This Week in the Woods

Sitting here this morning, Randy says “We should do a this week in the Woods. It’s been a while.” I kinda shrug….. UGH its 6:30 on a Sunday and I’m not ready to think yet. I reluctantly agree, get my computer, and realize it has been since April! Where has the girl that loves to write gone? Oh, an ice cream store- that’s where she has gone. But I do love to write, so I’ll try to catch you up on the bazillion things that have happened since April.

Since we last chatted, some how we’ve become world travelers. We had planned our first ever family vacation to an airbnb in Florida at the end of April when Randy also got an invitation to take a trip the Sweden to visit the Komatsu factory and tour some logging operations in the northern forests of Sweden. After the very long flight over the ocean, the jet lag set in hard for Randy. Time zones are no joke on the body. He spent his first day in Stockholm touring the city a little and trying to figure out if he should be sleeping or awake! The next day they took a flight up to northern Sweden to a town called Umea. Umea is up there where the sun barely sets that time of year. They spent their time there visiting a forest operation. Most of the forests they visited were plantation woods. The trees were very tall and very straight, unlike here where most of it is crooked and the straight trees are a gem! Those nice, tall, straight trees are definitely easier on their equipment. For equipment, they were using wheeled processors, not tracked like ours, and their processing heads were smaller because the diameter of the standing timber barely exceeded 14 inches. But otherwise, it was just like our cut to length system. After the woods, they toured a saw mill where they were sawing spruce and jack pine. The next day was touring the komatsu factory and the Olofsfors track factory. They ate lots of smash burgers and meatballs and got zero sleep. A couple country Maine loggers in a foreign city- I would have loved to see that, but I had to stay back and open an ice cream store! Thank you to Komatsu and Anderson Equipment for giving him this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Since spring, probably the biggest news of our life has also happened. Randy is a second generation logger and we started this gig by purchasing a couple pieces of equipment from his father, Ron. Ron started and grew this business from a chain saw and cable skidder, teaching Randy all along. We have been ready for years to take over the entirety of the operation and allow Ron to focus on trucking and firewood but he wasn’t quite ready to do that, until this past Spring. Literally, out of the blue he came to us and said “Buy it!” This is a giant milestone for us and we are so grateful for the decades of work Ron put in before us. Trust me when I say, Grampa is still working more hours than any other human I know, but I think he quits the day at 5:30 now instead of 8 and I am so happy for him!

The rain has definitely put a bit of a damper in our summer time production but we’ve been holding up alright. We fight the mud with the bogie skidder and forwarder and carry on. The pine log market continues to be strong and we are just crossing our fingers that we have a dry fall. We’ve also been working on finally building a garage so they don’t have to work on all this iron in the dirt and mud anymore! I’d say “babysteps”- but only moly I feel more like we just took a giant leap over a canyon!