2012 Annual Guide to the Great Outdoors

Ax Men

Paul Smith’s College’s Adirondack Woodsmen’s School is a forest fantasy camp. Chopping, felling, skidding and birling could lead to futures in the woods or on ESPN

It’s 7:45 on a steamy summer morning. The forecast calls for highs near 90 degrees. Oliver Cooperman is trudging along the Keese Mill Road on his way to the Paul Smith’s College stable. The sound of his Redwing steel-toe boots dragging on the asphalt is the only interruption to the forest idyll.

“Last night we had to jog across campus and we were 42 seconds late,” groans Cooperman, a recent high-school graduate from Westchester County, New York. He crumples to the ground in front of the horse barn, tugs at his bright orange Stihl hard hat and stares blankly into the woods. “Brett made us drag a 10-foot log all the way from the cabin to the dining hall.”

Day three of this weeklong session at the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School hasn’t even begun, but 48 hours of sawing, ax-chopping and log-dragging are a rude awakening to Cooperman, who says he’s always wanted to work in the woods. “I’m wiped out.”

A janky Toyota pickup pulls up as the rest of the Woodsmen’s School students arrive to start the day. Program director and founder Brett McLeod hops out and leans against the truck bed. “There was a little too much energy the night before,” McLeod says. “We could write ’em up or call their parents. But it makes more sense to have ’em drag a log around.” He smiles like the Cheshire Cat. “Some of them weren’t training at the level we wanted them to. We also had them cut around 60 inches of wood by hand with a singlebuck saw.”

McLeod is ﬁve foot nine, with bleach-blond hair and a whisper of a goatee. He’s stocky and strong, but hardly the Paul Bunyan type you’d expect to run what he calls “a woodsmen’s boot camp.” That’s actually one of the big lessons he tries to convey to these young loggers-in-training. The ax-throwing, log-splitting lumberjack champion may be a mountain of a man, but the Adirondack woodsman 150 years ago was very different. “You had to be agile on your feet if you were riding the logs down a river,” McLeod explains. “It was all about quick footwork and dodging falling trees. These men were the toughest of tough, and the amount of work it took to get a tree to become a log and ultimately lumber at a sawmill was incredible.”

That’s why today’s session starts at the stable, where draft horse teamster and Paul Smith’s forestry instructor Bob Brhel—who really is a mountain of a man—teaches the students to harness a pair of majestic French-Canadian draft horses. The students are going to learn how those tough loggers of yore plied their trade. They’re going to fell towering trees with nothing but hand tools and then haul the logs out of the woods with horses and a forecart. Just like lumberjacks did almost two centuries ago.

You could make a pretty good case that the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School—hosted on the Paul Smith’s College campus, near Saranac Lake, with its 8,000 acres of green-certiﬁed managed timberlands—has scant reason to exist. In today’s forest industry, diesel skidders, bus-size delimbers and high-torque chain saws rule the woods. The burly lumberjack can still come in handy in a pinch, but with forest technicians and engineers in charge of the woodlots, he can seem more like a warm-and-fuzzy anachronism.

Yet as the Woodsmen’s School prepares to open its third season this summer, enrollment is up 20 percent, and McLeod expects all three one-week sessions to sell out with about 20 students each. The sessions get progressively more technical and grueling. Beginners cover the basics of handling an ax and a crosscut saw, known to loggers as the “singlebuck saw.” They learn foundational skills like orienteering, and they study the raw science of logging. They peer at an ax blade under a microscope. They study the physics of a human body swinging an ax, and learn how minor tweaks in form can yield more power and efﬁciency.

Intermediates—the group I’m watching today—delve deeper into the basic skills, including log rolling on water, or birling; ax throwing (which seems more like entertainment than core logging skill, basically darts for old-time loggers); and crosscut sawing in a team of two. They also make a dugout canoe from a tree trunk and launch it on pristine Adirondack waters.

The advanced group continues to hone all those skills, while also learning sophisticated maneuvers, like springboard chopping, where the logger inserts a plank into a cut in a tree, then stands on the plank to chop the tree down. The springboard chop is used on steep hillsides, the ﬂat board mimicking level ground; it’s considered the most difﬁcult of all the chopping sports. Students also learn chain-saw carving and sharpening an ax with diamond stones.

The core demographic proﬁle of the Woodsmen’s School goes like this: an 18- to 20-year-old male (McLeod says there are woodswomen who take the course, too, but not the week I was there), from a rural or suburban town in the Northeast, who likely did some trade or technical coursework in high school, may have grown up on or worked on a farm, likes working with his hands and likes being in the woods. And he loves chain saws.

“My favorite chain saw is a Husky,” conﬁdes 18-year-old Jordan Bradish, with the coughed-out accent of Vermont’s Northern Kingdom. Bradish was an offensive tackle on his high-school football team before he graduated last year. He looks it—buzz cut, tall, beefy and wide. After taking an interest in forestry through his school’s natural resources program, he matriculated to Paul Smith’s and decided to attend the Woodsmen’s School as a sort of orientation. Bradish admits he had never handled an ax before. “I came over here to get some woodsman experience, have fun, meet some people.”

