Like many Vermonters, Hayden Lake spent a lot of time in the woods while he was growing up. Those experiences eventually led to a career as a consulting forester. Last year he took a break from work to return to school, and he’s currently enrolled in the Transatlantic Forestry Master’s Program in British Columbia, with an opportunity to spend next year studying in Europe. The focus of his research – on smaller scale, silvicultural-based forestry – suggests, perhaps, that you can take the forester out of Vermont, but you can’t take Vermont out of the forester.
I grew up in Grafton, Vermont, where my family has lived for five generations. My grandfather, Norman Lake, was a forester and logger, and some of my earliest memories are of sitting on his lap in his John Deere 350c bulldozer in some of his managed woodlands. I spent a lot of time outside as a kid and consider myself fortunate to have grown up in rural Vermont.
I soaked up a lot of forestry lessons from my grandfather. And the great thing about forests is that they are slow-growing, so I continue to learn what the results of his management decisions are today as I manage parcels of land that he worked in 40-plus years ago. Reading Tom Wessel’s Reading the Forested Landscape as a 13-year old, combined with issues of Northern Woodlands magazine, definitely influenced my decision to seek a career in the woods.
My family was sort of homesteaders, back-to-the-landers, so we always raised animals and had a big vegetable garden. That’s something I’ve continued to do in my adult life. In Vancouver, we’re at the mercy of the grocery store. It’s been a long time since we haven’t had a pantry full of canned fruits and vegetables and a chest freezer full of venison and pork that we’ve raised. We’ll get back to it eventually.
I didn’t get into hunting until I was in my mid-20s. A big influence there was learning more about the crossover between wildlife biology and forestry. I started seeing the results of a high deer population on the forests that I was managing, seeing forests that were basically a monoculture of beech in the understory because the deer just mow down all the oak and maple. That opened my eyes that there were too many deer per square mile, and really the only thing that can be done about that is either heavier cutting to have a resurgence of new growth so maybe some stems can get above deer browse height – or the other control would be reducing the deer population through hunting. I started hunting to sort of do my part for the forest. I eat meat, and venison is about as sustainable a meat source as I can think of.
I went to the Putney School for high school, where I was equally involved in and interested in the arts and the sciences. After high school, I gravitated towards the arts, specifically printmaking and music. My mom was both an artist and a nurse-practitioner (she also studied botany), so it seemed natural that I could do both in one lifetime. I think that there can be and should be overlap between these two worlds. I place a lot of value in the definitions of silviculture as “the science and art of growing and tending forest crops” (silviculture professor Ralph Nyland, 1996) and “the art of producing and tending a forest” (silviculture professor David M. Smith, 1997).
When I was studying fine arts as a young undergraduate, I found myself using the natural world, and forests in particular, as my subject matter. That led to a scientific curiosity, prompting me to switch my field of study and pursue a degree in forestry from the University of Vermont. I started a forestry consulting business during my last semester at UVM. I had family and friends of family who have a land base who had expressed interest in the fact that I was studying forestry, so that was at least a place for me to begin practicing. I held a few jobs logging, working for other consultants in Vermont, before building a client base of my own.
I began working as a subcontractor for another established consulting forester, George Weir. That was a great relationship, and I learned a ton from him. Having a mentor, especially someone like George – he just sort of instinctually talks to himself as he’s walking through the forest, so as long as I was following closely on his coattails with my ears perked up, I absorbed so much information from him. We still collaborate quite a bit.
After about 13 years of working as a consulting forester, I looked around and decided that if I’m ever going to go explore other parts of the world, and really challenge myself, open up other opportunities, there’s no time like the present. I decided going back to school would be a responsible way to tick a few of those boxes without just ditching out altogether on the business that I had built up. I shopped around for forestry master’s degree programs and kept coming back to a program through the University of British Columbia that offers two master’s degrees in two years, with one year spent in BC and one year in Europe. If I stick with this trajectory, I am headed to Finland next year.
Initially I’d thought my second year might be in Freiburg, Germany, because of its proximity to the Black Forest, which is something that I’ve always wanted to visit. Vienna, Austria, was also interesting to me, because the curriculum for that location focuses on forest management in the Alps and high elevation. Ultimately, I was advised by the program administrator, who happens to be a Finn, that with my background and experience managing private land, the Finnish model would be really appropriate and in line with that. In Finland, about 80 percent of the forest ownership is in small, privately owned parcels. In Canada, almost 90 percent of the managed forest is either provincial or federal land. So it will be a stark difference between year one and year two of the program, and the Finnish exposure will be a good segue back into managing New England forests with the private ownership model.
