Lessons from a Stone

There are things that shape us while we are young, things that are forged into a guiding light which can be used to navigate through the unexpected complexities of life. One such happening occurred to me as a twelve year-old walking through our family owned woodlot on Ebenezer Mountain in the heart of Adirondacks of Northern New York. These woods are where I would go to be alone, having my own personal communion with the natural world.

I left that fall morning from the porch of my paternal grandparents’ home on some land in the tiny community of Upper Jay, a town of just a few hundred hardy souls. The family woodlot which was attached to the family homestead a mile up the road, contained 160+ acres of white pine, hemlock, fir, and spruce, and a host of hardwoods such as maple, oak, and poplar. To the people which inhabited the eastern branch of the Au Sable river, some of them extensions of my own family, these woodlots offered a much needed income stream when being logged every ten to twenty years. I believe it was my uncle Emerson’s woods that were in the process of being logged while I was on my walk that day.

These woods had been logged several times in the past and the job was in its beginning stages with a couple of skid roads having been reestablished. It was a Sunday, so none of the workers were on site. As I continued to walk, I came upon a flat which was about to become the landing, one of the places where the logs would be taken and decked and, when several loads were at the ready, the logging trucks would come and haul the logs off to one or more of the region’s sawmills. Then the process would repeat itself. At the end of the landing there were two newish looking John Deere 440 cable skidders awaiting duty. For a mechanically inclined kid, these skidders were there to be climbed on, and I would fill in as one of the skidder operators, sitting in the seat but staying away from the ignition and hydraulic controls. The keys were in the ignition as there would be no cause for concern over potential sabotage or joyriding (sans me!). This was private property, unseen from the closest homes or the highway heading north to Plattsburgh and south to the Albany area, roughly two hours away. After I’d had my vicarious fill, I climbed down to continue on my walk. But something happened, deep inside my boyhood person, and those skidders, emblematic of the ultimate in masculine work, remained forever ingrained and burned into my memory. I thought to myself that there might come a time when I was working in the woods for a living, and couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do.

Like many of my friends at the time, I enjoyed the entire suite of team sports and did my best to do well in school. After college, I moved immediately West and would spend the lion’s share of the next thirty years in Colorado, engaged heavily in mountain sports and working in the mining industry as a project engineer. I would use these skills again later in my career to make the transition to project management in the natural gas industry. But, after grinding it out working 60+ hours a week, often including Saturdays, I was ripe for a complete makeover just two years shy my fortieth birthday. I had gone through a divorce a few years years earlier and was living in the mountains outside Golden and making the hour-long commute to my job below. I don’t tend to think of myself as a lucky person, but just as I was getting myself more and more strung-out and was at a very real crossroads, an opportunity popped-up in Durango, Colorado, to relocate and operate a fledgling landclearing business. While it wasn’t directly in my “bucket list” of job oppotunities, it was in terms of the kind of place in which I had wanted to live for as long as I could remember. While I knew it wouldn’t be easy, I had some ideas as to the direction I could take with landclearing as a hub from which to grow spokes around. But before I took the bait and leaving my life on Colorado’s Front Range behind, I took several weeks before I made my decision as to stay or go. I spent a couple of weeks in Durango getting a feel for the town and whether of not I believed that I could make something like this sprout wings.

This was the late 90’s and Durango, along with many other gilded mountain communities throughout the Rocky Mountain West, was experiencing a huge influx of people moving in from seemingly everywhere, but predominantly Texas and California, and real estate was booming with people buying anything from a two room bungalow in town to thousand+ acre ranches. Larger ranch lands were being bought by developers who parceled them into 35 to 40 acre subdivisions which were going in as fast as they could get them platted. In driving around the area, I could see that this growth was coming at the expense of the environment. Things just weren’t thought-through and the fast money coming into the area seemed to be the only driver behind the huge increase in building not only new subdivisions but the necessary infrastructure to go with them. Roads, water, and septic were well established industries in the area, but I could see the need for forest thinning and wildfire mitigation work to take presidency and become the single most important thing to do before the houses started to go up. Once a given subdivision has been built-out, the homes would be in the way of doing a more effective and efficient job, making the process all the more difficult and expensive. At this stage, the business was predicated on operating a single piece of equipment, a large tractor with a giant mulching head that could handle brush and trees up to five-inches in diameter and, depending upon how many passes the operator made at the material, the finer the resultant wood chips would be. The result of just mulching brush and tightly interwoven stands of small trees was significant, but there was a very real need to do even more thinning and that would require a lot more equipment and manpower. Armed with the mulching unit alone, the trick was to concentrate on material of less than three or four inches in diameter. The larger diameter trees and brush took a lot longer to treat and, while doable, were a lot harder on the machine. In its earliest stages, the concept was to thin properties overgrown with trees and brush and reopen the once beautiful and extensive views and forest canopies, thereby increasing the value of an unsold parcel or doing the same but under contract with a recent buyer. The biggest benefit to the thinning was to the forest ecology itself with the benefit of greatly reducing the threat of treated acres being burned over in the event of a wildfire.

But using the forestry tractor predominantly to mulch brush and/or logging slash left behind by some other contractor seemed to me to be just the tip of the iceberg for the business and not something I would even call forestry, not in and of itself. We’d done a couple of showpiece properties where people could see the finished product. It really did take a rough piece of land and help make it shine, but that was only to the untrained eye and dealing with just a fraction of the ecological problem of overgrown forests dying slow and painful deaths throughout the Western US. I could envision much more for the business and, as difficult as it would be (at the time) to sell the concept at a level that would even make a dent to these overgrown forests, at least I felt a sense of direction.

Since I had a good job in Golden and was getting paid well for doing what I best knew how to do, I was wary of turning my back on a career I’d worked so hard to establish. I was already twenty years into my working life. But between my career, my life as a competitive mountain athlete, and a volunteer firefighter and EMT, I was completely exhausted every day. I rolled out of bed at 5 AM to get in my first workout of the day and get into work early to jumpstart yet another ten to twelve hour day. As soon as my workay ended, I would change clothes in my office and head out for a six to ten mile run or two-hour mountain bike ride. On evenings when I didn’t stay below before heading home, I’d take my dogs for a long run before dark. I made it a point to take time each morning to commune with them, going for a walk or playing Aerobie (a specialized Frisbee), their favorite activity and something that, along with the runs, kept them extremely fit and happy. But you can see where this was headed, even if, at the time, I didn’t. My need for having far more control of the hours I worked had begun to eat away at me as my daily focal point. I’d been going at this pace for years and I knew it was becoming too much for me to keep up with as I headed towards my forties. I had always had ample amounts of energy but was beginning to be concerned with my health, both physical and mental. Things were much easier when I was married and had a life-partner with similar interests who was only too happy to help me achieve my goals. We did that for each other. I was also into community service as a volunteer firefighter and EMT-head medic for the department and a mountain rescue team. It was a very busy department with nearly sixty volunteers, and it wouldn’t be at all unusual for my pager to go off in the middle of the night to respond to a structure fire or car wreck on the twisty canyon highway. Sometimes I wouldn’t return home until the wee hours just before dawn, in which case I’d drink a half pot of coffee and simply head into work on three hours of sleep. It’s easy to look back and see the situation as untenable, but I expected a lot of myself in those days and thought I could do it all without paying the price.

I could feel the first pangs of what being forever tired might be like. I got a physical and a full suite of bloodwork done, and other than being substantially low on iron, the doctor told me that my pace was too high for anyone to handle well without an eventual breakdown in health. Not realizing that, to me, being a competitive mountain athlete superseded everything in my life in terms of importance and that, if I could just hang in there for a few more years, I’d be “retiring” in the context of racing, though I still intended on continuing with my fitness as a lifetime commitment. It was a commitment I’d made with myself many years before. It brought me far more satisfaction than my work, and I would have a young body for only so many years with which I could perform at an elite level. It wasn’t just mountain biking, but a plethora of mountain activities I’d been pouring time and energy into for thirty years. Each one took years to become accomplished, and my mountain activities kept me spritually grounded. The sports and my spirituality were deeply intertwined. Without them, I believed my performance in the work place wouldn’t be better, but worse. I worked my tail off and had aspirations to be at the top of the heap with my work, as well as play.

But, a part of me knew the doctor was right. Something had to give, so I began to cut back on the number of hours per week that I was training, which, up until that point had averaged twenty to twenty-five. I cut back to between sixteen and eighteen. Major changes to my life were about to occur anyway, which would force me to back off on the sports, at least for the foreseeable future. I was willing to make a temporary sacrifice in order to have my own business and live in a Colorado mountain community, far removed from the insanity and crowds of the Denver area.

