Heath Bunnell has worked in the woods since he was a kid, stacking wood and tagging along with his father and grandfather, although as a young man, he briefly lived in Alaska, working longline fishing off the coast. Honored as the 2019 Outstanding Logger of the Year by the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association and in 2022 as the Logger of the Year by the Northeastern Loggers Association, he participates in several groups that promote high standards of logging and silviculture. Bunnell owns three companies: H.B. Logging, H.B. Trucking, and most recently, Kirby Mulch Company, which he founded in 2019. He and his wife Tricia, a real estate broker, live in Kirby, Vermont, with their two teenage daughters, Sofia and Zoe, who have their own small business selling firewood.
I grew up in Monroe, New Hampshire, right across the Connecticut River from Barnet, Vermont. I played sports and went to high school at St. Johnsbury Academy. My grandfather came from Canaan, Vermont, and my mother’s side was from Danville, so there’s always that tie to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, which is where I live now.
My brother and I – he’s about four years younger – grew up spending a lot of time outside. We were always walking somewhere. I don’t remember actually learning tree species; I just grew up knowing them. I hung around with my grandfather and my dad all the time. My grandfather was a logger and trucker. Basically, he would buy logs from other loggers and landowners, and market them and haul them to the mills. He also ran a small excavation business. It was just him and one other guy, most of the time. My father was more into the logging. Both were great influences on me.
Our whole family is outside oriented. We get together at Thanksgiving at our hunting camp. Most of my cousins hunt, and we all worked at a young age. We still had 4-foot wood in the industry when I was a kid, and we basically worked under the log loader, stacking the skidder piles. We’d make bundles so that the log loaders could pick them up easier. It’s a good way to grow up, I guess. When we drove somewhere to pick up wood, there would be three to four kids – loggers’ kids, truckers’ kids – doing the same thing.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an Alaskan fisherman and logger. Those were the two things I wanted to do. I bought a skidder right out of high school, but I had an itch to go somewhere, do some things. So I went to Alaska to work on fishing boats. My buddy and I got a van and we travelled cross-country. We went up through Glacier National Park and ended up in Seward, Alaska. We walked the docks asking for jobs and landed a black cod and halibut long-lining job.
It was the worst boat ever. A terrible boat. Bad captain, bad crew, unsafe. I learned how to work, how not to trust everybody, and how to deal with people. Before our time in Alaska was over, both of us were on highliners, making good money long-lining. We did crab fishing up there and in Washington State. We’d usually be out at sea for a week. Two weeks would be a big trip. You’d need supplies, and the boats were small enough that bad weather would kick you into port. We fished some other species too, like albacore. Those trips were a month long, 1,000 miles off the coast of Alaska. It was a good job as a young man, back when you could live on nothing.
I came back home in 1998 and began working with my dad. It was only supposed to be for a few weeks, and here I still am. What happened was that an ice storm hit and there were a lot of opportunities for cutting wood, so I didn’t go back to Alaska. I stayed here and bought my second skidder. I began working for myself almost immediately. Dad was a mechanized logger and I was a basically a conventional chainsaw and skidder logger. I preferred that type of logging and I still like it, though I’m mostly doing mechanized logging now.
My dad and I still talk every day. He was a pulp contractor as well as a logger and trucker, so he helped me market the wood or told me how to do it. I also worked for him here and there, cutting trees as a subcontractor with my own skidder.
My dad and grandfather taught me economics, and I don’t think I’ve ever lost money on a job that I cut with a cable skidder and a chainsaw. But you have to think about how much you want the job. If you’re going to get paid for doing a skilled job, you need to know your worth and the skill set you bring – for example – how you get the work done without causing residual damage. I could live on cutting pulp, but I had to work hard at it. Often I’d work from daylight to dark. I took care of my chainsaws before I went home so that when I showed up in the morning at the site, all I did was dump gas in them and went to work. I was efficient and ready to go. As you get older, it’s a harder job to make work. But your costs are next to nothing compared to mechanized logging.
To me, the Northeast Master Loggers Certification program seemed like a good one to be involved with. It’s another program that’s moving in the right direction for professionalization in the industry. That’s why I joined the Professional Logging Contractors in Vermont, and why I’m part of New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association and the Timber Harvesting Council in New Hampshire. They’re all good outfits. They’re looking out for the forest industry as a whole – landowners, loggers, and foresters. Everyone needs to be in one group, otherwise we have no voice.
Ninety percent of our work is based on silviculture. How are we going to keep this property as forestland in this person’s family? The public doesn’t always understand what we do. There’s a tendency, for example, to confuse tree age and diameter size, and think we’re cutting virgin forest. You can have a big young tree, or an 8-inch tree that’s more than 300 years old. There’s needs to be better public education.
I have three companies and, with all of them together, I have 20 employees. Right now, we have crews in Vermont mowing rights-of-way with brontosauruses. We have a tree crew there doing maintenance on dangerous trees. We have logging trucks hauling timber mats for the right-of-way project and the grinder is down in southern Vermont right now, grinding waste mats. We also have a logging crew out in Plymouth, New Hampshire, working for a client, Green Acres, a family that has bought a lot of land and wants to keep it intact.
We also do trail work now, putting trails in and doing excavations. We work on 30 to 40 solar projects annually. We go in, clear the trees, stump the ground, do all the excavation work, plant the grass, do the maintenance, do the trenching work with the electrical guys. I have great employees. That’s the truth. They all get along. They might bicker a little bit, but there’s no real conflict. Without these valuable employees and the office staff, I would not be able to run the multiple jobs that I have going on.
I decided to take the leap to founding Kirby Mulch Company when I bought a grinder. I was thinking of ways to still be able to log and turn my by-products into something I could sell. I started the company in 2019. Then COVID happened, and everyone was staying home. It was a busy time when people were needing topsoil, compost, and wood chips. When we mix our own compost, it’s basically by-products from local farms and we get the grindings and leaves from our own projects. We’ll let it cook, and that’ll be the mulch. We don’t add chemicals, although we do color some mulch. But our number one seller is our Northeast Kingdom all-natural mulch.
This work has been good for my kids. They work with me and they have their own little business, bundling firewood. Zoe is 13. My oldest, Sofia, is 16, and she delivers firewood to local campgrounds. They’re both into sports, but when they’re not playing sports, they have to work. Which means they play sports most of the time! Those were the same rules I had growing up: if you’re not playing a sport then it’s time to work. And you had to do both when you could.
They go to work with me occasionally when they don’t have other stuff to do. Sofia occasionally answers the phone and takes orders. Zoe will help putting together new orders. They could run the equipment, but in the yard, they’re not allowed to. That’s something we need to work on in the forest industry, making sure younger kids can run some equipment so they can develop interest.
In the winter we ski. We usually go to Jay Peak. We also hunt when we can. We try to get out of this area in April and traditionally, we have gone to Moab, Utah, for about a month – mountain biking and dirt biking and hanging out in the desert sun.
Our family has always had dogs. My first two, Ricca and Moab, came to work with me regularly. My dog Sparky goes to work with me every day. He doesn’t like being left at home. He will literally be waiting at the door, waiting for it to open. With the solar work, I can’t bring him every day. It’s tough on him. But when I’m logging, he’s either in the truck if it’s too cold, or on the job. It’s a good dog life and has been a good life for me.