As a log buyer and forester, I’ve had many opportunities to spend time on active logging operations, but until recently, I had never traveled by boat to visit one. When Charlie Hall, manager of Sappi North America’s forestry program based in Skowhegan, Maine, invited me to tour a current timber harvesting operation on Moosehead Lake’s Sugar Island, I jumped at the chance.
Moosehead Lake, located in west-central Maine, is the state’s largest at 75,471 acres; it’s also the source of the Kennebec River. There are many islands on the lake, with Sugar Island being the biggest. The 4,500-acre patch of land is approximately two miles across at its widest point and close to four miles long. Originally owned by the Scott Paper Company and sold to the state of Maine in 1985, the island is currently managed by the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands (BPL). There are around a dozen small, privately owned camp lots on the southern end of the island, as well as several public campsites. Timber harvesting was last done on the island from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, when softwood pulp and hardwood grade logs were skidded directly onto the ice. The hardwood logs were trucked across the ice, while the pulpwood was sent down the Kennebec to Scott’s mill in Winslow after ice-out.
When E J Carrier Logging, based in Jackman, Maine, bought a barge and began harvesting timber on the nearby (privately owned) Deer Island in 2012, BPL forester Marc Albert took notice, and it got him thinking. Collaborating with his colleague in the Bureau, Pete Smith (now retired), Albert developed a plan for a harvesting operation on Sugar Island. Typically, BPL bids out timber sales, but in this case a stumpage sale was negotiated with Sappi North America. A contract was signed in September 2013. The harvest plan called for the removal of 40,000 cords over an eight-year period.
This amounts to 10 cords per acre, or approximately one-third of the total volume. The plan called for logging to be done from summer through early fall, with several miles of summer road to be constructed on the island and an access road rebuilt on the mainland. A temporary dock system would be installed each spring and removed in the fall. Best Management Practices would be critical due to the proximity of the lake.
I met up with Hall and Doug Reed, Western Regional Manager of BPL, in Greenville on a cool, cloudy morning in late August. Hall, a University of Maine forestry graduate and 20-year Sappi employee, leads a team of nine foresters and technicians in procuring stumpage to supply some of the more than 1.5 million tons of hardwood pulp needed annually to run the pulp and paper mill in Skowhegan. Reed, also a UMaine graduate, has been a forester with the state for 18 years and oversees seven foresters who manage approximately 250,000 acres of forestland. With Hall driving, we headed north along the eastern side of Moosehead Lake 10 or 15 miles before turning west onto the rebuilt gravel road leading to the lake. We parked at a staging area a few hundred feet from the shore and walked down to the temporary dock just in time to see a truck loaded with hardwood pulp arriving on the barge. After chaining the barge to the dock, the driver backed the truck off and drove up the hill to the staging area. He soon returned with an empty truck and trailer and backed onto the barge. Our ride was ready.
Jack Plummer, an equipment operator and truck driver who also has experience running a lobster boat, met us on the deck and gave me a quick tour of the engine room and wheelhouse. He explained that the 110-foot barge was built in 1956 and is powered by a Detroit diesel engine. It takes 12 to 15 minutes to make the 1.3-mile crossing, with the barge traveling at seven miles per hour empty and five miles per hour loaded. It handles much better loaded, according to Plummer. A loaded log truck and trailer can weigh 100,000 pounds, but the heaviest run he makes is when he moves the John Deere excavator and the off-road dump truck together. On those trips, the deck of the barge is only a few inches above the water. On a big lake like Moosehead, there are days when the water is too rough to move equipment or trucks safely, and Plummer has to make the call whether to run or not. I was there in calm weather, so with Plummer behind the wheel, we backed away from the dock, smoothly swung around, and headed for the island.
