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A day in the life of a logger

by RACHEL SUN
Staff Writer | October 28, 2020 1:00 AM

SANDPOINT — At 4:45 a.m., Jacob Callen, one of the setters for Dunkel Logging, pulls his blue Dodge truck into a parking lot in Ponderay where he’ll meet up with his friend and fellow crew member, Yasmine Guthrie.

As Callen pulls up, Guthrie steps out of a nearby Jeep, waving. With few words exchanged she gets into the passenger-side seat of the truck. Callen pulls out of the lot, Guthrie connects her phone to the stereo, and country music fills the cabin as town fades from view. Over the course of about 45 minutes, the truck pulls first onto the highway, and then up hills on increasingly bumpy logging roads.

On the logging road, headlights reveal the dirt path and underbrush on the roadside. Finally, Callen pulls over, then backs into a space next to where Jason Steele, another setter, has parked.

All three crew members wait on the dark road a bit longer. After a while, Callen cuts the engine and steps out of the truck, followed by Guthrie. There is almost no sound of the truck’s doors opening and closing, the scrape of dirt and the sound of the loggers pulling on their work boots. Callen checks his phone, which briefly lights up his face against the silhouettes of trees and a dark blue sky.

The forest is beginning to take shape in the dawn light when Mose Dunkel, owner of Dunkel Logging, drives up the road. He pulls over and chats with the crew members for a few minutes, going over plans for the workday. Then Callen, Guthrie and Steele pick up their gear and ascend the freshly-carved dirt path to the worksite.

Dunkel grew up with logging, and was around 5 or 6 years old when he first started watching his father working in the woods, he said. At about 12 years old, he began working during summer and holiday vacations, but hadn’t planned to continue long-term. He hated the early mornings and the exhausting work, he said.

“I did make more money than the average kid, and I did like that part,” he said. “[But] I knew I didn’t want to be a logger, I wanted to do something that was easier.”

Many loggers are people who like being outdoors and away from desks, said Steve Barham, projects and safety services coordinator for Associated Logging Contractors of Idaho.

“It’s mostly hunting, fishing outdoors, people that want to, you know, spend their leisure time out there anyway,” Barham said. “The only difference [these days] I’ve seen is we lose some of the younger more athletic type of men to other industries because we have difficulty competing sometimes on wages.”

Callen, who’s in his second year with Dunkel logging, is a longtime outdoorsman.

“I’ve been in the woods since I was 5 with my grandpa,” he said. “There are some days when you don’t want to be here, like when there are five feet of snow and you’ve gotta wrap that skyline and run down, [but] you eventually get used to it.”

Still, Dunkle said, logging also tends to draw in younger people, usually without college degrees, for its comparatively high starting salary.

“If someone is good and can do the work,” he said, “on day one, they’ll probably make a fair wage.”

That money has a limit, though. Because employees can start out at around $13 or $14 an hour — a necessary acknowledgment of the hard work and risk loggers take on, wages tend to max out at roughly $30 an hour, he said.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median faller salary in 2019 was $44,650 a year. That can be slightly higher or lower depending on the job.

Still, it was enough for Dunkel. He said he preferred logging after a year and a half of college. He wasn’t making much money as a student, so he came back. From that point on, he and his dad worked side-by-side, even managing two crews for some years.

The job has changed a lot since Dunkel began the work as a boy, he said, and even more so since his father started the company in 1975. At that point, loggers were still using horses, a now nearly-obsolete practice.

“It almost isn’t even the same work, because the equipment does so much more than it used to,” he said.

Instead of horses, heavy, diesel-powered machinery and systems of cables have replaced animals and some employees. As Dunkel’s crew hikes up the road surrounded by pines, a yarder that Dunkle will use to pull logs up the steep mountainous grade comes into view.

The crew works every day, early morning until around 2 p.m. As the sun begins to rise, Callen, Guthrie and Steele pull out thick wire ropes that will be used to drag newly-cut logs up the hill every few minutes. The three then take hold of a cable, and together pull it down the mountain where it will be attached to create a pulley system.

