We're Going Down...Not just me Brother, YOU!

[Cedarkerf]

Feel for ya Burvol. Don't want to add to the gloom but Weyerhaeuser announced yesterday they're closing their export operation in Aberdeen.

 

[mercer_me]

the current government is taking us down a road that will be very hard to come back from. they INTEND to put us out of business, it fits their vision of the world.

:agree2:
I think we will come out of it but it will be long and hard.

 

[Taxmantoo]

I came hear in 1956 with the Uranium boom in Elliot lake (they called it Uranim City of the world)

That's sad.
My family used to camp at nearby Mississagi Provincial Park for a couple of weeks each summer after black fly season. I used to like shopping in Elliot Lake when I was a little kid.

 

[Gologit]

These are bad times. I've seen them come and go...our industry has a long history of boom times followed by times of extreme hardship. I don't ever remember, in my over forty years of being in the woods, times as bad as these. This is truly a depression.

I'm not much on politics or rhetoric. None of our politicians lately have really understood the working man...especially the logger. This isn't likely to change. Let's move past the partisan blame calling and start looking at our future.

Will the timber industry come back? Sure, it will. But it will take years...maybe a lot of them. Will it ever come back to anything even remotely like the good times of the past ten years? No, it won't. Not ever. The housing boom is over, the demand for lumber will never be that high again. In the lifetime of anyone reading this we will never see times such as we look back on now.

Young guys like Burvol, just beginning to work well at their craft, just beginning to get their feet under them after a long and arduous apprenticeship, are the hardest hit. A timber faller takes immense pride in his occupation and when there is no more timber to fall he is left confused and directionless. Where do you go and what do you do when the work you love most in the world evaporates before your very eyes? I wish I had answers but, like most people in my profession, I'm left with only questions and a feeling of uncertainty and impending doom.

I wish I could make up a couple of crews just out of the good men I know that are out of work, with no certainty of ever working again, around here. Fallers, Cat skinners, loaders, landing guys...you name it. We'd be a log-gettin', wood down the hill bunch...if anybody wanted the logs, which they don't. And if anybody would buy the wood, which they aren't

I couldn't honestly recommend a career in logging to a young guy just starting out with a wife and a kid and a mortgage. The future might hold more of what we're experiencing right now and we have no control over that. That kind of uncertainty doesn't feed the family.

Me, I'll stay in it. I'm close enough to the end of my string that I'll play it out. I'm too old to change, anyway. I always manage to scare up some kind of work but I have a vast network of people that I've accumulated over the years. Without those contacts I'd be just another guy with a bunch of dusty logging gear who's watching the mailbox for his unemployment check. Logging is what I do, it's who I am, and I'll stick with it until I can't pack in anymore.

 

[Burvol]

I had some nice wood a few weeks ago and it all didn't last very long. I thought I was dreaming.

This thinning job I'm doing is more than a blessing to me right now and I still get to be out in the woods with one of my powersaws. I can't complain...especially now.

I grew up in logging family that has been at it for generations. Like Bob said, it's who we are. I do have alot of pride and love for cutting timber, it's the best job a hard worker could ever want.

Yes, I remember all the talk as a kid hearing how bad it was at times, but this seems to be the real deal. I just hope that the housing bust and tough times kill us, not the environmentalist extremists. The prescriptions I recieved (keep it anymous) from a said agency show me little concern for what needs to happen. It's like they want to piss money away to show they tried. Frusterating. I have never claimed to know a hell of alot, but I know enough to see what is going on in the field, and know darn well what needs to happen. It's like what J. Browing was saying about a generation will be lost on mentoring and teaching the right ways to manage and harvest timber. That's what concerns me. I guess I just hate losing more than anything.

 

[hammerlogging]

God bless you gologit.

I hope to make it to where you are one day. I admire dusty and old.

 

[Burvol]

All of this isn't new. Logging has been on the way out for over 20 years. "Engineered" lumber, synthetic building materials, and reclamation has streamlined the way builders use materials and the need for continued processed new lumber. The strongest market in the last ten years besides the exports has been custom-dimension sawn lumber.

If you look at America's economic base stretching back 30 years, we've moved from a manufacturing and export economy to a service economy. What this basically means is that you'll have to trade your chainsaws in for other tools.

Of course Jacob, I hear you. I grew up through some of those times. Yes, the demand for lumber is nothing like the baby boomers saw, but it is also still going to be needed for remodels, additions, framing for concrete, bridges, ect. I thought Obama's idea of keeping it all in house while fixing America's bridges, highways, ect. was a decent bandaid to help the timber industry too, but I doubt that would help either. I just know that some people are seeing a bigger sprial that is coming. I will always be able to find some work doing something, but I am concerned for the first time in my life about how our Country is doing.

 

[Humptulips]

I look back and it seems to me mechanization has done more to ruin the woods then anything. These are tough times to be sure but it will pass and logs will be leaving the woods again. The question is how many jobs will still be there. When I started in the woods we went to work in a bus and the cutters had there own crew bus besides. Now the whole crew rides in a pickup. Shovel, processor and a buncher. Three guys do the work a dozen used to do. It's the same way all through the wood products industry. How many men have been eliminated in the mills?
The logging towns are dieing and there's not much can be done about it. No future in logging.

