Great Outdoor Games staff — July 8, 2004
MADISON, Wis. — Rob Scheer was like a schoolboy getting ready to introduce a girlfriend to his parents or an artist showing a masterpiece.
His eyes twinkled as he started pulling on the blue tarp off, unveiling not the Mona Lisa, but a forest of logs.
"Look at how consistent it looks," Scheer said, the admiration way too evident in his voice. "We've taken the wood selection to an entirely higher level for the Great Outdoor Games."
Just how high is that?
This isn't the wood Paul Bunyan was used to cutting.
If the Timber events in the Great Outdoor Games seem to be a throwback to yesteryear's decidedly low-tech origins of lumberjacking, the methods of procuring the wood used in competition has become more high tech with every year.
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| Rob Scheer heads up the search to find the perfect wood for competition. |
The wood used in all the Timber chopping events is Yellow Aspen, taken from the Chequamegon (SCHWA-ma-gan) National Forest, which is located in Wisconsin's Northwoods. This national forest is actually two forests managed together, thus its formal name is the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, which covers over a million and a half acres. The Chequamegon side of the forest covers about 858,400 acres in Ashland, Bayfield, Sawyer, Price, Taylor, and Vilas counties in Wisconsin.
Wood for the sawing events is taken from White Pine of the Menominee band of Ojibwe Indian's reservation in Wisconsin. The Menominee Indians have been managing their natural resources in their tribal forests for more than 100 years.
In the late spring, Scheer, president of Lumberjack Sports International, distributes a notice to foresters in the area of the National Forest as well as the tribal foresters of the Menominee Indians, regarding the species and type of wood that he requires.
Many forest management techniques rely on selecting trees for harvest that are at their climax of maturity and will begin to decline in health, or even fall, relatively soon. Forest managers need to remove certain trees periodically for the health of the forest. These trees, which are already part of a designated cut, are sought by Lumberjack Sports International for the Great Outdoor Games.
"We could have up to five different foresters contact us with potential wood," says Scheer. "But it's critical to determine if the wood is competition grade. Once we've identified potential trees, I send in a crew to do a visual check of the trees and mark the competition grade wood."
The visual check performed by Scheer's team includes a search for trees that have been in an area that is protected from the wind and have been exposed to an equal amount of sunlight and equal amount of moisture. The trees also need to be 12- to 16-inches in diameter and at climax, or mature age, for the species, which is typically 25 to 35 years for Yellow Aspen. Evenly matched wood is critical to fair competition and Scheer's team uses strict criteria for the wood they will use.
The wood crew from Lumberjack Sports International also looks closely at the markings on the trees.
"Our foresters can look at the markings on a tree and determine if that tree had to compete for sunlight when it was young," Scheer said.
"What happens with a young tree is that it sends out branches to reach the sunlight. Some of the branches don't mature and eventually skin over and become knots, while others become limbs. We're looking for trees with as few knots as possible."
Knots are the bane of the competitive lumberjack's existence. Hitting a knot in competition can shave precious seconds from a final score, or worse — dull a finely honed axe or precision ground saw blade.
Once a tree is determined to be competition grade, the acreage that produced it is mapped, specifying all the trees in the local area that will be used for Great Outdoor Games wood. The team then cuts the tree and numbers it. At the same time, they map the actual tree, diagramming it for every 27-inch length of competition wood it can produce.
The mapping of the tree includes detailing whether the wood comes from the bottom 16-feet of the tree or above.
"We have to note whether the section came from the bottom, older section of the tree or the top, which has not had as much new wood added and has not had to be as resilient to the wind," said Scheer.
When the acreage is mapped, details are noted about the location of trees and their proximity to each other.
"If we know that two trees grew up side by side, with equal exposure to sunlight and equal exposure to moisture, we then know that we can use the bottom sections of both those trees for an even match of wood chopping," Sheer said.
The trees that are harvested can be anywhere from 8- to 20-feet in length. After they cut down the trees, the Timber team takes them to a yard. The bark is left on and they are laid in wet sawdust and covered with a tarp so that they don't dry out.
The next step on the agenda is to put the wood on a lathe, to remove the bark and turn the log to exact diameters. Comparisons of the different trees are made with the competition schedule. At this point the wood is cut, grouped, and numbered. The Timber wood team has to have their numbers game together.
The wood is then tagged and bagged. In essence, a skin is reintroduced by wrapping the sections in plastic and duct taping them securely. The goal here is to have no moisture loss. All the wood is then stored in a holding area that maintains a constant temperature of 62 degrees. Scheer says the wood can be stored for up to 3 months.
"We have actually done tests on wood that has been stored in this manner for up to a year and found that it meets all competition specs."
After the wood is transported to the Great Outdoor Games venue, the plastic is removed and the wood is set into a shallow "watering pond," which is a shallow pool rigged with sprinkler heads that waters the wood consistently on a 24-hour basis. The wood remains covered with a tarp in this shallow pool with it's own water and re-circulating pump until competition begins.
Even a novice can look at the smooth, white cylinders resting in three inches of water behind the Timber stage at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison and appreciate the effort that goes into selecting and caring for the wood.
"It's like looking at a piece of artwork," Scheer said.