It took me a few weeks to ruminate over, but in the end I made the decision to leave my old life behind and start a new one. One thing is for certain, I had no delusions over immediate success and knew it would take everything I had to pull it off. In my mind, people who got to live in a place like Southwest Colorado were extremely fortunate. Everyone wants to live in such a place and to to find your place in the community was not easy. For one thing, the cost of living was 40% higher than it was in the Denver area. For another, there simply weren’t enough good paying jobs to go around. But I was determined to make a lifetime home for myself and be in a place where I would never again have to move to fulfill my dreams.

There was just one way to develop the business and that was for me to be in the field everyday, operating the unit and getting some visibility in working with various other businesses in town. The machine would draw attention everywhere I went, from trailering it down the road, to getting fuel for both truck and tractor, and buying things I needed at the local outdoor power and landscaping supplyhouses. Until I could sell my home outside of Golden, I would be camped, along with my three beloved dogs, on the floor at a friend’s place in town. My salvation from long hours riding the tractor each day came when I’d shutdown for a while in the afternoon to go for a run. I had always used the de-stressing benefits of physical exercise as a means to maintain a modicum of overall well-being. I wasn’t built for sitting on my butt all day, whether confined to an office or operating a piece of equipment. I would work until dark each day to make sure I got enough operating hours in to satisfy the needs of a project and to maintain good relationships with clients who seemed to see me as as much of a peer as they did some “redneck contractor”. Educated, professional, hardworking, and capable in terms of being able to carry my end of some quasi-intellectual conversation. After all, I’d already been a “career person” for over half of my life. I ran the equipment for roughly fifty hours a week and spent at least one weekend day performing necessary maintenance. I would get in a run or a ride anytime I could squeeze one in, but I learned quickly what life was like for business owners who relied on unreliable heavy equipment to make a living. The way “the other half lives”, so to speak. It had always been important to be to be able to relate to all types of people, from professionals to tradespeople and laborers. I didn’t value someone for what they were able to do to make a living, but by the type of human being they were, all the way around. I didn’t realize it then, it was simply one of my values, but I believe this was a core factor as to my success at virtually every job I’d ever had and my ability to quickly establish myself and cultivate solid friendships wherever I went in the world. I think that people could see that I was genuine and not putting on some sort of act to further advance myself. This one value that I held so dear would lead to some very real advantages in being a small business owner or, for that matter, if I were to ever return to engineering and process design. I saw it simply as part of maturing as an adult and trying to be a worthwhile human being.

After about six months, good news came as my mountain property outside of Golden had sold and I was able to find a much needed place of my own.  By then, I’m sure my buddy wasn’t unhappy to see me go. The deal was that after I’d paid the back payments on the tractor, I would assume ownership of the machine (and the payments!) and the spare parts and implements that went with it, along with the very short client list. Essentially, I was free to run the business any way I saw fit once I got the previous owner out of hock. The sale of my house was cause for celebration and I took my buddy out for dinner and probably more than a few libations!

My father, grandfather, and I were quite close during what you might call my formative years, and the time I spent in the Adirondacks hunting, fishing, skiing and hiking both in the High Peaks Region but also just knocking around on our family’s woodlots lying under the watchful eye of Ebenezer Mountain, and getting to know my relatives on that side of the family would forever dictate the choices I made as a young man. When it came time for me to head off for college, my grandfather looked me in the eye and said, “now that you’re about to get your degree, never assume that you’re somehow better than the truck driver sitting next to you at the traffic light”. The family story has it that he had had a partial scholarship to Brown University (which, in the 1930’s was on par with Harvard and Yale) but his family was unable to scrape together the remainder. As a young man looking for work, he’d come from depression-era Vermont to the Adirondacks. I don’t know anymore than that about his early years. Whatever the case, those words, along with so many others that my grandfather spoke to me, resonated within me for my entire life. He also told me that, as long as I was the hardest working person at whatever I chose to do, I should never have to worry about keeping a job. He had come up through the depression and worked through the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and took many jobs with the Civilian Conservation Corp (the CCC). I believe his employment included stints as a logger, a high-steel worker, and longer-term, as a construction superviser on some pretty big projects. A great deal of this period meant working far from home on projects like the Golden Gate Bridge and some of the high-rises that were going up in places like New York City, so when he told me about being the “hardest worker” at any of my jobs, he knew all about hard, backbreaking work. My grandmother would maintain their life on the homefront while working as a school teacher for thirty-five years. Their only son, my father, had gone on to become a professional civil engineer and got his master’s in Public Administration, ultimately settling down as a senior supervisor for the New York State DOT, in Albany. Always the perfectionist and being the valedictorian of her class, my mom had graduated from Green Mountain, a small but well regarded  school in Central Vermont and, after traveling around the country with my itinerant project engineer father and giving birth to me and my younger brother and sister, had gone into banking. There was a solid work ethic that ran down the spine of my family, on both sides, and I intended to continue as a flag-bearer Out West. I feel like this sort of hard working family history gave me an edge in the workplace, and it wasn’t long before I could see what my grandfather had been talking about. Times hadn’t changed that much, it seems.

Operating the tractor all day every day gave me time to formulate a plan to take the business where I wanted it to go. By the time I felt like I was gaining momentum, I’d been at it for about eighteen months. I’d supplement my income by following logging contractors around and cutting firewood to get my business through the leaner, winter months. Once I was able to secure all the right equipment for performing complete forest restoration projects, there wre enough tasks involved that I didn’t have to rely on the forestry tractor and mulching head alone when the ground got soft from rain and snow, I was able to operate throughout the winter with the exception of March and April, aka “Mud Season”, when virtually all heavy equipment based companies came to a grinding halt. In terms of firewood sales, I had myself set up so that I could deliver two cords at a time. In the beginning, when I had some lengthy breaks between mulching projects, I sold over 300 cords of firewood , bucked, split , and delivered. It was backbreaking work but added to my strength and endurance when slinging a saw for nine hours a day on future projects. It turned out that those “future projects” would be coming sooner than I had anticipated.

I had taken the seed of an idea and not only was I now clearing the land, but I was doing it in a way that improved those acres ecologically. The concept was novel in terms of how I went about doing it. The timing for the concept was several years ahead of itself, and the overall package of services that my company provided was not an easy sell. Many of the regional sawmills had already gone under, and the remaining two were close to it. In the previous few years, traditional logging in Colorado had been hit with more and more regulation because of environmental groups that had taken up residence with offices in town. The Forest Service was constantly being sued by these groups and, in order to keep them at bay, logging contracts were changing. These changes were making it virtually impossible for the last remaining logging companies, who were barely hanging on before such changes had been made, Then changes far better defined what was OK to cut and what wasn’t. Effectively, this meant leaving roughly half of the tallest and straightest trees, while the less desirable trees (from a logger’s perspective) would go. This new formula was in sharp contrast to prior contracts which essentially hadn’t been amended for generations, allowing the logger to have much more latitude in terms of processes and procedures and leaving behind supremely unhealthy forests as their primary cost of doing business.

Our concept was to restore landscape-scale (dozens of acres at a time) ponderosa pine ecosystems to “pre-settlement” conditions. That is, to take these forests down to naturally occurring densities which were in place before the West was full of European settlers (often first and second generation) and their towns popping up everywhere across the Western landscape. One of the services my company provided was a prescriptive forestry plan that walked a given landowner through woodlot management and wildfire mitigation, which would include how to best take care of their woods in the decades following their completed project. The secret sauce was in utilizing specialized equipment…just the right equipent for effective forest thinning in our region, and, of course, loads of manual labor. Because there was no one else offering such an overall service (thinning the forest as a whole in lieu of simply logging trees of a certain size and species), it took some time to determine our costs and establish pricing. We had gone from charging just $75 an hour for brush clearing in the beginning (a price established by the previous owner) to incrementally increasing the number to $150/hour. We were now able to cover costs and have a reasonable margin with which to function. Our customers were going to have a much easier time grasping the cost of their project as we moved from charging hourly rates for each task to billing on a cost per acre basis. Depending on the project, we billed between $300 and $700 an acre with the owner of the property to keep the logs for their own use. Many clients built homes or workshops from lumber we milled right there on the property. Or, the owner could ask me to broker and sell the resultant forest products including sawmill quality logs, firewood, poles, and vegas. They would receive all associates funds. We worked with several firewood wholesalers and the two remaining sawmills to sell the materials. I also had a friend who owned a portable sawmill and he would come in and mill the logs for people who wanted to build with timber cut from their own properties. I would run the mill on an additional shift to expedite the saw-milling. It was a wholistic approach to timber thinning and resulted in a win-win situation for both us and the property owner and was really something when it all came together. To me, the woods themselves were the real client and working long and intensive hours to restore these properties just felt right, giving me a deep sense of satisfaction. If we did the woods a good turn, the end result would almost always yield a happy human customer. Often, it didn’t take but a few weeks to see woodland creatures moving back into an area we’d completed, making things all the more gratifying. Before, the woods were so overgrown with so little grazing and browse, the deer and elk avoided them. Additionally, these are large animals that require room to move around. Simply put, overgrown forests don’t provide adequate surroundings or food for these creatures to thrive.