 

[M.R.]

http://www.lagrandeobserver.com/News/Local-News/Boise-to-close-sawmill

Had a locksmith make some keys to fit a service body box a couple of weeks ago, this is the slowest he's seen in 26-27 years.

 

[redprospector]

Hang on boy's. It's going to get a LOT worse before it get's better. Just going to have to dig in our heel's.

Andy

 

[windthrown]

Well, its now more like it was here when I was a kid. Oregon was always bumping along from recession to recession. I never saw it as good as it was in logging from 2004-2006 in my lifetime up here. May never happen again.

Anyway, its not just logging. 3 major store chains have gone under here (Circuit City, Linens 'n Things, and most recently GI Joes). Several banks have failed or have been bought out (WaMu in particular). Four or five major housing builders here have gone bust here in the past 6 months. Housing here is not as bad as California... yet. Our old house in Monterey was up to 1 million in appraised value, and now it is back to 500k. That's a 50% drop. I have never seen housing drop like that before.

I have been though 2 other industrial booms and busts in my lifetime. I was in the Reagan/Bush military peak and meltdown in San Diego in the 80's and early 90's. Then the tech bubble in the SF Bay Area in the late 90's and the meltdown in '01. I rode that out through '04.

As the fortune cookie says, "May you live in interesting times."

 

[2dogs]

Makes me glad I'm 56 but I fear for my kids. The 911 center my works for is instituing mandatory furloughs next month. Still we (the City) massively fund the arts, adult soccer, roundabouts, concrete planter boxes, medical marijuana, homeless services, the police review board, and other money toilets. Contractors still spend a year just trying to get a building permit, every fee the City can raise they are, $12,000 for a residential fire sprinkler connection that takes a 3 man crew 3 hours (less patch) to complete.

The School Board just voted to eliminate sports next year in one vote. Then they spent the rest of the meeting discussing the menu at the high schools so the students can't buy food they will eat. They can buy coffee but no bagels, no muffins, no burgers or fries or soft drinks, no burritos, no candy. All this includes football games. The various clubs bend the rules as much as they can.

I feel like I am in a handbasket.

 

[ak4195]

Deer in the headlights.....

Doesnt have to be this way......
Public works coming down the pike.Im 1/2 way thru my initial apprenticeship training for Operating Engineers Service Oiler,if these kids Im shoulder to shoulder with are representative of my competition,Im gonna eat there breakfast...LITERALY...
Cant work,dont want to work,dont know how to work,theres big project supervisors out there looking for real workers Burvol,but most likely it'll take a big adjustment on your part.
Life has a way of making you cry "uncle".
At 48 Im the oldest apprentice here,and D*MN glad to be here,glad to just have a chance.My homesite excavation buddies aint doin much at all...
No house building,no timber use,no loggers.....

ak4195

 

[Tree Sling'r]

One thing about is, the state of health our federal forests are in fires are nearly a gaurantee.
I have not worked since Oct. 30 of last year and am better off. With savings, un-employment and saw money on the side it adds up - the biggie is that I have 0 expense. Where as when cutting logs the expense out weighs the profits anymore.
Maybe I will be a cull and exercise everyday, mod saws, collect un-employment and go on fires.
Sounds good to me...

 

[M.R.]

One thing about is, the state of health our federal forests are in fires are nearly a gaurantee.
I have not worked since Oct. 30 of last year and am better off. With savings, un-employment and saw money on the side it adds up - the biggie is that I have 0 expense. Where as when cutting logs the expense out weighs the profits anymore.
Maybe I will be a cull and exercise everyday, mod saws, collect un-employment and go on fires.
Sounds good to me...

Glad, you're getting by, I would have sent the saw we talked about, down to you, but one of the other halves girlfriends lost her house & these funds [unknown to me] were used for storage thru the end of June for her house hold goods, she went to Portland to stay with family & find work to try to get back on her feet.

 

[Meadow Beaver]

I know this isn't positive but, everything is downhill from here.

 

[windthrown]

Well, we will hit bottom at some point. Economics goes through cycles. This bottom is apt to be long and flat though.

 

[Burvol]

One thing about is, the state of health our federal forests are in fires are nearly a gaurantee.
I have not worked since Oct. 30 of last year and am better off. With savings, un-employment and saw money on the side it adds up - the biggie is that I have 0 expense. Where as when cutting logs the expense out weighs the profits anymore.
Maybe I will be a cull and exercise everyday, mod saws, collect un-employment and go on fires.
Sounds good to me...

That sounds good. I'd be on the Salmon and Steelhead every night.

 

[funky sawman]

I know this isn't positive but, everything is downhill from here.

YEP, untill 2012 anyways then things might change DURASTICALLY
But I will keep sawing as long as their is gas and air to breath even if it's illigal in a few years, I will still do it and go out in flying colures cutten a big cedar or somthing.

 

[windthrown]

Oh yah, 2012, the end of the Mayan Calendar. They predicted that would be end of the world.