This Week in the Woods

A Randy Selfie to start your day

Good morning! It is going to be a beautiful day today and we are all thankful when it’s nice on Sunday Funday. School is out and we are all ready for a fun summer. We have been working far away according to our standards and are ready to come back close to home. The kids will like it too, because they enjoy coming out to visit for lunch.

We are just finishing up a job this week working with Mallory Bussell, a forester from Prentiss & Carlisle. This was the first time we have worked with this forestry company and we are thankful to have worked with such a great forester, especially since this job did not come without obstacles. We have been down in Alfred, Maine. Where the hell is Alfred you say…. exactly. It is certainly not close to the biomass and pulp facilities we haul to. I wish every job could be easy, but it’s not. This one definitely gave me a run for my money. Quite literally. The trip to the mill was 95 miles, one way. If you’re in the business of logging you can immediately understand my pain. The formula is simple really… time = money. We have two trucks that haul wood chips and pulp and each trip took 6 hours. Brutal. There was a lot of work that went into getting the wood out of this lot. It seems like we can just pull into a job, set up shop, drag out trees and carry them off to the mill. You have to take into account the sheer size of trucks and equipment. Just because a car can turn onto a road, doesn’t mean a tractor trailer can. In order to get the trucks on and off the landing, we built bridges over culverts so we could make wide enough swings to get the trucks out. Another challenge in this job was the topography. We couldn’t easily get from point A to point B because there was a steep slope in between. This just means we had to go around. You know what that means…. time. The rationale for taking the job so far away from the mills and home was simple…. weather and land conditions. This was the best option to go next considering southern Maine dries up from spring sooner and the ground was high and dry.

An interesting thing you may not know about logging compared to similar trades, is that in most businesses running heavy equipment, equipment gets charged by the hour. For whatever reason, logging doesn’t work like that. I get asked quite often how this equation works. (More to come on this in a future post) The short and sweet of it is this… For us, we buy what is called “stumpage". Stumpage is the the value of the standing timber on its “stump” and the right to cut the trees. We purchase this standing timber and the right from the landowner. We then operate the job and turn around and sell the cut and processed wood to various mills. The mills set their prices based on supply and demand. We don’t always get the same price, and we don’t always get to send in unlimited loads.

In other, exciting news, we broke ground on the site for our business garage. Thanks for the help from my friend Darrell Moore. Michaud Concrete Works came out and set the forms for me. This is part of my long term goals because currently we work out of my father’s garage. Some day in the future, I am going to need my own, on my property, so I am getting started on that now. If you only knew how much I hemmed and hawed over how to orient the darn thing! Pretty sure I drove Chrissy to drink over it. I wanted the garage door facing southish in order to get the most sun, aka heat, in the Spring when we spend the most time in there. I also needed to consider the best way to use the least amount of space for trucks to get in and out. Less space = less gravel = less $$$$$. They certainly don’t give that away! I finally settled on the best orientation I could come up with. Chrissy says, “I don’t care what the hell you do, just make it pretty and keep it clean.” Yes, Boss.

This week we’re headed back towards home! More time to catch snakes and fish with the kids and less time driving. Here’s to a great summer.