I continued to study Scandinavian logging practices which were far different than our own and were the basis for my operating model. They were all about sustainable forestry, and for centuries these Northern European people had thinned their forests in a way that resembled large-scale tree farming. They used different equipment and techniques which left their forests healthy and ready to be thinned every ten, or so, years. Today, these small but independent countries rely very little on imported forest products because they’ve done such an incredible job of maintaining their own timber resources. For the past hundred and fifty years, fire ecology in the US had essentially become non-existent as nearly every fire was put out before it could even get started, even in the remotest locations, far from communities and man-made structures. Little was understood about the role of naturally occurring wildfire which, throughout history, tended to be low-intensity burns, clearing areas that had grown to be too thick and keeping brushy species at bay while promoting native grasses. Ponderosa pine, which is the dominant softwood species in much of the Western US, when under healthy growing conditions, amounts to just sixty larger and healthier stems per acre and abundant sun, with low-lying brushy species and native grasses in the open areas between the trees. I’ve thinned ponderosa pine ecosystems which had become mixed with fast growing white fir that were upwards of 600 stems per acre! Because we had effectively put an end to “wild-fire”, pine forests were so overgrown that shade-tolerant white fir had infiltrated them and were killing them in a parasitic manner, crowding out the native pine which requires ample sunlight and plenty of room to thrive. This algorithm of ponderosa pine ecology continues today with the white fir growing so densely that the entire forest becomes subject to beetle infestation, whether the target is fir or pine. One can easily see this paradigm at work upon nearing almost any Colorado town where the reddish color of the forest at a distance is indicative of dead or dying trees of almost every species. In fact, this has become typical of forest health throughout the Western United States. Millions of vacationers drive right through these dead and dying ecosystems each year without even noticing. It is my belief that the relationship between humankind and the natural world is at an all-time low, and this isn’t limited to trees. It has been said that evil can only exist when otherwise good men look the other way. I’m just not someone who could look the other way and wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did. Too much knowledge can be a bothersome thing, and knowing what I had come to know about our nation’s forested lands, I simply couldn’t stand by and allow it to continue if there was anything at all that I could do about it. The more I understood the problem and there gravity of the situation, the more compelled I felt to help in some significant way.

I considered making some phone calls and moving back to performing work on private lands only, but a good friend who ran a natural gas engineering. design, and construction management company came to me with an offer to get back into engineering as a project manager for the Denver-based company and his field office located in Durango. Our clients were companies like BP, Chevron, Williams, and ConocoPhillips, and, within our first year and a half of working together, we grew that field office into a regional headquarters, going from nine to eighty employees. It turned out to be a solid decision as I would continue to work in that industry until retirement. But the “Woods Years” were, hands down, the best working years of my life. I would thereafter struggle with not feeling as fulfilled as I was while thinning nearly 4,000 acres of overgrown and badly neglected forested ecosystems. It gave me nine years of complete satisfaction in what I was doing for a living, often living a very similar life to the loggers who operated a hundred years before, except that I was doing things in an ecologically beneficial manner, in accordane with the times. To their credit, they were simply doing what they were told and had no designs on ruining entire landscapes. It was a very different time, and natural resouces were viewed in a very different way. Since I had no television and certainly wasn’t getting the paper, I often read myself to sleep at night, knocking off one book after another. I was in my own world, by design. I would walk whatever project I was on with my dogs in the evening, just before sunset, to take in the day’s work and was so physically spent that I slept well, regardless of the pressure of owning and operating such a capitally intensive business or without the nightly anxiety other jobs had brought. I would greet each day as an opportunity for more hard work and adventure but, when I did have the chance to slip away for a few hours, I’d take my dog on a good long run or mountain bike ride, and managed to stay in good enough shape to place near the top or win the occasional mountain bike race I’d sign up for. It was really quite a life and I am thankful to have had it right in the middle of my working years. I shall never forget those times and felt compelled to write a little about them. A boyhood dream that began so many years before had been made a reality and I would remain forever changed in the most wonderful of ways.

We worked year-round but were typically forced to slow down considerably during the mud-season months of March and April. This was a time to tear the equipment down and perform the necessary annual maintenance. As much as possible, I kept my guys busy during these months while my competitors generally laid people off until they could pick it up again in May. The combination of all of the things I did to keep my company at the top of the heap meant that when all was said and done, there wasn’t much left over to pay myself. I kept telling myself that there would be plenty of time in the future to put something away for a rainy day, or contribute to my own retirement. But for now my everyday objective was to get the business going through the startup years and long enough to where were were a known entity as a business contributing to our community and a known player in the woods business throughout the state and our region of operations. We were getting close. I would embrace things when the time came to where I wasn’t under so much pressure on a daily basis to make sure the company was going to survive. Somehow, I always managed to get by but I certainly was not setting myself up for a “worry free” financial future (not that many people actually do). In the meantime, as long as I could pay the bills, the work and the priveledge to be doing such work was reward enough. But there would be one thing that was an absolute and that was that I never got seriously hurt or too sick to take more than a few days off. My physical health and mental acuity were central to making this type of business successful. In all, I would be owning and operating my own forestry business for almost ten years and, in that time, the most serious injuries I sustained were several times cutting a finger to the bone when sharpening my chain by hand (the only way to put the absolute best edge on the cutting teeth) and getting hit just behind my right ear when a heavy limb I was throwing out of my way recoiled and struck me hard enough to render me unconscious. I’d been working alone that hot August day and broke my own rule about wearing all necessary personal, protective equipment (PPE) while felling trees. It was nearly a hundred degrees when I swapped my hardhat for a bandana to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I was a little dazed and had a nice goose egg on the back of my head, but was otherwise fine. I donned my hard hat and continued with what I was doing, only too happy that none of the crew was there the see me break our cardinal rule. I had a worker almost loose a finger while working on the tractor, violating the procedure I’d laid out for him to perform the work. Still, I was responsible for allowing him to do that bit of work unsupervised. Due to a mild hand injury he’d acquired the previous day, I had him performing light duty tasks until it healed in a day or two, but, in retrospect, he was confident but in over his head relative to the little experience he had previously acquired performing that task, which I had taken all of my workers through during a number of equipment maintenance training sessions. What a shame, though. I’d made sure to remain within shouting distance had he simply called out to me to answer a simple question so he could proceed safely. But he was just twenty-two years old and didn’t want to let on that he didn’t know how to do that part of the task. There was a second incident, again with a younger worker (twenty-five) which happened within a month of the first incident and on the same project. This time it involved one of the equipment operators with roughly three years’ experience running the forestry tractor and a couple of years running other other equipment for other companies. Again, I was working within shouting distance (I also had radios for the crew and we’d do a radio check every two hours) when the tractor operator was mulching some logging slash on a hillside where I’d felled and skidded the timber the previous day. The hill was steep toward the top so an operator would have to drive the equipment accordingly, making no sharp turns or turnarounds on the steepest part of the slope or any sort of side-hilling. Working in the mountains, this was pretty standard operating procedure for an operator driving any kind of heavy equipment off-road, but this time the operator had done nothing wrong to cause the hydrostatic mainline to burst. It was new-generation equipment fitted with a well-designed hydrostatic system which determined the amount of power, and therefore, speed going to the articulated wheels and all of the functions (up, down, side to side) of the three point hitch to which we would afix any number of implements, but its primary function was with the 6,000 pound mulching head attached. He was operating according to procedure, travelling directly up and down the hill when the hydraulic mainline failed and with the instant pressure drop, the machine immediately began to travel backwards down the hill. Instead of putting the mulching head in the down position to act as an anchor and applying the emergency brake, he panicked and opened the door and made a “jump for life”, landing full-force on a stump and breaking his right arm in three places. He was extremely fortunate not to have gotten caught-up on something while attempting to jump far enough to avoid the five-foot tall wheels and getting runover. Jumping from a piece of moving equipment is “THE” cardinal sin as an equipment operator and is the first thing any operator learns. As it worked out, the tractor simply rolled straight down the hill, coming to rest in an open meadow just a two-hundred yards downslope. As was the case with the other incident (I was an EMT for several years in my life in the Denver area), I packaged the injury and drove him (we were lucky) just the twenty minutes to an emergency clinic where they treated the arm and put him in an ambulance for the ride to the hospital in Durango for a two-hour surgery. It took four months, but he was able to recover fully and return to work. But, to put things in perspective, I was fortunate as the owner of such a business to have just two reportable injuries in ten years of operating. This is the benefit of worker’s compensation insurance. Sure, my rates went up but I’d never have been able to live with myself had these two injuries been life-altering and there was no way to pay for the required medical care.