When I arrived in BC, it didn’t take me long to see that forest management is very different here. For one thing, it’s a very different forest ecosystem – mostly coniferous trees: Douglas fir, western hemlock, western red cedar, and lodgepole pine when you get into the interior of British Columbia. They have major issues here with fire and mountain pine beetle. By far the most common approach to forest management out here seems to be very industrial and almost agricultural. Clearcut logging and replanting fast-growing, genetically superior preferred species is just what’s done here. I decided to look more into commercial thinning, partial harvesting systems, and “alternative” silvicultural practices that are being used here, but on a very, very small scale in places like community forests, municipal forests, small private landholdings, woodlot licenses, and First Nations managed forests.
I wanted to shed some light on where, when, why, and how “alternative” silvicultural practices – alternative to clearcutting – are being used and how that might help influence the greater philosophy of an approach to forestry in the province and help expand the use of partial harvesting systems instead of clearcut logging. That has allowed me the opportunity to do some literature review, but mostly to find and informally interview forestry professionals, both active and retired foresters, loggers, members of the Ministry of Forests – which is like the Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation back in Vermont. Historically, thinning was used here, and there are still some standing examples of the results of those partial harvests that I’ve been able to visit and see in contrast to the more industrial approach.
Another project is an independent study again influenced by what I’m used to back in Vermont, which is a lot of small-scale, value-added entities – sawmills, remanufacturing companies, furniture makers, timber framers, log home builders – that I find actually have an influence on forest management, because there’s this free market and all these niche marketing opportunities to grow, for instance, really nice, big oak trees that you know will go into these value-added craftsmen avenues. That’s really lacking in British Columbia, where there are five multinational companies that consume close to 100 percent of all of the timber that is harvested. That makes it very difficult for an entrepreneur or somebody with an innovative idea of having a value added wood product company to even get ahold of logs so that they can start up these small businesses. So I’ve been working on finding the few and far between examples of that small scale, value added model and trying to shed some light on those and identify some of the barriers and challenges that they’ve faced, and successes that they’ve had in sustaining that small business model.
I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do when I’ve finished my studies here. In some ways I know I would be foolish not to return to Vermont and resume life as a consulting forester. If all goes according to plan, I will have a couple of degrees added to my resume so eventually I might do some teaching. But I’m leaving my options open, and we’ll see if any other opportunities present themselves.
I really like the diversity of the consulting forester work. I’m always doing something different, whether it’s forest inventories or occasionally I’d do forest appraisals or timber trespass investigations. I absolutely love walking with landowners on their properties and educating them – just kind of doing what George did, talking to myself out loud and pointing out what I see and opportunities for influencing the growth of the forest and influencing wildlife habitat creation. I just love being outside and being in some remote places that a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to visit. I love using clues on the landscape to paint a picture of what happened to get this forest to its current state – and, as a forest practitioner, thinking about what the long term impact will be of the management decisions that I make.
I try to live by the philosophy that life is short, so make the most of it. Live in the present, make time to have fun, challenge yourself, and keep an open mind. Of course, that’s often easier said than done. I appreciate that everybody is busy doing something. To use that as an excuse not to have time to spend doing something that’s fun or doing something that you love, I just don’t think that’s a good enough excuse. Stop what you’re doing and go have some fun, even if that means that at times you’re going to disappoint other people or not meet a deadline. It’s a battle. It’s a compromise. My mom died at age 60, and that really made me realize that life is short. I’m 36. There’s so much that I want to do in this life, and I’m not going to do a fraction of it – especially if I use the excuse of “I’m too busy.” I really make an effort to balance being responsible and meeting my obligations with just living my life.
I’m passionate about motorcycles – specifically dual sport motorcycles, so on and off road. It’s a great mode of transportation, especially on backroads and Forest Service roads. During the first year of Covid, I reconnected with a childhood friend, and we did this cross-country trip called the TransAmerica Trail on our dual sport motorcycles. It took about two months. The trail is a mapped route from coast to coast. We started right at my driveway in Putney, Vermont, and rode on Class IV roads and fire roads and Forest Service roads all the way to Port Orford, Oregon, which is the western-most point in the Continental U.S. That was an awesome trip, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Discussion *