Generational Logging?

[TreeTrunks]

Hey I’m new here, I’m not a logger myself but my dad and brother are. Dad used to fall, now he’s a side rod, my grandpa hauled logs, his dad was a logger, and it goes back I’m not unsure how many generations but there were a few more fallers, loggers, and truckers in there going back to when they were using steam donkeys and horses in the Sierras...I guess none of us like leaving the woods!

This got me wondering how many loggers in general are multi-generational and how many are completely new to the trade, meaning the first in their family to work in the woods.

So I joined to ask the community this question: Was it handed down in your family or are you the first in your family “to your knowledge“ to hear the call to the woods? This is includes every job in logging: loading, skidding, setting chokers, trucking, driving the water truck, not just the falling part.

 

[northmanlogging]

I'm technically multi generational, at least back to Grandpa Claire (it gets fuzzy beyond him), both uncles, i got into the woods early, but pursued a different path from my teens into my 30's... but like a damn fool came back to it.
My step dad did the cedar block thing for a few years, my real father, makes a great many claims, of many things...

 

[TreeTrunks]

I'm technically multi generational, at least back to Grandpa Claire (it gets fuzzy beyond him), both uncles, i got into the woods early, but pursued a different path from my teens into my 30's... but like a damn fool came back to it.
My step dad did the cedar block thing for a few years, my real father, makes a great many claims, of many things...

yeah it has a way of drawing people back in, kicking and screaming sometimes, and I have a few “story tellers” in my family too.

 

[davidwyby]

Seems to me it’s heard to break in if you’re not born into it.

 

[northmanlogging]

Seems to me it’s heard to break in if you’re not born into it.

meh, I did some gyppo loggin as a teen/preteen
but I pretty much started falling timber on my own, asking a lot of questions and talking to a great deal of people to glean their knowledge.

I"m an ok cutter now, lots of folks wayy better then me.

 

[woodfarmer]

Not as much loggers as primary income, however since my family landed in around 1750 till 1950 cut land clearing for farming, for heat and cooking for the first 200 years. They didn’t have any other source of heat till they got electricity in the early fifties but never used that for heat except a baseboard in the bathroom maybe. Not much coal around here and I don’t recall any oil/wood furnaces until the ‘70s Which only lasted a few years when the oil crisis hit , so back to wood furnaces.
Built every house and barn up until 1970’s with lumber from the bush as they also farmed. Some boys had shingle mills others like my Great-Grandfathers family would rent a bush from an older farmer for the winter to cut logs for lumber and firewood for them selves and to sell. One of my Grampas kept a diary which is really cool, went into town almost one day a week all winter long to sell a wagon load of firewood.
I’m about 8th generation that still uses wood for heating and I sell some logs, although I do have propane backup but only turn it on if I go away.

So are we ”Loggers” I don’t know but have cut down a **** ton of trees in the last 250 + years!

 

[Akbar Karim]

Well if i dig into my family history, my dad was watchman and my grand father was farmer and I am chef. And I am glad to hear yours.

 

[slowp]

When I retired, the complaint was that nobody wants do work in the woods anymore so "being born into it" might not be the case. It's more of are you going to be a reliable, safe, worker. Are you willing to work outdoors in miserable weather doing dangerous work for what may be the same pay (here in Warshington) as a burger flipper? Can you get up at 3AM to go to work on a dark and stormy morning?

I'm thinking that if you really wanted to work in the woods, you can find someone who'll take you on. But you need to start at the bottom--like setting chokers for a yarder crew. There's more to logging than falling trees. Not sure how many people who read this forum understand that bit. Money doesn't arrive until the logs make it to the mill. Getting logs up (or down) the hill and onto trucks can be difficult.

What kind of physical shape are you in? That's another biggie. I've seen guys who just couldn't do the work. It can be painful for a few days--sore muscle wise. Bruises and boo boos are part of it. Mentally, can you follow instructions? Can you stop yourself from trying to stop a log from swinging as it arrives on the landing? That was a cause of death for young, green guys.

The good outfits to work for will have a smaller turnover of employees. You'd have to research the area that you want to work in, make phone calls or show up in person and do some talking to convince them that you will be reliable, work hard, listen to the experienced folks, and be safe. Safety is huge. When an accident or death occurs, insurance rates rise. Those rates are already high. Also look into who you work with. You don't want to be relying on meth heads to watch your back. One gyppo logger told me he suspected a couple of guys were tweakers, but the drug tests went through a private company and the guys tested as OK.