In lieu of my mountain bike, during the winter months I kept a pair of backcountry skis at the trailer and instead of going for a run with one of my dogs at the end of the day, we’d tour around the nearby mountains and return to camp to build a roaring fire. There was no shortage of firewood! I operated the company for a year and a half without a log skidder using a special implement I had fabricated for the tractor. It took a lot of practice and some serious finesse, but I could almost keep time with a skidder. I trained a couple of guys on its use and the next thing I knew, it became everyone’s favorite task. Operating the equipment also gave the guys a break from the heavy manual labor associated with slinging a chainsaw. With the right rotation, I was able to monitor the amount of rest versus hard labor each of my guys had. This was paramount in order to keep things running smoothly and reducing the risk of injury. It was inherently dangerous work and my worker’s comp payments were a true reflection as to how much so. The only jobs deemed more dangerous were Alaskan king crab fishing and West Virginia coal mining. Worker’s comp alone cost the company thirty-two cents on the dollar, which was a constant thorn in my side only because my competitors would outright lie about the nature of their business, calling it “landscaping” instead of what it truly was. As far as I was concerned, there was only one way to do things, and that was the right way. Sometimes I wish that I had reported them. After all, some of them were simply copying our business model but cutting corners everywhere to survive. It seems that traditional logging was on the way out and restoration forestry on the way in. Over the years that I had my business, I had more than one worker come aboard only to leave a year later to start their very own forest restoration and wildfire mitigation company. But for those nine years of my life, I never had another company perform the work at a similar level. The difference was a big one, and that is that it cost a lot more money and energy to operate at such a level. Some of the other companies throughout the region were busy populating their payrolls with illegals. They were tremendously hard working, but were here illegally, just the same. The worst of it was in watching the USDA Forest Service turn a blind eye to not only that, but being only marginally insured to perform large-scale work. As each year rolled by, these things began to eat into my business to a point that I was effectively penalized for meeting the criteria to do business on public lands. I’d gone from feeling like I’d finally made it through the roughest of times and earning the respect I believed we deserved to having to threaten to sue the United States government, with the Forest Service being the offending government agency.

There are some major differences between “Restoration Forestry” and logging, but when I was first getting the company going and transitioning from basic land clearing (which was an important function but dealing only with a part of the problem), selling restoration forestry, something no one had even heard of, while against the tide of existing traditional logging companies that were still “in tight” with the Forest Service from doing things a very particular way for 100 years, sales were slow and required a tremendous amount of marketing to wedge our way in. The way logging works is to bid on various Forest Service projects through the regional USFS procurement department which puts the contracts together and loosely defines project specifications. Though our regional office had been under the gun for seeing that projects went to the lowest bidder (when only just recently a “Best Value” paradigm had been mandated) thereby getting maximum acreage logged at a minimum of cost. One of the problems in doing it this way is that Forest Service administrators were rewarded primarily on the basis of total acres logged and completed (only on paper – the projects were rarely audited) in a given year at the lowest cost to the taxpayer. Invariably, this led to shoddy work practices (forest fuels left lying all over the place because there was no disposition of brush and logging slash) and loosely written specifications in terms of the end result. In our region, since the regulations for thinning brush and treating the thousands of mounds of resultant logging slash led to a massive buildup in fuel on and within the forest floor. These large expanses are effectively ticking time bombs, not from naturally occurring low intensity burns, but catastrophic burns with temperatures so high that these fires developed their own weather creating hurricane level winds such that everything in the often shifting path is incinerated, including mountain homes and the wildland firefighters trying to save them. The Missionary Ridge fire near Durango burned over 150,000 acres at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and a half-dozen lives. At one point, the fire had encroached on the north end of town and it appeared that soon all was to be lost, but through the heroic efforts of firefighters and slurry bomber crews, the fire was contained right at the city limits. But in putting so much focus on saving the town, tens of thousands of acres burned small communities and mountain enclaves completely over.

Historically, the logging industry and its contractors went about things in a completely different manner, a paradigm which worked only as long as there were stands of old growth trees that increased profit margins to the point that this form of logging from one generation to the next was an economically viable means of making a living, particularly in the smaller communities dotting the West where good paying jobs were either non-existent or few and far between. It takes a significant amount of money to successfully operate a logging company (the wear on the equipment is very high, and there are hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in the equipment a logging company required to move through the process quickly and remain competitive, so as long as there were enough big trees to go around and the focus was on cutting down as many of them as possible, a company could be profitable. The same holds true for the sawmills, where much larger and more plentiful logs were being processed around the clock. This is how it went for over a hundred years, when contracts between the newly formed Forest Service and the logging companies required little to no cleanup or necessary removal of smaller or genetically inferior trees in some reasonable proportion to taking the best stock in a process known as “high-grading”. Brushy species such as Gambel’s oak filled in the new open spaces, growing wide and tall and extremely dense. When combined with the “all-knowing” Forest Service protocol of preserving forests by never allowing them to burn, as they did naturally and regularly for tens of thousands of years, entire ecosystems had fallen horribly out of balance. Native American tribes well understood the value of fire within the greater ecosystem, and would burn their summer hunting grounds every few years so that when they returned in the spring, the deer and elk had moved in to graze on the tender shoots of new growth. For those tribes that grew small crops, these burned areas provided the necessary nutrient-rich soils. So, between trees being clear-cut to build new Euro-American towns, a completely backwards policy on fire, and rampant logging to feed these newcomers the lumber required to build, Western forests were in rapid decline and, sadly, have mostly remained that way. The “controlled burn” and continued poor forestry pracices have kept them that way to the extent that any given acre of forest is currently subject to burning wildly out of control because of the accumulating forest fuels as taken relative to a native ponderosa pine forest from two hundered years ago.

Unlike the Douglass fir forests of the Northwest which received ample rain to grow quickly, Ponderosa pine forests are relatively slow growing. In areas of the Southwest US, forests were laid bare of old growth and ultimately became overgrown with the resultant genetically inferior ponderosa pine and shade -tolerant white fir, which, unlike ponderosa pine, are of inferior quality for use as building materials. The lumber simply isn’t structurally sound enough to handle any real loads. The sawmills didn’t want white fir because there was little market for it, and the smaller diameter and crooked ponderosa pine was virtually useless, except as lowly firewood. This led to a complete lack of markets for forest products and nowhere for the thinning products to go.

In stark contrast, restoration forestry, by design, eliminates many of these forest fuels, including chipping brush and logging slash in-place and thinning volumes of overgrown, unhealthy stands of timber. “Wildfire mitigation” thereby becomes an integral part of the process. A typical logging contract allows for six-inch stumps when I required our our sawyers to leave stumps no higher than two-inches on the downhill side and, wherever possible, stumps were flush-cut to match the surrounding ground. We had a large forestry tractor with an eight foot brush chipping head running off of the power from the engine. It was all wheel drive and articulated so the operator could get into some pretty tight areas to mow down both logging slash and brush, such as large stands of Gambel’s oak, which was also being allowed to grow to never before seen densities. The affect of mulching the logging slash and brush in place was that of a beautifully and freshly carpeted forest floor. Instead of high-grading the timber, I would carefully mark the trees which were the be felled, leaving behind the best genetic stocks of pine, some fir, and the occasional grove of spruce or aspen. Unless unhealthy, we typically left stands of aspen alone. I would estimate how many “sawlog” trees were being removed and leave a solid ratio of trees of differing ages, with ideal spacing between stems. In forests which were being overtaken by white fir, most of the fir would be eliminated. I would have a good idea of the quantity of readily sold logs and forest byproducts such as poles, vegas, and firewood which we would have to find and help create larger markets for. This was clearly an intensive process and much of it was done by hand, falling trees all day long, every day.

