Spring 2001 - Blanchard Mountain

The Harvesters
by Greg Woehler
photos by Chris Goodenow

David Burlinggame, a chaser for A.L.R.T. Corporation, unloads logs from the company's diesel-powered carriage, which brings logs up slopes. In a 15-acre clearcut, amidst a wall of diesel engine noise and the crackle of chain saw motors stands David Burlingame, calmly eating an orange. He's wearing ear plugs, safety goggles and a Day-Glo orange hard hat.

Directly behind him looms a 90-foot-high tower, held by cables that splay out hundreds of feet into the forest and attach to tree stumps. On one of the cables rides a diesel-powered carriage, from which two bundles of newly cut trees are suspended. The bundles, swinging back and forth as they ride up the cable to the tower, are headed straight for Burlingame. Behind him creeps the shovel loader, an immense excavator on tank treads. In front of the loader hangs its huge arm and the grappling claw it uses to pick up logs. It too is coming straight at Burlingame.

The carriage, controlled via radio by the tower engineer and the chokers at the bottom of the hill, comes to a stop right in front of Burlingame and lowers its cargo onto a pile of logs it has already deposited.

Burlingame hustles to the logs, releases the cables and sends the carriage gliding back to the bottom of the hill for another load.

He grabs his chain saw and sets to work trimming the branches off the logs and cutting them into proper lengths. As Burlingame works, the lumbering shovel loader moves into position, ready to begin stacking the logs. The arm swings to the pile and the claw greedily begins snatching the logs, just a few feet away from him. Burlingame continues with his cutting, not even looking up.

This is the life of the chaser on a logging crew. This is the job David Burlingame does seven hours a day, five days a week for A.L.R.T. Corporation, a contract logging company based in Everson, Wash. It's the job he plans to do until he retires. It's a job his father did his whole life. .

It's a job Burlingame loves.

"It's refreshing to get out here in the fresh air away from all the stress of city life," he shouts over the din. "Beats sitting behind a desk somewhere."

The crew is logging a 133-acre parcel of land in the hills above Acme, west of Lake Whatcom. The land has an estimated 4.8 million board feet of timber on it, said Ernie Parker, A.L.R.T. logging manager. A board foot measures 1-foot by 1-foot by 1-inch. Parker says a local saw mill purchased the timber from the Department of Natural Resources for $1,087,000.

The DNR estimates there are 120 million board feet of timber on Blanchard Mountain’s 4,500 acres that could be harvested. Burlingame has yet to be hurt on the job, which puts him in the minority among loggers, said Snohomish County logger Collin Palmer. He said loggers swap injury stories like boys trade baseball cards.

"It seems like everybody's been hurt out there at least once," Palmer said. "I was working as a choker about ten years ago and I got hit square in the chest and the face by a cedar about as big around as a manhole cover. Damn thing broke four ribs and broke my nose. Lucky it wasn't moving too fast or I probably wouldn't be here to talk about it."

Burlingame credits his safety record to simply staying alert, though he admits that random accidents sometimes happen out in the field. He said he saw a man die once when a branch whipped around and hit him.

"He did everything right, and his partner did, too," he said. "It was just a freak accident. But freak accidents happen no matter what you're doing. This is no more dangerous than delivering newspapers."

Working about 100 yards away, Frank Cain, Jr. is cutting his way through a stand of cedar and fir trees. Cain has been logging since 1982 and, like Burlingame, he said he loves it. "I wouldn't be out here if I didn't love it," he said. "I like the wildlife you see out here. I saw a herd of elk at the bottom of the mountain the other day."

Unlike Burlingame, Cain has been hurt seriously while logging.

"I broke my collar bone and four or five ribs," he said. A log rolled on top of Cain and pinned him down. Like everyone else on the site, he wears a whistle that he’s supposed to blow if he's hurt and can't move.

In this situation, however, Cain's arms were pinned to his chest and he couldn't reach the whistle. It's doubtful anyone would've heard it over the bellowing of all the machinery, anyway.

"I guess I blacked out, but I wormed my way out from under the log somehow," he said. Parker, a former safety inspector for the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, once broke his leg and had to be helped out of the woods by Cain.

Cain has twice won the Ironman contest, a grueling competition where loggers race each other through four back-to-back skill competitions.

He has a banded tattoo around his left bicep showing different logging scenes, and on his right bicep is a logging emblem he copied from his tape measure.

"I couldn't sit behind a cubicle all day," he said, echoing Burlingame. "I wouldn't be able to hold a civilian job, where you go to work and have to put on a smile for everybody. "I'm too ornery," he said, grinning.

Cain was all set to study architecture before he started cutting trees. He said he began logging to save money before college and simply never went back to school. He said the money was pretty good when he started. Now, it's just decent.

"I haven't really had a raise in 13 years," he said. "The money's just not there. Thirteen years ago I made a good living; I'm still making a good living, but not as good."

Even so, Cain and Parker said they know many unemployed, experienced loggers eager for work.

