugural women’s division. Although college meets have always been co-ed, STIHL’s collegiate series, which is aired on ESPNU and is one of the driving forces behind the growth of the sport, has offered competition only for men since its inception. The inclusion of a women’s division in the Northeast this year is an acknowledgement that lumberjills are making their mark.
Images of Paul Bunyan are being shed in other ways. Some of the men at these college meets wear sneakers, sport mohawks, or saw through a log in a collared shirt and khakis. Richard Russ, who spent three years on the woodsmen team at Unity College—a small, liberal arts institution in Unity, Maine—was a three-sport athlete in high school. A football player, he remembers seeing professional timber sports competitions on ESPN. “Whenever I saw it, I watched it,” he says, “[but] I was never big into the logging aspect.” He was an outdoorsman, though, and he was drawn to the physicality of training for woodsmen events. “I’m the kind of person that likes to trick my body into thinking it’s having fun and not working out,” Russ says. Sawing and chopping at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. four days a week did the trick.
For Russ, however, the bigger draw may be the relationships that result from team cohesion. “You are bleeding and sweating with each other,” he says, “you build this nice bond with each other…you kind of become a family. Most of the people I hung out with in college were either woodsmen or in my major.”
Unlike many competitive athletes, these students extend the good will and friendship onto the field as well. “It’s a competition, but we’re all out to help each other,” says Bujnowski. “I have so many friends from so many different teams. It’s not cutthroat.” She says it’s not uncommon for a team to lend another team a bow saw to replace one that broke. And clapping and calls of “C’mon!” and “Breathe!” and “Whole saw, whole saw!” or “Keep that angle, let’s go!” don’t stop with the first, second, or third finisher in an event. The chopper finishing last at the Dartmouth Woodsmen’ Weekend had her rivals and members of every other team in attendance cheering her on until the final, breathless cut.
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