A crew (I had two) was comprised of a senior timber faller (sawyer) and another faller, a skidder operator, a forestry tractor operator, and a worker using a six wheel drive ATV to skid and stack the smaller diameter poles. There would be thousands of them, typically sold, along with firewood, to the general public on weekends. We also used a log forwarder to haul loads of sawlogs and long lengths of firewood to the various decking areas where they could be easily accessed by the logging trucks which would haul the logs off to the two remaining regional sawmills. The log skidder I bought came after operating the business for over a year of using the forestry tractor and skidding boom. I had seen a skidder that would be perfect for our kind of forest thinning several times parked on a job site near Vallecito, Colorado (thirty minutes from Durango) and stopped to inquire, but the older-aged logger who owned it was never there. After poking around at our area’s landscaping and logging supplies store, I found that his name was Gordon Pope, a third generation logger in that region of the Southwest. As luck would have it, the skidder was being used for the last time, after which Gordon was planning to retire. But you guessed it!  Just as I had witnessed when I was just a kid, it was a two-years newer model but very much “vintage”1976 John Deere 440 diesel with a seven-eighths inch main cable a six chokers (the fasteners for the six 8-foot long by 7/16ths inch cables which attached the six logs to the mainline). The machine had fallen into grave disrepair and needed a complete overhaul, but I didn’t care. It was, after all, the same make, model, and just two year’s newer machine which was virtually identical to the two 440’s I’d seen all those years before. One of my operators was a heavy equipment diesel mechanic and, between the two of us, it took roughly three months of weekends to rebuild it from the ground up. Now that we had both skidder and forestry tractor, we were set to take on even larger projects and move our way through the woods at greater speed and efficiency. I had a Dodge one-ton Cummins and a twenty-eight foot gooseneck trailer with a beaver tail for easy loading and offloading and could haul my equipment just about anywhere. The size of the equipment was, in large part, chosen to get around the thick woods more quickly than larger equipment often seen on projects throughout the Western US, and also of a size that I could haul myself. To keep hard miles off my truck, I would later buy a used two-ton GMC to do the hauling and it quickly paid for itself.

Next on the docket, we struck gold as we moved two crews to what would become our two most important projects to date. We’d already spent a full year doing 40 and 80 acre lots at Elk Springs, a proposed subdivision encompassing some 1,400 acres, when we scored a contract to perform wildfire mitigation thinning on the subdivision as a whole. Then, just two miles from this site towards Pagosa Springs, we were awarded a second large project called Timber Ridge Ranch (approximaately 1,600 acres). We’d acquired these two projects through two different developers under a new Archuleta County wildfire thinning program which was being administered by CSFS (the Colorado State Forest Service). The requirements were based on a forestry plan I wrote for each subdivision (based on CSFS project guidelines) and these plans were then reviewed for approval by the state. Combined, the two jobs were roughly 3,000 acres. Much of the work was being conducted proactively to mitigate the risk of wildfire once the infrastructure and homes had gone up. It was a novel program. Just like any other elements of subdivision infrastructure such as roads, water, electricity, phone lines, and other utilities, the developers were paying for the work in hopes that the work paid for itself by increasing the value of the lots, which would now have mountain views where there were few before, a much healthier and fire resistant landscape, and bragging rights for being new members of the Colorado Forest Service’s Forest Stewardship Program. It worked like a charm and the lots sold for an average of 35% to 40% more than they otherwise would have, easily paying for the cost of the work. I saw no reason as to why this paradigm shouldn’t be followed for every proposed subdivision in the Rocky Mountain West, but, at the time we were plenty happy to have such regulations being supported in our own backyard.

Being an experienced timber feller is a skilled trade and takes loads of experience to become highly proficient. The equipment operators not only needed to be good at operating the various pieces of equipment, but needed to be pretty fair mechanics, each responsible for maintaining the machine that put dinner on the family table. Last, but not least, these guys needed to be strong and in excellent physical condition. There is no work more physically demanding than woodswork. The longer they’d been with the company, the fitter they got. Once a week we’d quit before sunset, clean up and head into the closest town for dinner. At a given time, we might be two hours from home, so we really looked forward to kicking back and enjoying a burger and a few beers. When we were working in the Pagosa Springs area, our favorite place had live music on Thursday nights and a really cool mountain vibe. It attracted mostly locals as it was sort of hidden and off the beaten path. The crew looked forward to these nights, as did I, and they went a long way toward bringing us even closer as compatriots and not just coworkers. Some of my fondest memories are of those evening’s out in Pagosa Springs. Afterward, the crew would return to a rented cabin or make the long drive home to their families, but most would stay locally, just a few miles from our jobsites. My guys were committed to their work in a way that is rarely seen today, but, for the right type of person, these were excellent jobs that paid far better than just about anything else that might be available to them in such small mountain towns.

My back was really starting to feel the rigors of each day. I ran my company as a working supervisor and prided myself on being able to be able to cover more gound in a day than any two of my timber fallers. But the last thing I wanted was for anyone of them to push themselves to a point where it affected their personal safety. I rotated myself through all the tasks to give my guys a much needed break, and keep myself sharp on all operating aspects of the company. I never asked anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do, and this led to some pretty strong relationships between me and my crews. I can envision that our relationships were at least somewhat similar to men who had served together in the military. The work was that hard and we relied on one another heavily to stay safe and see that our coworkers stayed out of trouble. I believe that this kind of work environment cultivates solid relationghips between coworkers which are much more profound than if we had been working together for years in some office setting. Certainly, the element of danger in a workplace is going to bring people closer, but I do not mean to stretch it to make a direct comparison to soldiering. I have always had nothing but the utmost respect for those who have fought for, or are in the process of, fighting for our country and for the betterment of mankind everywhere. I just can’t think of a better analogy.

We were now working as a well-oiled machine and had become well aware of our capabilities. Work was always coming in the door and we had a backlog of about sixteen months. Both the CSFS and USFS had us high on their radar and we were regularly referred work by the former but the latter still saw us us too expensive for public lands work, a point I adamently opposed when factoring-in all their costs (I’d done my homework), including the huge fires that they themselves started while attempting to perform “controlled burns”, which plagued them every wildfire season. It is far less expensive to mitigate wildfire than it is to fight it. I could break out a chart detailng their thinning costs, the true cost of their “prescribed burns”(which would often burn out of “control”) and the cost per acre of fighting a wildfire of a given size and intensity. Those costs far outweighed what we charged to perform the appropriate work in the first place. Ah, “in one ear and out the other”. But we were making inroads and I was invited to be a guest speaker at a number of CSFS and USFS happenings. I even got a grant from the Four Corners Forest Stewardship Inititiative to write a paper on restoration forestry and wildfire mitigation processes, equipment useage, techniques, and the costs associated with performing this work, including appropriate insurances. I presented the paper at the annual get-together in Flagstaff, Arizona, and we got a couple more solid projects out of that effort, though they would be a long way from home if we agreed to put them on the docket. I had to graciously decline as we just weren’t prepared to operate effectively that far from our home area, mostly because we already had more work than we could handle. Perhaps there would come a time when we could!

I think certain people are just built to work for themselves and viewed myself as one of those people. For one thing, as crazy busy as I was, I was captain of my own ship and how I went about making the most of my time was completely up to me. I’d always been a mountain athlete struggling with various jobs in terms of making time to fulfill that very important aspect of my life. Now, working for myself, I spent even more time working than I ever had before. But it gave me license to be much more creative with my time. I could be super-efficient with how I planned my weeks and, because the job often meant being far from home, I setup my truck with multiple tool boxes with spare equipment parts, saw gear, 110 gallons of diesel fuel for the equipment, and compartments for plenty of warm clothes. I setup a second truck in a similar manner for my lead man and kept both trucks stocked with project equipment, fuel, tools, and consumables. For my truck, I also kept several days worth of food and water on board along with my mountain bike and both cycling and running gear, along with my flyfishing gear. In the beginning, when money was tight enough that we barely met our mortgage payment each month, I would spend the week camping in the woods on the job site. I had three dogs at the time and rotated them so that I’d have one of them living out of the truck with me. I’ve always been unusually close with my dogs and each of them was so well trained, they’d patiently watch over camp until the end of the day when we’d go on a nice, long run or mountain bike ride.  After dinner, they would be as tired as I was and would lay at my feet while I read myself to sleep over a beer, or two. Days would begin an hour before sunrise and I’d lay in my bag while drinking the thermos of coffee I’d made the night before and slept with inside my bag to keep it warm. Before breakfast, I’d take Zeke, Judd, or Bogie on a walk so they could chase away the night’s chill. Working from sun-up to sunset during the summer months made for long and rigorous days. I would require nine hour days from my workers, including a forty-five minute break for lunch while I might work 60 hours one week and 70 the next.

Naturally, finding the right kind of people for the work was difficult so once I’d established a foreman and a crew, I took very good care of them, providing plenty of incentives to keep them happy. Something like the loss of a foreman would rock the company. Similarly, the loss of an equipment operator/mechanic had a monstrous impact leaving me to maintain all the equipment on top of my regular duties. We rarely hauled a piece of equipment all the way back to Durango to have it repaired or serviced. When we had a breakdown, I was under considerable pressure to get the machine back on-line. I realized that every small business owner who relied on his vehicles and equipment was under precisely that same pressure. It was the low point in terms of making a living with a capitally intensive, equipment-based company. There was nothing you could do but collect yourself and fix whatever might be wrong, rain or shine. When fixed, it was all about pushing the equipment to catch back up with the crew.  I thought I’d known pressure in my previous career, but owning and operating a business such as this was an all encompassing affair. It was hard work which required off-time from which to recover. Try running a twenty-three pound chainsaw and climbing through waist deep logging slash all day for five days a week and you’ll be hardpressed to not appreciate the hard core, blue collar workers who grease the wheels of this country to keep it running for the rest of us. I typically worked six days a week and headed home, often a couple of hours away, for a single day to recover. I was proud to be “one of those” workers.