Upon arriving at Sugar Island, we were met by Sappi forester Pete Foss and BPL forester Jeff Bartley. Foss, another UMaine graduate, began his career at Scott Paper as a scaler. Over the next 44 years he’s held many positions, including forest technician; supervisory roles in the woodroom, waste treatment plant, and mobile equipment garage; and procurement forester. Bartley started with the BPL in 1987 as part of a summer field crew while studying forestry at UMaine, and one of his projects was doing a timber inventory of Sugar Island. He was part of another cruise of the island in the mid-1990s, working during the winter by snowshoe and snowmobile. “I have been involved with the island since I started 32 years ago,” said Bartley. “It’s always interesting to track parcels of land for that long, and it gives a perspective not afforded many. Commercially thinning the stands that, in 1988, were annoying softwood thickets is a satisfying experience.”
After studying a harvest plan map on Foss’s laptop, we headed out on side-by-sides with Bartley acting as tour guide. He explained that the state determines the prescription and the volume to be harvested. Reed mentioned that the planning process involved public input and added that BPL forestlands are both FSC and SFI certified. Bartley said that visual management of the ridgelines, shorelines, and roads – in other words, how the job looks – was an important part of the planning process. Laying out roads to reduce visual impact involved adding curves, and Bartley commented that the “truck drivers must think we were drunk.” As we drove along, he pointed out some of the recently harvested stands and noted that BPL goals are primarily to conduct multi-aged management and to grow quality sawlogs. Patch cuts are generally kept to less than five acres.
We stopped at a log landing and watched an operator delimbing tree-length hardwood with a John Deere stroke delimber while a grapple skidder grabbed the brush to bring back into the woods. The operator stopped his machine and stepped out to talk with us. Dana Leblanc has worked for E J Carrier for 10 years and acknowledged that he’s done “some hard laboring jobs” in his time. He said he enjoys this job and doesn’t mind commuting by boat to get to work every morning.
A little farther along, we came across a John Deere 350G excavator building a new section of road. Nearly 14 miles of roads have been built on the island since logging started in the early fall of 2013. All road-building material has come from on site, much of it pulled directly out of the drainage ditches that now line the roads; when additional material is needed, it is trucked by an off-road dump truck from borrow pits nearby. When I asked excavator operator Mike Champagne if he had built all the roads on the island, he answered, “I’ll claim it.” Champagne, who lives in Jackman, has built plenty of roads in his 35 years with E J Carrier. When he started, road-building work was done with a dozer; he’s since switched to doing most of it with an excavator. Depending on the ground, Champagne said he can build 500 to 600 feet of road in a day with the 2.8-yard bucket he was using.
Our next stop was the site of a future skid trail, where we watched feller-buncher operator Todd Hanson of Greenville laying down trees in a new section. Hanson, who has worked at E J Carrier for 19 years, also logged on Deer Island before moving to Sugar Island. He explained that in his machine, he follows a written prescription for each block on the island describing how much, what species, and what diameters of tree to harvest. A GPS in the cab delineates the block boundaries so he knows exactly where he is within the block at any given time. He spent many years cutting marked wood with a chainsaw and running a cable skidder and says he prefers cutting by prescription rather than following a forester’s paint.
Soon after visiting with Hanson, we received a phone call suggesting we head back to the dock. The last load of the day (number eight) was on its way, and our ride was getting ready to depart. Most days, eight to ten loads of logs and pulp leave the island. Forest Weston, log marketing manager for Sappi’s forestry program, told me that BPL favors Maine mills when it comes to marketing forest products harvested from state land. The pulpwood from this job is going to Sappi’s mill in Skowhegan, about 90 miles away. Sawlogs are an important part of any logging job, and Weston works with a number of mills that saw pine, spruce, hemlock, and hardwood, as well as veneer and specialty products. There is an added transportation cost for Sugar Island because of the barging, but “other than that, it is a very standard operation,” said Weston.
Barging back across to the mainland with a load of hardwood pulp on board, the sky was gray and it was getting windy, so the lake was choppier than during our morning crossing. Plummer looked calm and thoughtful as he stood behind the wheel and carefully piloted the barge toward the mainland dock. As we traveled along, I admired the scenery and thought about how much time and cooperation it takes to pull off an operation like this. “We have a good relationship with the State and E J Carrier,” said Hall. “It’s a great team effort by everybody involved.”