I suspect you are thinking that falling timber is hard to get into, and yes, that bit is. However, a foot in the door by working on a rigging crew can make that happen after you've proven yourself.

I mean, back in the days of a lot of logging, one just had to show up in the wee hours of the morning with a hardhat and caulks and wait outside the Mt. Adams cafe. A crew missing a guy would likely stop and haul you out to the job.

 

[davidwyby]

I run a machine and welding shop. We test machinists and welders and hire or not and pay according to their abilities. If no skill, we hire as a helper and try them out. If they have a good work ethic, we start teaching them. We have gone through a lot of young people since the olders started retiring out. It seems I went from being a young guy running a shop full of my seniors to being the old guy overnight. It seems like it would be a good idea to test a want-to-be faller instead of sending them to chokers and potentially wasting 5 years of falling.


Me personally, I love falling but already have a career. I'd go fell for free on vacation if someone would give me a crack at it. Obviously don't have 5 years to set chokers. I understand that that faller needs to know what the logger needs, and that there is a lot more to falling than falling, but I'd give it a whirl and do my best...and I'm no dummy.

 

[davidwyby]

All the "other stuff" that needs to be known gets talked about a lot by those who know, but not shared. It's a tight knit old fashioned community. That's what seems to make it hard to break into to me.

 

[slowp]

I run a machine and welding shop. We test machinists and welders and hire or not and pay according to their abilities. If no skill, we hire as a helper and try them out. If they have a good work ethic, we start teaching them. We have gone through a lot of young people since the olders started retiring out. It seems I went from being a young guy running a shop full of my seniors to being the old guy overnight. It seems like it would be a good idea to test a want-to-be faller instead of sending them to chokers and potentially wasting 5 years of falling.


Me personally, I love falling but already have a career. I'd go fell for free on vacation if someone would give me a crack at it. Obviously don't have 5 years to set chokers. I understand that that faller needs to know what the logger needs, and that there is a lot more to falling than falling, but I'd give it a whirl and do my best...and I'm no dummy.

A faller wannabe has to know what has to be done to get the logs out of the woods. There has to be a "lay" to the logs--trees have to be felled to the lead or at an angle that they can be pulled out without damaging leave trees or getting hung up on stumps or making a mess. The only fallers that dump trees are the helicopter crews as a helicopter lifts the trees straight up. There is no equipment available to pull a tree over during the falling operation unless it's along a road and a spare piece of machinery is available.

Dunno where you figured 5 years. But the OP was about "logging" not specifically falling.

I was the forester type so was out checking stuff and cruising additional trees that had to come down for corridors/skid trails, landings, tailholds and road locations along with solving problems. One young logger thought I had the perfect job in the woods and I'd have to agree.

 

[davidwyby]

A faller wannabe has to know what has to be done to get the logs out of the woods. There has to be a "lay" to the logs--trees have to be felled to the lead or at an angle that they can be pulled out without damaging leave trees or getting hung up on stumps or making a mess. The only fallers that dump trees are the helicopter crews as a helicopter lifts the trees straight up. There is no equipment available to pull a tree over during the falling operation unless it's along a road and a spare piece of machinery is available.

Dunno where you figured 5 years. But the OP was about "logging" not specifically falling.

I was the forester type so was out checking stuff and cruising additional trees that had to come down for corridors/skid trails, landings, tailholds and road locations along with solving problems. One young logger thought I had the perfect job in the woods and I'd have to agree.

I'm familiar with the challeneges of "laying"...I've watched, read, and talked with loggers enough to figure that out. Maybe there's more to it. I'm smart (old?) enough to know that, "You don't know what you don't know". I think a trickier part is figuring how to maximize wood yield with bucking length...although in a west coast production op I guess that happens on the landing for the most part.

5 years...I think I read it in a fb comment somewhere about breaking in and my brain crossed that thread with this one. I guess that's the testing period we give our helpers here, though not that long. I have one guy who isn't out of his 90 day probation period yet and is already welding.

 

[slowp]

The mill determines what lengths logs are bucked to. Then there is bucking out some of the defect but some land agencies dictate what a sound log is--something else I did so there is that. In second growth, there isn't as much defect as there was in the old growth.

Most fallers will carry a little chart listing the lengths logs are to be bucked into, unless the unit is tree length (processed on the landing).

 

[davidwyby]

Interesting, the vids I watched were more small time loggers (gyppo?) or landowners doing their own and calcing the bucks to yield the most BF/value from each log.