After a year and a half of camping on the cold, hard ground, with only a beloved dog to keep me company, I was on my way home from a visit to my sister’s house near Denver, I was driving through Salida when I saw a game-changer. It was a vintage, 1973  eighteen-foot Prowler travel trailer that had been refurbished on the outside, but not on the inside. It was white with a fat blue racing stripe down the side. As a second work truck, I’d only recently purchased a red 1974 Ford F-250 Ranger “Hi-boy”, one of my favorite trucks ever made and my second, the other was blue. Ford made them from 1969 to 1977 and they came with a small block 390 with a five speed manual transmission. The thing that really set them apart was that they came lifted from the factory and looked all-business in terms of being the ultimate outdoorsman’s vehicle. It was in excellent condition and still had all of its chrome. Going down the road in that setup (well cared for vintage truck and vintage trailer) drew smiles from passing vehicles everywhere. After “roughing it” and camping under the stars for so long, it felt more like a five star hotel than a forty year old trailer. Prior to purchasing the trailer, I had even spent a full winter camped at 9,500′ during the snowiest winter in a decade. The project, and my camp, were about 18 miles from the nearest town where I would occassionally take a break from the ten-below zero nights and get a room. I did this as much for whichever dog I had with me as myself. I have clear memories of firing up my saw and the tractor to warm them up before starting in for the day in thirteen below zero temperatures and the sting of a wood chip coming off the saw and hitting my cheek. One of the biggest compliments of my entire life came indirectly as I was in the hardware store buying a couple new pairs of Carhartt bibs and two young guys past me in my tattered clothes and one whispered to the other “that’s the kind of guy they make Carhartts for…”. I loved being covered in wood pitch and bar oil and looking somethig like a mountain man crawling out of the 1800’s. It made me feel “needed” by those very woods I was working and the wildlife that would come to reinhabit those acres I had completed. I would literally get to see deer, elk, squirrels, pine martens, coyotes, and birds reestablish themselves in the now far healthier landscape. It might take until the following spring, but it would happen, nonetheless. But having that trailer made all the difference. I would wake up still owning the energy I’d have otherwise expended sleeping out in the cold. But, make no mistake, I would sleep without the aid of any kind of heat source and the trailer floor would be cold enough to turn water spilled from making coffee immediately into ice. The dog water bowl would be frozen solid. It wasn’t just me living this way, but my dogs got a chance to live as their wild brethren did. I’d never seen winter coats on a dog like these before. I’d pull whichever dog I had with me into bed and my twenty-below bag each night, which is a far cry from sleeping on the floor. I was constantly in tune with them and making sure that they got their needs met every day. With one of my dogs with me, I have no memory of ever feeling alone. These were special times and deep inside, I knew they wouldn’t last forever, no matter how much I’d have liked them to.

The only thing still functioning in the trailer was the propane cook stove. No water, no heat. and certainly no A/C, but it slept two comfortably and would provide a world of protection from the elements. This was a year-round business and, until the snows got deep, the frozen ground of winter was ideal for low-impact operations. I could keep the skid roads clear with the equipment and was fine operating in up to three feet of snow. Beyond that, we wouldn’t cease operating but the going got considerably slower. I don’t remember ever shutting down because it was too cold, as daytime winter temperatures ran from around ten below to thirty degrees above zero. We liked the cold because it kept us from getting wet. Fifteen degrees was about perfect. I recall working through this one blizzard when it snowed 17-inches in just four hours before it let up to around an inch per hour for the next eighteen hours. With the equipment there to tow us out to a roadway, we were seldom concerned about getting snowed-in. We had skidder chains on the tractor and skidder and chains all the way around on our trucks. Even the six-wheel-drive ATV had chains and a plow to keep the tighter areas clear. I had a ten-foot grading blade for the tractor, so we simply assigned plow duty to one of the operators and “kept on truckin’!” I have nothing but the fondest of memories of working through such conditions with my crews. I’m a skier at heart and had many snow-scaped dreams at he time.

I would have one project that trumped all the others. An eighty acre parcel of spruce and fir running along the Upper Blanco River and adjoining the South San Juan Mountains between Pagosa Springs, Colorado and Chama, New Mexico. This project was located in the most rugged and isolated mountains in the lower-forty-eight and, though up for debate, home to the last population of grizzlies in Colorado. Also up for debate, local ranchers claimed that it was home to a small population of timber wolves. There would come several occasions where I bore witness to these incredible creatures, the wolf, my favorite animal since childhood. I’d read everything I could get my hands on about canis lupus and been a lifelong student of their whereabouts and behavior. For much of my young adulthood, it was said that, having been persecuted to the brink of extinction, the only remaining wolves to still occupy space below the Canadian border were the Boundary Waters area of northern Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. There had been talk of reintroduction in Yellowstone and, decades later, in the South San Juan’s of Colorado. As most people know, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and that reintroduction has gone extremely well, to the benefit of the entire Yellowstone ecosystem. Some of these wolves traveled north into Montana and west into Idaho, while at the same time reestablishing themselves by coming down from Alberta and British Columbia. Throughout my thirty years in Colorado, reintroduction never got past the talking stage, but little known to even the Colorado Division of Wildlife (DOW) there was already a population of wolves in this region of Colorado. People living in Blanco Basin, near where I was working, spoke openly about a local pack of wolves, some residents going so far as to say that they saw these wolves regularly. Area sheep ranchers made claims to have occasionally lost livestock to these wolves, but, while DOW would investigate the claims, they fell short of agreeing that wolves were the culprit.

I went about my business of thinning a property owner’s beetle killed spruce lot, taking out overgrown white fir, diseased aspen, and cottonwood trees. I left a crew on another job near Pagosa Springs and hired an additional timber faller to help with this project. I would work the project alone on weekends, staying in my trailer in a large meadow across the river. I would handle the large diameter trees while my new helper would take care of the smaller ones. I would drop trees for a couple of days and skid the logs to the landing every third day. And two to three days a week I’d mulch the logging slash with the forestry tractor. I had arranged the sale of the logs to a logger out of Chama, New Mexico, who would haul the logs to a large sawmill in Espanola. He and I hit it off right away and became friends. I’d see him once a week when he came up for a couple of loads and we’d “talk shop” about the state of the logging industry. Needless to say, he was quite interested in what we were up to and how we managed to be paid by the acre as opposed to the value of the logs alone. The property had been in the same Albuquerque family’s hands for four generations and there was a gorgeous cabin, built in the 40’s, that they would stay in while visiting. I would see Rick, the father and family patriarch, every weekend when he’d make the four hour drive up from Albuquerque to check on my progress. He had heard about the company through the Colorado State Forest Service, which had recommended us for the work, and would have me over on Friday and Saturday evenings for dinner and a bit of bourbon and a cigar while hanging out by the fire on his porch, looking out at a starry sky the better of which I would never again see. He had a small lake on the property that he kept stocked with rainbow trout and gave me permission to flyfish for dinner every evening. Since my dog, Judd, was getting up in years and was starting to have hip problems, I brought him along for the duration, which would be about four months. I would work until the snow got too deep, around Thanksgiving (this was a high elevation job), and come back to finish in the spring.

With a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigar in the other, plus Judd at my feet, we’d belly up closer to the fire as the evenings crept past midnight and got cold (it was now mid-October at roughly 9,600 feet). Every now and then we’d hear the unmistakable howl of a wolf in the not-too-far-off distance. Judd was a powerfully built chocolate lab of about eighty pounds that never before showed the tiniest signs of feeling threatened, but he knew precisely which canid made a howl like that and the hair on his back would stand straight up. The conversation would naturally turn to wolves and Rick would verify their existence there in Blanco Basin at the foot of the South San Juan Wilderness Area. After discussing wolves, the subject turned to grizzlies and David Peterson’s book, Ghost Grizzlies. David is a native to Southwest Colorado and an author with several books on archery elk hunting to his credit. He had been invited by DOW a couple of summer’s back to contribute to a study taking an intimate look at these mountains to prove or disprove that the South San Juan grizzly still existed. A world renowned grizzly expert named Doug Peacock came down from Jackson Hole, Wyoming to head-up the study. After spending an entire summer backpacking in the wilderness area and interviewing area ranchers, it was concluded that, yes, in fact, there was a small population of perhaps a dozen individuals (a number too small to function as a viable breeding population) and Doug Peacock made the simple recommendation not to study them any farther, but to leave them alone to live out their natural lives, unbothered. DOW agreed. Sometime after midnight, Rick and I would call it an evening and I’d walk back through the north meadow with Judd to call it a night. We’d have a big day coming on the morrow.

