FLATLAND LOGGING

Marvel Logging occupies a former mechanic shop east of Havre. The stack of delimbed pine logs that occupy a portion of the parking area sit in stark contrast to the backdrop of Milk River Valley cottonwood trees and the vast stretch of prairie that fills the horizon all around.

"Logging is logging," Pat said, whether logging in mountainous western Montana or the hills of the east.

The trip to the job site is similar. You follow a series of ever smaller, more rugged roads until you start to think you might be lost, then you see signs of recent logging, starting with bark in the road, like the bits of hair a dog shakes loose as it walks away from being brushed.

Then come sawdust, stumps, slag heaps and tidy stacks of delimbed timber as your vehicle follows a two-track trail up a draw here, a ridge there, side-hills and switchbacks, and at least one "what the heck?" spot, until you reach the sound of a saw buzzing through wood, the crack of limbs shattering and the whomp of hundreds of board feet of lumber in its raw form hitting earth.

What is different in the east is that the first part of the trip crosses wide open cropland and rolling, grass-covered hills that turn into small, grass-covered mountains dotted with both evergreen and deciduous tree that occasionally form small groves. You see nothing that would support the logging industry until you reach the bark in the road.

Pat and his son Gabe are working 40 miles south of Havre, on a ridge overlooking the southeastern slope of the Bear Paw Mountains. One open, grassy saddle in that ridge offers a panoramic view of hills dropping swiftly down to wide open prairie and pasture interrupted by the Little Rocky Mountains in the distance.

After a year or two of bouncing from job sites east of Billings and around White Sulfur Springs, Pat landed a logging job on the Cowan Ranch in the Bear Paws in 1993 and has spent most of the years since then logging different sites in the Bear Paws.

For 10 of the last 11 years he worked on Rocky Boy clearing pine beetle killed timber for the reservation's forestry plan to contain the beetle infestation and clear the fire hazard of dead trees.

Pat and Gabe are logging a section of Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation land on a contract for almost 1 million board feet of lodge pole pine and fir, but it's not quite the same type of logging operation that Pat started with at the beginning of his career.

Not so many years ago the sound of a saw at a logging site meant men with chainsaws felling trees for a skidder operator to come along behind and drag to where the trees were delimbed and cut to length, again with a chainsaw, then stacked for loading. Logger was considered one of the most dangerous occupations.

Today, even a small two-man operation like Marvel Logging can harvest almost 1 million board feet of timber on 160 acres, including building roads into a portion of it, in less than two years of favorable weather conditions - given the right machinery.

Pat operates a feller-buncher that looks something like an excavator, but in place of the bucket on the end of the jointed arm it has pincers that clamp onto the tree and a circular saw blade to cut through the timber. The logger, sitting in the cab manipulating levers, lifts the cut tree and stacks it to the side.

He cut and stacked four trees in under five minutes.

"When I first came here, all I had was a skidder and a Cat, and then as the need arose I got more machinery and got mechanized," he said.

His son Gabe climbed into the delimber and went to work turning a pile of felled trees into processed logs. Parked next to a stack of felled trees, the delimber, with Gabe at the controls, picked up a tree with a set of claws mounted on an extendable arm. The claws wrapped the tree and slid down its length, popping off limbs as it went. A circular saw near the claw-head cut the tree to length - doing in moments what would take someone with a chainsaw several minutes.

"This isn't even the top-of-the-line technology," Pat said.

"The newer stuff is really high-tech because it's all computerized," he said, adding that new feller-bunchers have an automatic saw that cuts as soon as the operator closes the clamps on the tree.

And other machines, called harvesters, do the work of both of his machines in one. This is what he could afford when he started the 10-year project on Rocky Boy, Pat said, and it's still doing the job.

The machinery they have keeps the overhead down and cuts back on the number of employees needed, Gabe said.

"We're just small enough to do what we do and make a living at it because we don't have the production chasing us down. The big loggers, they got to move the wood or they're going down," he added.

It's hard to find people who can do the work anymore, both men said.

"Even at home the farm kids made the best loggers because they grew up driving tractors," Pat said.

But finding help is hard.

"It's a lost art," he added. "You just about got to be raised in it to really be good at it. It's specialized work is what it is, really."

And logging means hard work and inconsistent hours - long days when there's work then a long spring break from about the end of March to June some time with random days off when the weather is wet because logging shuts down when the ground is soggy.

Along with adding machinery, the Marvels have had to make other changes to operations.