"If you called up and asked for a rigging job today, I don't think you'd get it," Cain says. "There's a lot of people out there who are just down," Parker said. "There's a lot of unemployment out here."

Washington state was hit hard by the decrease in timber production in the 1990s. According to the Forest Service, timber sales fell 78 percent from their high in the mid-1980s. For many in timber-dependent areas, it meant the end of an entire way of life.

Some areas of Washington state, such as Grays Harbor and Pacific counties, saw unemployment spike as high as 15 percent in the 1990s, according to the DLI.

"There's a lot of small [logging] outfits that just couldn't or wouldn't change with the times," Dick Hammer of A.L.R.T. said. Hammer has been logging for more than 50 years and now handles purchasing and permits for the company. He said many companies didn’t adapt to new environmental regulations, such as the buffer zones around waterways that are meant to protect salmon spawning grounds. Trees help maintain the cool water temperatures salmon need and the root systems limit the amount of silt and debris that washes into the water. John Nelson had to quit logging after almost 20 years in the business. He was born in Grisdale, Wash., about 50 miles northwest of Olympia.

"It was the last permanent logging camp in the country; my grandfather was the governor of the camp," he said with pride. "My mom was literally raised there."

Nelson said he got his start in the timber industry when he was 13, planting seedlings in clear-cut hills surrounding Grisdale. His family has logged on the Olympic Peninsula since the beginning of the century and he said there was no reason to think he wouldn't do the same.

Nelson rode out most of the turbulent '90s working for Weyerhaeuser, but in 1998, he decided to leave.

"You just never knew for sure if the job was gonna be there," he recalled. "I've got two kids —12 and 16 — and when it's time for college for them, I need to know that I'm gonna have a job.

"I played my cards right and I got out at a good time," he said. "A lot of guys with smaller companies didn't. Those poor bastards, they lost everything."

Nelson landed on his feet. He found a better-paying job working for Rohm and Haas, a chemical manufacturer, at their Elma facility. Still, he said it's no comparison to the satisfaction he got from logging.

"I just loved it," he said. "I've seen more beauty in a day than most people see in a lifetime. I've seen things I can't even describe."

Nelson bristles when critics say loggers simply destroy beauty when they clear-cut a patch of the forest.

"We weren't destroying the environment, we were farming!" he said. "When people look out over a field of corn that's been harvested, do they complain that it's been destroyed? No, because they know it'll grow back."

"There's too much emphasis put on the visual aspects of the forest," said logging contractor Paul Isaacson, who owns more than 2,000 acres of timberland in Whatcom County. "You might have open-heart surgery, but I sure don't want to see it. It's the same thing with clearcuts."

For Isaacson, the answer to this dilemma is simple: "If you don't like clearcuts, don't go stand in a clearcut!"

He said he believes a clear-cut area has benefits, even aesthetically: "On a nice day, do you see people in the forest on Blanchard? No, you see them standing in the clearcuts. A clearcut's a cool place to be."

Isaacson said environmental groups and the media vilify loggers and unfairly paint them as the enemies.

"We're told every day that we're rapers and pillagers," he said. "We've had windows knocked out of equipment and had it spray painted with 'tree killer.' I could retire tomorrow if I wanted to. But I enjoy what I do and I feel it's honorable what I do."

"My son came home from school one day and he said, 'Dad, you're a tree killer.' That's what he'd learned in school that day," Cain said. "One time there were some people out in the woods calling me a rapist, saying I was gonna be judged when I go to heaven. "You have to get pretty thick-skinned after awhile."

A.L.R.T. personnel have to lock a cable across the road when they're driving into and out of the area because vandals recently snuck in at night and damaged equipment. Hammer said vandals have burned A.L.R.T. equipment, broken windows and poured sand into gas tanks and intake manifolds, among other things.

Rather than heaping blame on loggers, Isaacson said he sees American consumers as the real culprits.

"Until consumption is addressed, we're not going to solve this problem," he said. "Wood consumption is way up in this country," Stargell says. "We can keep growing trees here forever. This is fertile land. Or we can grow elsewhere, in other countries, with no regulations and limits."

"If we don't selectively log in places like Blanchard, [logging companies] are going to go places like South America, where it's cheaper," Isaacson says. "I don't see the poor, impoverished people in these countries with a lot of 3,000 square-foot houses.

The wood isn't being used by them. It's being used by us."

Hammer said popular opinion about loggers has dramatically shifted since he began logging in the 1940s.

"When I grew up, every young man who thought he could hack it wanted to be a logger," he said. "Everybody respected it because they knew that everything around here was either supported by logging or fishing.

"You need to remember that these are men doing a job," he said. "Most of our logging crews are family people. They're supporting their kids and their homes and their schools. People need to realize that these are really good people out here."

Archives | Introduction | Welcome to Blanchard Mountain | Paper Trails | The Harvesters | A Cedar Living | Setting the Stage | Trail Block | Worth The Ride | Economics of Logging | Economics of Recreation | Living in the Shadow of the Mountain | A Walk in the Woods

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