The chatter is more or less what you’d expect of this cohort of woodsmen-in-training—tall tales about felling trees with chain saws, playful shoving and low-grade bravado, usually about using a chain saw. But it’s pretty astounding that, in 2011, no one is fondling a cell phone, looking for the latest text message. It seems almost like a point of pride not to talk about video games or TV or smartphones. Matt Clum, a 17-year-old from Scranton, Pennsylvania, cops to watching “a few hours” of television a day at home. “Here, I haven’t watched TV in, like, two and a half weeks,” he marvels. “This is the way things used to be, and it’s probably the way it should be.”

Kenneth Aaron, Paul Smith’s College’s director of communications and marketing, calls the students at the Woodsmen’s School “throwbacks … not guys who have their gamer score up-to-date on their Xbox.” At least for these few weeks, they’re the outliers of the couch potato trend documented in Richard Louv’s red-alert national best seller, Last Child in the Woods, about the growing disconnect between children and nature. “A Paul Smith’s College student from 1946, when campus opened,” says Aaron, “could probably sit down and talk real easy to a student from 2011. They have a lot in common, a certain mentality, a certain ethos.”

Paul Smith’s is bucking an overall declining trend in enrollment in forestry-related programs, says Jeff Walton, the college’s dean of natural resource management and ecology. Walton chalks that up to the college’s emphasis on environmental education. But on a campus where competitive logging is actually an intercollegiate sport, the Woodsmen’s School is proving to be a potent recruitment tool. “You have some students who come for the summer,” says Aaron, “and they say, ‘Hey, why just spend a week back here in the woods when I can spend four years here on campus?’” Seventy-ﬁve percent of Woodsmen’s School campers already attend or go on to enroll at Paul Smith’s.

High-school senior Matt Clum says he’s a newcomer to forestry, but wrestling with a singlebuck saw wedged into a tree trunk gives him a new appreciation of farm life back home. “We have old wagon wheels on our farm, and I don’t think anything of it,” Clum says. “Someone worked that wheel for days and days and days and their sweat was on that wheel. I just know that I’m going to appreciate that stuff a little bit more.” Clum says the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School has opened a door into a new potential career, and he really likes what he sees on the other side.

By the time the forecart is ready to roll into the woods, the French-Canadian horses are frothy with sweat, the horseﬂies are hitting hard and the smell of pine pitch perfumes the forest. We follow the horses about half a mile past towering red pines, hemlocks and scrubby beech.

McLeod and his colleague Joe Oriﬁce teach the students how to pick a good tree to harvest, how to spot the line along which it will fall and how to scout out a safe escape route when it begins to crash to earth. They make a game of trying to predict exactly where the crown will land, each student sticking a branch in the ground. The students hack away at little saplings with axes and saws to clear space, their awkward motions contrasting with the level of experience in the art of wood chopping that most of them claim.

“With this antique farm equipment we’re working with,” mutters one student, holding up a rusty singlebuck saw, “we’re running a little bit of a risk. If we had a chain saw, we could do it better.”

McLeod rolls his eyes. “There’s a lot of ma­ch­ismo that these guys carry with them into the woods,” he says, “and it slowly dissipates throughout the day as they get more and more worn down.”

That’s just what happens as ﬁve students take turns sawing through a midsize red pine. They heave and sweat, braced on one knee. They tag team in and out. They run out of breath and sweat some more. Oriﬁce coaxes them on, sometimes shouting, almost mantra-like. “C’mon, guys! Keep goin’! It’s hard work. You gotta do it, though!”

Then the tree creaks and everyone scatters along his escape route. Oriﬁce screams, “Tiiiim-berrrrr!” (seriously, that’s what loggers say), his voice cracking in excitement. For an eternal instant, the tree seems to pause diagonally, then it crashes to the ground, and the earth shakes. It’s dramatic, and wicked cool, and breathtaking. And for just a moment, it’s silent in the woods.

Then the students rush around the lumber like worker ants. They touch the still-warm wood inside, count the rings, see who won the guessing game about where the tree’s crown would fall. McLeod picks a bunch of students to start sawing the tree into sections to be skidded out by the horses. He stands over them, chanting encouragement, like a Mr. Miyagi of the forest. “Use the whole saw, guys! Nice! Use the whole saw! Bring that misery whip back and forth! That’s right!”

There are modern applications to the 19th-century skills the woodsmen-in-training are learning here, says McLeod. Rangers maintain trails with hand tools in wilderness areas. Heavy equipment won’t ﬁt into some suburban parcels. And a growing number of landowners prefer their woodlots be maintained with pre-mechanized techniques, because the practice leaves a gentler impact on the land and decreases the carbon footprint of logging. “In the context of carbon reduction,” McLeod says, “seemingly anachronistic skills like felling a tree with an ax and skidding it with a horse suddenly develop new relevance.”

But McLeod contends the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School is about much more than preparing young people for a career in forestry or as a competitive lumberjack. McLeod lived the life of the latter for three and a half years, as a producer for ESPN’s Great Outdoor Games. He traveled 300 days a year, organizing ﬂy-ﬁshing, lumberjacking and dog-retrieving and -jumping competitions across the country. One morning he woke up in a hotel room and couldn’t remember which town he was in. That’s when he knew it was time to get back to basics.