 

[northmanlogging]

Interesting, the vids I watched were more small time loggers (gyppo?) or landowners doing their own and calcing the bucks to yield the most BF/value from each log.

a good deal of it is simply witch craft.
The mills have their preferred lengths, meaning the lengths that make them the most money, its not always the same lengths that make YOU the most money
Theres a good deal of individual judgement involved in bucking, starting with what the mill will accept, what they are paying, how big of a log YOU can handle, how big of a log the truck can handle.
Round here the mills like 40' logs, cause they measure the little end and pay the logger based on that, for FS and DNR wood its scaled by weight, so long logs mean more wood on the truck, however, for most gyppo outfits cutting residential wood, you can't always get 40' logs to the landing, let alone 40' logs to the highway, so you have to take into account what the truck can and can't do.
As for bucking for defect, rot, crooked bits, broken bits, spike knots, pistol butts, wind shake, all maen a deduct at the mill, so its a fair bit of judgment as to what you can get away with vs what is just garbage. Mills like straight logs with as few of knots as possible, (reality is that few logs are really straight and they all have knots, its the loggers job to make them look like they don't)

 

[slowp]

a good deal of it is simply witch craft.
The mills have their preferred lengths, meaning the lengths that make them the most money, its not always the same lengths that make YOU the most money
Theres a good deal of individual judgement involved in bucking, starting with what the mill will accept, what they are paying, how big of a log YOU can handle, how big of a log the truck can handle.
Round here the mills like 40' logs, cause they measure the little end and pay the loggerI based on that, for FS and DNR wood its scaled by weight, so long logs mean more wood on the truck, however, for most gyppo outfits cutting residential wood, you can't always get 40' logs to the landing, let alone 40' logs to the highway, so you have to take into account what the truck can and can't do.
As for bucking for defect, rot, crooked bits, broken bits, spike knots, pistol butts, wind shake, all maen a deduct at the mill, so its a fair bit of judgment as to what you can get away with vs what is just garbage. Mills like straight logs with as few of knots as possible, (reality is that few logs are really straight and they all have knots, its the loggers job to make them look like they don't)

I kinda felt pity for the logger working FS land. They were caught in the middle between what the mill wanted and what the FS required. But, since my pay was for FS requirements, that's what I looked for.



The big old growth butt logs had a lot of "free" wood in them for the mills, since every load was scaled for volume. When I was learning my job, my teacher started mumbling angrily about how she knew exactly what was going on and it wasn't good. She was correct, as usual. The fallers had instructions to save out the butt log and smash the small stuff. That quickly stopped after our visit. What could have happened and I can't remember if it did, would be to scale the broken stuff as if it was not broken and charge the purchaser.

 

[PaulRogerNilsson]

I'm technically multi generational, at least back to Grandpa Claire (it gets fuzzy beyond him), both uncles, i got into the woods early, but pursued a different path from my teens into my 30's... but like a damn fool came back to it.
My step dad did the cedar block thing for a few years, my real father, makes a great many claims, of many things...

Same here but only with grandad in the woods now 20years later after "natureworking college" forestry&fishstockbreeding was my major classes .
im finally getting back to Nordic lodging and bigger brushcutting good fun and break from the last 12years of tattooing on junkies and criminals horrible when im a Lawabiding Taxpayer :-S

I do find the relaxation in building old chainsaw stihlen&Husqvarna from worn down machines to workhorses again good fun .

Im happy to read im not the only one going back to basics and do some other kind of work .

I hope alla Goes Well with your Career il Gladly follow and read up on this Thread !
Regards Paul-Roger Nilsson -Sweden

 

[PaulRogerNilsson]

When I retired, the complaint was that nobody wants do work in the woods anymore so "being born into it" might not be the case. It's more of are you going to be a reliable, safe, worker. Are you willing to work outdoors in miserable weather doing dangerous work for what may be the same pay (here in Warshington) as a burger flipper? Can you get up at 3AM to go to work on a dark and stormy morning?

I'm thinking that if you really wanted to work in the woods, you can find someone who'll take you on. But you need to start at the bottom--like setting chokers for a yarder crew. There's more to logging than falling trees. Not sure how many people who read this forum understand that bit. Money doesn't arrive until the logs make it to the mill. Getting logs up (or down) the hill and onto trucks can be difficult.