After a quick succession of hiring and losing drivers to the tough haul off the mountainside and the long hours to the sawmill in Townsend, Pat started hauling their logs to the sawmill himself.

"Some guys take one trip and say 'no thanks,'" Gabe said.

It's an 11-hour round trip starting loaded from their shop in Havre, and a 17-hour day if starting with loading an empty trailer on-site in the mountains.

West of the Divide, Pat said, the average haul to a sawmill is about 50 miles.

The truck with the pup trailer behind hauls about 6,000 board feet, he said, with 4,000 on the truck and 2,000 on the trailer.

The logs, both lodge pole and fir, are cut in 36-, 27-, 18- and 9-foot lengths based on the straightness, length and diameter of the tree.

The area they were working in mid-June was near the top of the ridge where the trees were stunted from weather stress, Pat said. Most of the trees grew with an eastward lean away from the prevailing southwest winds that blow in over the ridge.

Many of the trees were old growth, nearing the end of their lifespan, he said, and their bases were wide, but they tapered quickly. "They're short on the good end," he said.

"We can take them down to a 5 1/2-inch top," he said, "and when we make an 18-footer try to hold them up at 6 inches. They can get a 2-by-4 out of a 5-1/3-inch top, but the smaller the top the less you get for the log."

The longer the logs, the more the sawmill pays per board foot, Pat said.

Trees that are too bent or curvy could sometimes be cut to 9-foot lengths and pass inspection at the mill, but more often they are set aside to sell as firewood, he said. The smaller trees, which still have to be cut down, might make firewood, or they end up in a slag heap.

Much of what the Marvels were clearing in that area were trees dead or dying from a spruce budworm infection, which was stripping the needles from otherwise healthy trees, part of the reason for logging the area.

The dead trees were not necessarily a detriment, Pat said.

"The dead ones are still solid. This fir takes a long time to rot after it's dead, whereas lodgepole starts bluing on the outside, starting to rot," he said, "This fir, it can lay a long time and as long as it's still solid it doesn't hurt it."

At the time they had 10 stacks, or decks, of firewood-quality logs they were going to have to advertise for sale locally.

"There's a market for firewood, but it stays in the deck until someone wants a load," Gabe said. "To keep the money coming in you gotta have stud logs going to the mill. That's what we're kind of running up against. If it's too small you can't send it to the mill and if it's crooked they can't cut a board out of it."

But this was only one portion of the contract. Some trees they encountered earlier in the project were too big for the machinery and had to be felled with a chainsaw, Pat said, and they expected more tall, big trees ahead, but they had to get the road cleared and built to them first.

Any road construction was outlined in the bid and built into the contract, Pat said.

They were able to use an existing dirt road across a private pasture from the county road to the state section, but about two-thirds of the road they would end up with would be built by them. Other portions would benefit from improvements.

"That's about a $30,000 road job," he said, pointing to a drawing laid out on a satellite image of the area.

He's not paid for the road, but the expense for it is taken out of how much the state gets for their cut of the lumber profits, he said. Afterward, the road is seeded rather than maintained, but that base will be there in case access is needed to the area, such as for a fire.

The contract says they have three years to clear this 160 acres, but the Marvels think they might be done by spring break - about a year and a half into the project - but definitely within the three years.

The Bear Paws have 60,000 to 100,000 acres of timber and Rocky Boy about 30,000, Pat said, and Fort Belknap Indian Reservation has timberland as well. The Marvels have been hearing about bids possibly coming open, but Pat said he's turning 64 this autumn and thinking about retiring.

"I'm not as big a producer as I was at one time; I don't have a crew like I used to have. It's just me and my son and maybe one other guy. We're only getting out about three loads a week. I used to put out three loads a day, every day," he said.

From 1993 to 2015 he hauled 15 million board feet of timber off Rocky Boy reservation, he said.

This large output was what helped him pay the bills when the housing market and economy took a dive in 2008. Almost overnight a load of logs brought in half what it had been getting, he said, and the market for U.S. timber still hasn't quite recovered.

Gabe said he isn't sure that he wants to take over his dad's business.

"I'm experienced enough to find a job," he said about getting bids, but his conversations turned to the responsibility of keeping production up, paying the bills and the difficulty with finding employees.

He isn't convinced his dad is serious about retiring and thinks that decision might be put off.

"He's still got bills to pay, so he'll still work a while," Gabe said, laughing.

For his part, Pat talked about a few bids he heard might be opening in the area.

"It makes work, I guess," he said, with a smile.