Guthrie climbs back up the slope maybe 15 minutes later. Another example of changing times, she is the newest member of Dunkel’s crew and the first woman to have worked for him in the company’s decades in business.

Guthrie acts as the chaser, unhooking the “choker” noose that holds each log as they are pulled up to the roadside landing every few minutes. Guthrie, who was previously a full-time stay-at-home mom, said she’s been welcomed.

“I was a little bit surprised that he actually kept me on,” Guthrie said. “It feels kind of good [being the first woman with the company].”

Dunkel has had hundreds of employees over the years, he said, but it’s incredibly rare to see women in logging. Still, he said, he’s seen “big, strong-looking guys” who couldn’t do the job, and seen women who were more than capable.

“I went to another operation that had three women working for them,” he said. “One … she was, in everybody’s opinion, the best that anybody knew of in the area.”

A good crew can be hard to come by. He’s been lucky the past several years, Dunkel said, but it hasn’t always been that way — finding good crew members has always been the number one thing employers complain about, he said.

“If I see a potential good employee, I would be dumb to not give ‘em a shot,” he said.

When owners of logging companies do find good crew members, they’re loyal to them, Barham. The work can be hard and dangerous, and now more than ever there’s more competition for jobs with a similar pay scale.

“The owner knows the employee’s kids and when they're born, and you know, and their wives, and so they don't want to just leave them without a job,” he said. “Because [owners] know that it's not an easy thing.”

Barham, who sold his logging company, Barham Inc. in 2008, said he tried to retire but missed the mental challenge of the business.

Unlike the logging companies years ago, companies today strike a precarious balance keeping their crews working and machines operable to turn a profit. The business is high-cost, high-reward, with machines that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and more money than ever spent on repairs parts, maintenance and gas.

Price fluctuations for diesel or hydraulic oil, as well as the shifting costs of lumber can make things unpredictable, Dunkel said.

“A lot of money is going in and out for not that big a company,” he said.

In many ways, loggers are like tree farmers, Dunkel said. But unlike farmers, they don’t plant the trees or even own the land. Jobs are decided by contracts with landowners, lumber companies and sometimes bids for jobs with the Forest Service or similar entities.

Sometimes non-loggers have misunderstandings about how loggers operate, Barham said. For example, loggers may be seen as doing a “bad job” by people who don’t realize the trees for logging are marked by the landowners.

“I hear a lot of, ‘well, that logger did a bad job on that sale. I drove by it and looked around.’” Barham said. “He did what was required in the contract 99% of the time.”

There are also misunderstandings about how logging is used to help manage forests, Dunkel said.

“There’s this idea that we need to manage our forests better … The forests are in a stage where they’re outgrowing what we can manage,” Dunkel said. “there’s no logger sitting around not doing anything.”

If such a logger does exist, they certainly don’t appear to be on Dunkel’s crew. As dawn turns to morning sunshine, and then afternoon heat, Callen, Steele and Luke Plaster, the crew’s hook tender, trudge back and forth over the steep and uneven terrain connecting felled trees to the choker.

At 2 p.m., just over 9 hours after Callen and Guthrie left for the job, the crew sends up their equipment with the yarder, and hikes back up the hill.

The crew gathers by the machines, drinks water and talks before parting ways. Everyone is dusty, and everyone is tired. But the job — at least for today — is done.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

The light from a cellphone lights the face of a logger in the early morning hours.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A view from a site where Dunkel Logging is working.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

Many loggers are people who like being outdoors and away from desks, said Steve Barham, projects and safety services coordinator for Associated Logging Contractors of Idaho.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

Crew members for Dunkel Logging at pictured at work on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging checks his phone during a break on a recent job.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A logger for Dunkel Logging works on a job site.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A view from a site where Dunkel Logging is working.

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(Photo by RACHEL SUN)

A view from a site where Dunkel Logging is working.