What kind of physical shape are you in? That's another biggie. I've seen guys who just couldn't do the work. It can be painful for a few days--sore muscle wise. Bruises and boo boos are part of it. Mentally, can you follow instructions? Can you stop yourself from trying to stop a log from swinging as it arrives on the landing? That was a cause of death for young, green guys.

The good outfits to work for will have a smaller turnover of employees. You'd have to research the area that you want to work in, make phone calls or show up in person and do some talking to convince them that you will be reliable, work hard, listen to the experienced folks, and be safe. Safety is huge. When an accident or death occurs, insurance rates rise. Those rates are already high. Also look into who you work with. You don't want to be relying on meth heads to watch your back. One gyppo logger told me he suspected a couple of guys were tweakers, but the drug tests went through a private company and the guys tested as OK.

I suspect you are thinking that falling timber is hard to get into, and yes, that bit is. However, a foot in the door by working on a rigging crew can make that happen after you've proven yourself.

I mean, back in the days of a lot of logging, one just had to show up in the wee hours of the morning with a hardhat and caulks and wait outside the Mt. Adams cafe. A crew missing a guy would likely stop and haul you out to the job.

I figure Theres are junkies& criminals in the woods atleast here in Sweden there are Loads a real pain when they dont follow the requirements and laws to do forest work i left a company this summer just because i was the only one with education and apparently the only one who could de repairs well except for one guy other than that i was alone and went home and studied more so il get farther ahead than that company/crew .

Never worked in warm climats but ive worked winter with -28celcius during college with Husqvarna saw felling pine trees outside Kalix county good fun and good training for the worst scenarios in Sweden .

The logging is different i understand from the Us to Sweden here we work by ourselves and pull the 330cm logs ontop of each other in a pile and cut the next one in line and if the tractor needs help with the logs we help him out

When i watch your mega trees in the us with 5-7f diameters fall over its a big difference from here , sure we have big oak trees here in that size but their marked as cultursymbols or in protected woods "wildlife habitats" but production woods are mostly spruce&pine in 2-3feets width .

Its fun to read up on your forestry work over there il Gladly go over a third time to your fine country to work with logging and not just for education and tattooing .

Thanks for your thoughts and storys
Regards Paul-Roger Sweden

 

[Huntaholic]

At least a 3rd generation logger here, and I suspect it goes farther back than that but Im the oldest logger left in the family now. MY sons, ages 37 and 39, both work with me in the woods every day and as hard and dangerous as this stuff is, I feel BLESSED to be able to do what we do and make a decent living at it. I was raised in the log woods. My babysitter was a german sheppard dog that stayed at the log yard with me when I was 2 years old while my Dad and Grandpa put logs on the yard. My kids were raised the same way, minus the dog for a babysitter lol. My Dad took over that duty for me while I put logs on the yard.
Ive got to say theres a sense of pride in being able to tell my kids that on some jobs they are the FOURTH generation of us to work that tract of timber.
My grandpa died in the early 80s and my Dad and I kept the operation going. In 2005 my Dad had major bypass surgery and he pretty much left the logging to me and my sons. Of course he still came every day to "make sure we were doing things right" but mainly to fuss and ***** LOL. He passed away in 2019 and theres not a day that goes by that I don't miss him. He was a royal PITA sometimes but he passed along enough knowledge to keep multiple families working and making a living. God bless and keep you Dad!

 

[davidwyby]

At least a 3rd generation logger here, and I suspect it goes farther back than that but Im the oldest logger left in the family now. MY sons, ages 37 and 39, both work with me in the woods every day and as hard and dangerous as this stuff is, I feel BLESSED to be able to do what we do and make a decent living at it. I was raised in the log woods. My babysitter was a german sheppard dog that stayed at the log yard with me when I was 2 years old while my Dad and Grandpa put logs on the yard. My kids were raised the same way, minus the dog for a babysitter lol. My Dad took over that duty for me while I put logs on the yard.
Ive got to say theres a sense of pride in being able to tell my kids that on some jobs they are the FOURTH generation of us to work that tract of timber.
My grandpa died in the early 80s and my Dad and I kept the operation going. In 2005 my Dad had major bypass surgery and he pretty much left the logging to me and my sons. Of course he still came every day to "make sure we were doing things right" but mainly to fuss and ***** LOL. He passed away in 2019 and theres not a day that goes by that I don't miss him. He was a royal PITA sometimes but he passed along enough knowledge to keep multiple families working and making a living. God bless and keep you Dad!

That's great, thanks for sharing.