The days were getting short, which was fine by me. I was tired every morning and would soon need a break from the work. Ordinarily, our work in ponderosa pine had us dropping some fairly big trees and tons of smaller ones. Any giant, older growth trees were pretty much left alone. Diseased trees or large trees that didn’t meet the criteria for a healthy forest were cut down. Bigger trees from which logs were made ran from 20 to 32-inches in diameter. Smaller trees ran from 6 to 14-inches. Middling trees of around 16-inches worked perfectly when harvested as vegas. But on this project, we were cutting beetle killed spruce up to 55-inches, diameter at breast height or DBH. The earth would shake when one of these hit the ground and the limbs were so long and stout, these trees would sit six or eight feet off the ground and limbing them was hazardous duty. Cutting dead-standing trees of this size is extremely dangerous work. Limbs can come down and trees can break it two while they’re on the way to the ground. There were “widow makers” everywhere you looked. These are dead limbs which get loosely hung up on other limbs, just waiting for the right bit of wind to dislodge and fall to the ground. Big trees meant big logs to  limb, buck, skid and load onto a truck. One day, I remember it was a Friday because Rick was coming up, I was working alone skidding logs with the tractor and skidding implement, and there was an area where I’d had a couple of big white fur trees that had gotten badly hung up and were still a long way off the ground. I carefully surveyed the situation and climbed up on the tractor and attached the tongs to one of the trees and began the process of pulling it down when it broke loose and quickly shifted to the point where the center of gravity swung and began to lift the front end of the tractor until it was three to four feet off the ground. The sight was almost surreal with the 18,000 pound machine hanging with probably forty percent of its mass sitting well off the ground. I was in a tight spot. My options were few and whichever one I chose would be equally dangerous. I chose to grab my saw and use the tractor as if it were a jungle gym. What was to happen next would occur quickly. With one foot on the tree and the other on the skidding implement, I made face-cut so that it was aimed at the sky above (it was tricky in deciding which direction the logs wanted to go) and, slowly began the back-cut from underneath while paying close attention to my surroundings. The tree would begin to break and that was my queue to jump. I landed on my feet and had just a second or two before the tree and tractor hit the ground in a big cloud of dust. A second later, the second tree that had gotten hung up on the same quagmire came crashing down. I was ready for it and had watched it come down, twenty feet away.

After making sure that the site was safe and everything was staying put, I limbed the two trees and skidded them out to the landing. The affected area looked more like the aftermath of a logging operation in the Pacific Northwest than a forest restoration job in Colorado. But it was easily cleaned up with the mulching unit.

I was about two-thirds of the way done on the project and had already begun to lament having to leave for the winter, where we had a number of lower elevation projects to get us through until spring when we had the two large projects (about 3,200 total acres) to return to. Come May and I would need to remobilize on Rick’s property for several more weeks of thinning and cleanup. We’d been forced to pull out that last November after taking a long weekend for Thanksgiving. It had snowed roughly three feet in the time we were gone and we needed to move quickly as another round of storms would be tracking straight through the region. This was one time that I became thankful for having the kind of equipment we had and the crews we were able to maintain. It was all hands on deck for the twelve hour day required to get everything out, back across the river, to Blanco Basin Road before dark. The bridge that the property owner used to access his property was sixty years old and, while well built for passenger cars and pickup trucks, was too feeble to make an attempt to cross with bigger trucks, trailers and two nearly ten ton machines. We had to ford the river, just as we had while mobilizing on the job the previous summer. It was something to see and gave each of my crew a chance to show his mettle. Fortunately, it was winter and the river was running low. We pulled everything out with one exception. Before Thanksgiving, I cut the largest tree on the project and it was absolutely massive at just under five-feet across (59″ dbh). I was able to get several giant logs out of it (the kind of logs that would simply take four or five of which to fill a logging truck to the top of the bunks). I sharpened my chain so that it was throwing two-inch chips and commenced to cut two five-inch thick, perfectly flat blue spruch table tops which were mistakenly left behind. This in itself wouldn’t be a problem as the slabs would have some time to dry out over winter. But there was still eight to ten inches of snow on the ground and, with all the thinning we’d done, the woods looked quite different than what I’d remembered of them, particularly with three feet of snow on the ground when we’d left the prior fall. But what was really strange in that in order to wrap the project up quickly, I’d brought the entire crew with me and assumed that one of us would eventually stumble over them. I at least knew approximately where they were. But even after the snow had melted away and things really began to dry out, I never did find them. To this day I don’t have a viable explanation as to what happened to them. So, it turned out that leaving them behind during the previous year’s rapid exit was something that I’ve always regretted. I knew the year before when taking on that project that I’d never again be thinning out a dying blue spruce ecosystem and cutting trees so large. These trees were too big and dangerous for any of my sawyers (timber fellers) to take on. They seemed to already know that that would be a protocol for this particular job and none of them did so much as ask for the honors. The chances of ever even finding a solid-slab table of that size in any type of rustic furniture store were essentially zero. Possibly in Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, but never in Colorado.

With all of us along with our equipment, we made short work of wrapping -up the Blanco Basin job. A couple of months later, the State Forest Service had contacted the property owner and I to see if we could wedge-in some time for a “dog and pony” show featuring the project. The answer from both Rick and I would be a resounding “YES” and, in early fall of that year, a couple dozen landowners who were a part of the state’s forestry incentives population, a Forest Stewardship Program designed to encourage owners of forty or more acres to pay to have some thinning done in accordance with a thinning plan specific to their properties in exchange for having their properties deemed agricultural as opposed to residential, and enjoy the significant reduction in property taxes that that change would afford them. The day came and Rick and I gave everyone a tour of the now completed project. It really was something to see and out of that single day’s proceedings, we landed at least four more projects. We were already backlogged a way’s out but it is very difficult to turnaway work.

I look back on the Blanco Basin project for Rick and his family as being the best six months of my life.  There was even an evening on that land where it was the height of autumn and the aspen trees stood golden and regal against the evergreens. Judd and I were flyfishing around the banks of the pond, when a phenomenon called  “alpenglow” lit-up the craggy peaks and a slight, isolated rain shower passed through lending a surreal, misty look across the lake on the fiery-yellow to orange aspens. I had a wonderful feeling envelope me and remember saying a short prayer to the effect that, if this was some sort of portal into heaven, I would happily go when it came to be my time. I could almost sense being surrounded by my closest ancestors calling to me from the mountains above. The division between heaven and earth had been lifted for a moment and I had the very real feeling of being in both worlds at once. It was a treasured moment, one that has never repeated itself, and one that I still remember clearly to this day.

I did end up seeing those wolves on several occasions, playing in the cold morning sun across to the other side of the meadow, maybe forty yards in from the forest and a hundred yards from where I stood. They remained close enough to the woods where if necessary, they could readily disappear. Each time I’d seen the pack I’d been enjoying one last cup of morning coffee before entering the woods for another day, so it must have happened during the “magic hour” between sunrise and when there was enough light from which to work. Once Judd (the dog I chose to bring with me on this job) was able to see these wolves for himself, in daylight, he showed no signs of intimidation or aggression and never even let out a bark. He knew by my manner that I was seriously curious but held no fear, only fascination, and he acted accordingly. If we are close to our animals, they take most of their cues from us. There was even a day not long after the last sighting, that I was running my saw, alone with no workers that week (the dogs would stay behind to guard camp) and kept getting the feeling that I was being watched. This very thing had occurred over the course of two or three times that week, but I had a strong feeling that it might happen again and that by waiting, the time I chose would be the best. After a a few minutes, I shut off and put down the saw, and made a slow but deliberate turn to catch a glimpse of the big, light grey male, most certainly the alpha. He’d been bedded down in some brush and we locked eyes for a moment before he slowly got up, shook-off the cold, and began walking away, stopping every now and again to look back until he vanished into the thicker woods. From my sightings in the meaow, the best I could figure is that the pack contained nine individuals, each as well fed and fit as the next. The year before, I had hunted the area during archery season and the elk, deer, and even moose were plentiful and showed signs of seldom being hunted. This was rugged country and private property was the only access unless you drove up a mile to the South San Juan, Blanco Basin Trailhead , and followed the trail up for a mile, and then swung back down one drainage and up another. The country was so rough that my ankles and knees remained sore for several months after that season, but lord, what spectacular country to witness. Though I had high hopes and had seen areas of bear activity, I never did see a grizzly but saw enough sign to agree with the study findings – that they did still call the South San Juan Mountains home and, instead of being radio collared and studied to death, that was the last thing they should be confronted with. When it came to our government and its policies toward the last of any endangered species, I am almost always universally opposed. But I’ve been but one voice on these issues, a complete unknown in the eyes of wildlife policymakers. All I had were my backcountry observations. According to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, the last remaining Colorado grizzly was shot in 1979 near the century old mining community of Platoro, possibly the most remote enclave of humankind in the state. It is located deep within the South San Juan’s, south of Wolf Creek Pass and north of Chama, New Mexico. To me, this is the prettiest, and most rugged part of Colorado, a state whose beauty is legendary.