“What are the things that matter most at the end of the day?” McLeod says he started to ask himself. Rural survival skills became the core of his research as an assistant professor of forestry and natural resources at Paul Smith’s College. “Can you house yourself? Can you grow your own food? Can you take care of yourself, particularly in a harsh, rural setting like the Adirondacks?” McLeod became increasingly drawn to the concept of self-reliance, and how traditional rural skills bring together a broad social and political spectrum of people, from lefty hippies building straw-bale homes and growing gardens to righty militias training with guns deep in the forest. The doctoral dissertation he’s working on at Antioch University New England, in Keene, New Hampshire, argues rural communities fractured by politics and money can be made more durable by rallying around these “back-to-the-land” skills and can become more sustainable in the process.

McLeod has built the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School around the theme of self-reliance. One of the summer camp’s most important exercises, he says, is a nightly journaling session. The students gather around the campﬁre, under the stars and alone with their thoughts. They write about working with their hands, and physical exhaustion, and independence, and their own path through a curriculum that challenges the mind and body in equal parts. “A lot of the image of the Adirondacks and of Adirondackers and guides is one of self-reliance. That’s the thing that you’ll ﬁnd that many of these students—regardless of their backgrounds—are chasing here.”

The morning session with the horse team in the woods goes longer than expected. To get back to campus for lunch—and to the delight of the students—the roar of chain saws ﬁlls the woods as logs are sliced and loaded up to be delivered to Paul Smith’s sawmill. This is the home of a modern forestry program after all.

This evening is one of the highlights of each session: an overnight camping trip in the primitive St. Regis Canoe Area. A couple dozen hungry guys cook for themselves on a simple campﬁre and sleep out under the stars.

As the counselors make last-minute preparations, the students hang out on a breezy rise overlooking Lower St. Regis Lake and practice their basic skills. Sunlight ﬁlters through the can­opy. A few use a stopwatch to time each other sawing a tree trunk into slices—“cutting cookies.” A couple guys help each other shimmy up a pole with climbing spurs, or “spikes.” Cheers echo from an ax-throwing contest. A pair of students splash and laugh down by the water as they birl, scrambling to stay atop a ﬂoating log.

It’s sport, for sure. But the bravado and bragging and competitiveness seem to have melted away with the morning’s exertion. What’s left is the quiet, earnest focus of young men seeking something special within themselves, and eager to help each other along that same journey.

In the basement of the Forestry Club Cabin by the clearing, Rob Meehan and Freling Strieﬂer, both from downstate New York, are taking turns cutting cookies from a massive log that’s almost three feet thick. “That was one heck of a cut,” Strieﬂer praises Meehan as he catches his breath. “You’re gonna be tough to beat.” Then he turns to me. “Why don’t you give it a try?”

I try to ﬁnd an excuse, but of course there isn’t any. So I grab the singlebuck saw, set the teeth in the top of the log and start to move it back and forth. In no time, I’m out of breath and exhausted and the saw catches.

The two students tell me not to despair. They coach me to adjust my stance, my hips, my torso. “If you use your arms, your abs and your legs right, you can saw faster than a 400-pound man,” says Meehan en­couragingly. I try again, and, sure enough, I slice more than half­way through the log before fatigue gets the best of me.

In just an instant, I understand a piece of what the students have been reckoning with all week, the kind of lessons you learn from delving deeply into any sport, skill or career. Nothing’s as easy as it looks on TV. Wii paddles and virtual exercise are no substitute for the real thing. You need to practice, again and again and again. And while technology makes our jobs easier, there’s no substitute for knowing how to do it the old-fashioned way, because there may come a time when the power’s out, or the gas tank runs dry, and you have no one else to rely on but yourself.

Down at Lower St. Regis Lake, the guys are loading provisions and backpacks into giant war canoes that ﬁt eight people each. The mood is giddy and goofy as they launch. One of the students topples overboard and everybody roars with laughter as he sheepishly clambers back in.

The overnight trip is a staple of any American summer camp. But as the students of the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School begin to paddle and the canoes glide off into the golden afternoon sun, their image feels like something bigger. They’re linked across time to Indian settlers who ﬁshed and hunted here, to loggers who muscled wild timber to civilization, and to anyone who has sought the isolation of the Great North Woods to ﬁnd a glowing coal of conﬁdence, competence and inspiration somewhere deep inside.

For more information about Paul Smith’s College’s Adirondack Woodsmen’s School, visit www.adirondackwoodsmensschool.com or call (800) 421-2605. In 2012 the school’s three sessions, from beginning to advanced, at six college credits total, are scheduled for July 8–14, July 15–21 and July 22–28. The sessions, which include lodging and meals, cost $1,095 a week or $2,995 for all three weeks.

David Sommerstein is a reporter and assistant news director at North Country Public Radio. Hear his audio postcard of the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School at www.northcountrypublicradio.org.



Tags: Paul Smith's College, Woodsmen's School