Chris Crowe grew up in Littleton, New Hampshire, just across the street from where he lives now. As a boy, he spent every moment he could tagging along with his father, Luther, who owned LR Crowe Trucking and KC Chipping & Lumber. After working for his dad as a teenager, Crowe set off on his own, establishing Timberwolf Logging. His company works on logging jobs large and small, processes firewood (some 2,000 cords per year), and runs two mills – one in New Hampshire and one in New York – specializing in crane mat construction. Earlier this year, the Northeastern Loggers’ Association honored Timberwolf, which Chris operates with his wife Rebecca Crowe, for “outstanding use of wood.” Despite the challenges of working in the industry, Chris can’t imagine doing anything else.
I was just around it from the time I was born. I went with Dad any time I could. I’d go on the truck even when I was a little guy. Dad was a trucker and hauled wood for the Franconia Paper mill in Lincoln. Around 1972, the mill shut down. Dad ended up buying out their whole woods department. Almost overnight, he became one of the largest loggers in New Hampshire. A lot of people still had horses and crawlers, and Dad now had two old skidders and a cable crane and a dozer. My father’s 88 now. He logged until he was 72, and then he did contract chipping. When he was 76 years old, he got rid of his trucks and chipper. But he kept a truck for himself and he hauled wood for me until he was 84. He’d still drive today if he could.
Dad really didn’t want me cutting wood, because cutting by hand is dangerous. He wanted me to do trucking. I got a little dump truck and ran that for a year. But I wanted to cut wood. I was 18 when I ordered my first skidder, 19 when it came in. A brand new 640 John Deere. I ran that skidder for a few years working for Dad, cutting wood for him. Then I got my own woodlot, and I bought a skidder from Dad. When I bought that skidder, the guy running it came with it to work for me, and he’s been here ever since, 32 years. I was renting Dad’s slasher, and he needed it back, so then I had to go buy a slasher. It just kept snowballing. We’re primarily all John Deere logging equipment and Western Star trucks and Hood cranes and Morbark chippers.
People aren’t going into the woods to work anymore. Logging, trucking, hauling wood – there’s been quite a few years where we haven’t had enough help. We need around 40 people to operate efficiently. Right now we only have about 27 – 14 on the logging side and 12 or 13 at the two mills. All my truck drivers are getting old, and I don’t know how I’m going to replace them. Ten years ago, you’d have 18-year-old kids begging to run skidders. Now, I’ve had maybe one or two guys come in looking for a job over the last 5 years, and they’re always older guys. It’s not that people try it and then leave; they don’t even come. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve trained a green person in this business – it’s been years.
My wife says I enjoy this work because I like a challenge. This is a damned challenging job, I can tell you that. But there’s just something about it. You get to be out there in the woods every day. Some days it’s 40 below, and some days it’s 100-degree heat, but there’s a lot of good days. I just like cutting the trees, I guess – of course I don’t do that much anymore.
We do logging, land clearing, firewood, and we have the mills, where our main business is making crane mats. We take a low grade piece of hardwood – a lot of that would have been firewood or pulp – and we turn it into a crane bed. We saw timbers out of 16-foot logs and drill them and bolt them together to make a 4-foot-wide wooden surface for people to drive on. I was one of the first ones to make these in New Hampshire, now I think there’s two of us. There’s a bunch of mills over in Maine that do it. It is kind of a niche market. It took me a while to get it figured out, but we do pretty good at it now. Now it’s a matter of getting logs and help to work at the mills. We also do a little bit of lumber sawing too. We have a mill in Lewis, New York, about 30 miles south of Plattsburgh, and we have a mill just up the road from my shop, between Littleton and Whitefield.
You really need to be diversified. Logging is not a year-round business here, and the markets are so up and down. What we’re getting paid for pulp and chips today is what we got paid in the 1980s, and it costs us a lot more money to produce it. Pulp and chips is 60 to 70 percent of what you’re cutting, depending on which part of the state you’re in. The North Country is a lot of pulp and chips. You get down south a ways, and it’s a little more logs. The business has always been tough, but it’s really, really tough now. A new guy starting now, I don’t know how they’d make it. We can’t raise our wages like everybody else can, because they just raise their product prices. We’re told what the mills will pay us, and the prices have dropped 17 to 18 percent over the last couple of years.
I run a processor on the landing. We modified that and put a cut-to-length machine right on the landing. Our utilization is far superior to stroke delimbers or pull through delimbers or a slasher. The computer helps the operator utilize every piece of that tree to its best potential. We make lots of different sorts. We get all the pulp down to 4-inch. We get all the 12-foot, 5-inch softwood logs. The computer reads that diameter, so there’s no more eyeballing it from the cab 20 or 30 feet away. It was a pretty substantial investment, but I believe it’s the far superior way to log. I started experimenting with the processor in 2012, and we went full time two years ago. I bought a brand new machine and trained an operator. I actually made him 25 percent owner, so it is to his best interest to utilize every piece of that wood to its maximum potential.
We work on federal land, state land, and with private landowners. We just wrapped up a federal job in Landaff, and we have one starting that will be about five winters long in Easton. And we do state jobs all over the state, as well as work for private landowners. Some landowners are strictly after money, some want to do selective cutting so forests will grow better so they can harvest again in the future, and some people like to do something to improve wildlife habitat.
On most of my jobs, I’m working with foresters. They are contracted by the landowners, so they are the landowner’s agent. A forester understands what it’s going to take to log that property, and some landowners don’t understand. I really like working with foresters, because they make a very good buffer. Those landowners are comfortable knowing they’ve got a person who’s working for them.
I don’t really have hobbies. I try to hunt, but it’s usually just a few Sunday mornings during hunting season. I’m basically looking at trees when I’m walking around. I work six days a week, and in winter I usually work a half day on Sunday. My wife works five and half days a week in summer, and if I’m working Sunday morning, she’s working, so she works a lot of hours, too. She’s here in the office at 6 in the morning, and she takes care of everything at home. If we’re not working, we have no idea what to do. Neither one of us can stand to be in the house during the day. I don’t see myself retiring. What would you do? It sounds boring.