Timber Harvest: We’re Excited to Share Our Days With You!

I make art from wood, and the wood I use is always part of a bigger story.  In a recent blog, I shared why my wife, Sarah, and I are harvesting trees from our property.  The two days spent felling and skidding the trees was a great adventure!

Finding Reliable Experts to Harvest Our Timber

Leading up to the harvest, I needed to find reliable experts to do the job.  Asking around for a good logger got me the same name a few times: Travis Barrett is the guy you want.  I’d also need someone to saw the logs. I had seen a small sawmill on the backroads just a few miles from my place.  I stopped by and met the owner. He’s Amish and grew up on the nearby family farm. For this article, I respect his wish to remain out of the limelight. He seemed to me to be a knowledgeable sawyer, and when I asked about a logger, he, too gave me Travis’s name.  Both he and Travis agreed to take on my job.

We toured my woodlot, which is mainly on the side of a rather steep hill.  From there the logs would have to be dragged across my lawn to the road. One way to do that is using a log skidder, a big, tractor-like machine made specifically to pull logs. That could be a very messy job.  We all agreed that it would be best to skid the logs out using workhorses from the farm owned by the sawyer’s family.  Using pink ribbon, I tagged the trees which were to be removed.

Finding the Ideal Time for Harvesting Our Timber

Now, we just needed to wait for winter when the ground would be frozen solid.  Historically that would be from December into March. The winter of 2023-‘24 brought us extremely mild temperatures and no frozen ground. Finally, in late February, we had a window of opportunity where the temperatures stayed in the single digits and teens.  

Harvest Day at Last!

When Travis showed up early the first morning, he could drive across the lawn with no problem. The ground was hard-frozen, and we had just a few inches of snow—perfect conditions! He opened the door and out jumped Oakley, his Labrador Retriever. Sporting a Carhart dog jacket, Oakley was thrilled to be running around and exploring the job site! He would spend the rest of the day scouting around or hanging out in the warmth of the pickup truck.

Travis’s Truck. Note Oakley in the passenger seat!

A short time later, we could hear the clip-clop of horses coming down the road. Today, the Amish sawyer was working skidding logs. He brought the horses back to us at the edge of the woods. Belle and Jasmine are a Spotted Draft and Belgian mix. Both are beautiful, and they’re huge! They are about six years old and have been on the farm with the sawyer’s family their whole lives.

Belle and Jasmine

Travis got to work at the top of the hill felling a red pine. After he limbed it and cut off the top, Belle and Jasmine went to work. The smaller, lighter trees were cut first in order to let the horses warm up. They pulled the logs a couple hundred yards down the hill and across the lawn to the road.  A small amount of snow on top of the frozen ground was perfect for skidding and made their job easier. They were obviously well trained and their driver was skilled and patient with them. The work went smoothly.  

At lunch break, the horses were each given hay and oats.  Each was then offered a five-gallon bucket of water from which they drank about a gallon.  

The afternoon work progressed well, with the harvest of some black cherry and ash trees. At the end of the very physical workday, both men went home to eat dinner and then worked into the evening on their family farms, milking cows and tending to horses and other animals. Incidentally, they had both done this at the start of their day, too, before showing up at my place at 7:15 a.m.

The following day was scheduled as a rest day for Belle and Jasmine. The day after that, we had high winds, making tree felling too dangerous. Travis came back with his skid-steer and stacked the logs in a pile near the road. Here, they would be accessible for a log truck to pick them up. 

We had great conditions again the following day. The team pulled a maple from the woods and then went on to the walnut trees. Travis's skill in felling trees is something to watch. After studying the tree and the surrounding area, he would cut out a notch and then make a calculated final cut. With the tapping of a couple of wedges, he would drop the tree with precision. 

At the end of the day, all the tagged trees were now logs piled near the road.  Here’s where the theoretical met real-world.  The two log piles were bigger than I had anticipated. I measured each of the trees when they were standing and calculated how much lumber they would produce. I was pretty conservative with the estimates.  More logs came from the trees than I had predicted. Where I had estimated two log lengths would come from a tree, we actually got three lengths.  Pines, which I thought would yield three logs, produced four or even five.  This is not a problem, though. Inside every woodworker is a potential wood hoarder!

Moe with the walnut logs

Sarah with cherry, maple and pine logs

Due to the nature of their work, most of us don’t often see the jobs being done by Travis, the logger and farmer, and our Amish friend, the sawyer, skidder, and farmer. Both are very skilled at the extremely hard and dangerous work they do. And both are just exceptionally good people. They helped make the harvesting of our timber a great experience.

If you want to see some of the types of wood art we make, see my available works page.

Beautiful art for life well lived,

Moe