After wrapping up the Blanco Basin job, we remobilized on the two bread and butter projects we’d already been working on for almost a year. Unlike La Plata county for which Durango is the county seat, Archuleta county, which held Pagosa Springs as its county seat, the latter county had become far more proactive in terms of forest health and wildfire mitigation. CSFS (the State Forest Service) had recommended our company for thinning the 250 acre Pagosa Springs City Park, an island of ponderosa pine and Gambel oak located on the southwest corner of town. At this juncture in the evolution of the company, we had hit our stride and had a backlog of almost two years. The City Park ended up being a highly regarded showcase for our work. Aside from being a popular mountain biking, hiking, and walking area, the park was home to several annual events which included a large bluegrass music festival which drew bluegrass, folk, and indie music enthusiasts from all over Colorado and New Mexico. My company was receiving a tremendous amount of fanfare from this one project alone. On top of that monster-sized stroke of luck, there was an adjoining 80 acre private parcel which we reeled-in along with another 80 acre property just up the road and owned by the same Florida family.

About half the work we had under contract came by way of CSFS recommendation and much of the other half was from people who had seen our work and inquired directly. My preferred projects were the acres we worked for private landowners where the end results had begun to sell themselves and I didn’t need to put on my salesman’s cap and “push” the concepts of forest restoration and wildfire mitigation. It was easy for me to jump in the truck and run up the road to a nearby property we’d worked and in briefly walking around and taking them to certain vantage points around the property that we’d worked, you could quickly see views of the preaks surrounding Pagosa Springs where before there were only overgrown areas of forest, particularly when we’d done some thinning either around an existing home or a proposed building site.  For people who had conracted with us to do their enire parcel, they were also pleased that once the work had been completed, they were then recognized as members of  the State Forest Service’s Forest Stewardship Council and, as long as they held to the forestry prescription for their property going forward, they would enjoy a considerable property tax break in going from residential to agricultural zoning. Their homes were also much easier to defend in the event of a wildfire. Even if they were forced to evacuate, while they might lose some of their trees and low lying brushy species, it was unlikely that they’d lose their home because they’d done prescriptive wildfire mitigation on the entire property and not just proximal to any buildings there might be. Upon learning of wildfires burning every summer in the Southwest, out of state landowners now had peace of mind and could relax with the knowledge that they’d already done everything they could to see that their acreage was relatively safe.

During our most profitable year, we were fully engaged in our two largest projects that had come to us by two developers who had seen the results of our work elsewhere and contacted me directly. The next thing I knew, I was giving a presentation at the City Park which included the two CSFS regional forest service foresters, our two prospective new clients (the developers), and several senior members of the Archuleta Planning Commission. “Wildfire Mitigation” was feverishly being talked about throughout the Western US. It had been no secret as to the loss of homes and those caught behind trying to save them in places like California and Florida, and, something called the “National Fire Plan” was now an everyday debate in Congress. The writing on the wall was clear. Communities both large and small should soon be seeing federal funding to help keep the entire Intermountain West from burning and taking hundreds of human inhabitants along for the ride.

Pagosa Springs is a picture perfect town in the heart of Archuleta county, a socioeconomically eclectic community full of tourist enticements, tradespeople, and summertime second home owners who pay for it all. The latter folks made up a large portion of our client list. It was all coming together, the newly proposed national funding, increased public awareness of forest ecology and wildfire mitigation-driven forestry practices, and the changing of the guard in Southwest Colorado’s oversight of their precious forested lands. But there was one major battle remaining and that was over what the true cost per acre was for having this kind of work done to tens of thousands of acres of surrounding publicly and privately owned lands.

Naturally, when D.C. higher-ups asked their in-the-field procurements officers what were their estimated costs for thinning X acres of Forest Services lands, they used the lowest figures possible and those figures were based on just two things: prescribed burns and the cost for mechanical thinning which didn’t involve specialized forestry plans, using the right equipment, or paying crews a reasonable, sustainable wage. These land managers were shooting themselves in the foot by underselling senior Forest Service officials in DC on what the real costs were. I came to believe that the only person in this whole affair to know what the appropriate range of costs were was me. These procurement officials were gambling on being able to use their least expensive (and least productive) means to treat acreage under their domain and show that it could be done for less than half of what a company like mine would charge. Regional procurement managers were selling Senior Forest Service officials on two things: prescibed burns (which had been proven many times over many years to be inneffectual and risky in that as often as not, these “prescibed burns” would get away from their handlers and become large, catastrophic fires, and the second cheapest means of knocking trees down and making a mess meant hiring various low-cost youth corps groups which relied on leaving all the necessary timber felling not to trade professionals but to 17 to 21 year old kids doing woodswork as a means to pay for college. These were predominantly summer jobs for these kids such that they’d only be available for three to four months a year. To get around meeting the specifications for completing the work under a given contract, the forest service went without thinning the brush (which was at least 40% of a project as a whole and disposition of the logging slash (the limbs tops, and parts of trees which didn’t meet sawmill requirements for turning logs into lumber). The project would be stripped of its forest products of value to area mills (about 40% of the overall saleable vegetative mass) leaving the other 60% either standing (brush and low genetic quality trees (usually a mix of ponderosa pine and invasive white fir) or, on the forest floor (logging slash/brush) to be dealt with later via prescriptive burning (or not, the Forest Service had fallen years behind on its prescribed burn projects). There were any number of problems in the fractionation of a given Forest Service project.

1.) Public lands managers had already fallen way behind on treating the brush and logging slash from countless projects which had already been done this way.

2.) The slash might sit there, drying out and become the preponderance of fuels on the forest floor, just waiting for a source of ignition such as an errantly tossed cigarette, a spark from a chainsaw, ATV, or a random bolt of lightning (the historical ignition source when mother nature is in control of doing her thinning work).

3.) A group of ne’er-do-wells watches as a childish stunt turns felonious and hundreds, if not thousands, of woodland acres burn to the ground. This happened on a 175,000 acre burn an hour outside of Denver in 1995.

4.) The vastly increased risk of having a prescribed fire run out of control burning tens of thousands of acres and leaving untold numbers of homes and, sometimes, firefighters caught in its wake. Wildland fires are well known for having a mind of their own, burning so hot such as to and create their own weather, which means high winds and rapid changes in fire direction. When this occurs, firefighters don’t have a chance when it comes to outrunning a large fire and get swept-up as if they were standing still.

5.) The unscrupulous nature in terms of how these projects are awarded, rarely going to the most experienced and qualified companies, contractors with appropriate insurances, seasoned manpower and specialized equipment at a sustainable price that keeps them in business. It is almost certain that project specifications are not met when Forest Service jobs are awarded to the lowest bidder, yet, at least in our region, I followed the bidding process, including my own proposals, for twenty-two projects awarded in 2005 and without exception, they went to low bidder. This occurred during a time when new bidding criteria had been set in place to ensure that these projects would be completed to a much higher standard than as seen in the past. The Forest Service called the new paradigm “Value Based”, a system which had been long in place for other types of government work such as bridge and highway contracts as awarded through the Federal Highway Admininistration (FHA).

After following those twenty-two awards in 2005, I put together a summary which was submitted to the Forest Service, both at a regional and national level. I had had it and the gloves came off as I went to war with my region’s Forest Service procurement officer and brought forth my gievance to the USDA Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C.. Through the morass of an agency the size of the Forest Service, I finally found the official who managed all of the Western regional procurement specialists and came to find out that he was quite familiar with the specialist I was have trouble with in my region. He asked if I’d be willing to open my books on the specific project I was in difficulty over at the time, the Vallecito project near Durango, so we could prepare some “apples to apples” cost comparisons. At the time, the forest service was using decades old figures that were merely based on constractor cost assumptions which was far cry from using proven numbers that were prepared from anything in recent memory. In contrast, with the new “National Fire Plan” was coming and funds were getting closer to being released on the ground, where it mattered most, the creators of the document used some more recent numbers but, when it came to anything consideered a “Forest Restoration” scenario, these officials were also way off the mark. I know these things because the concept of restoration forestry was new to our country and there was only one other company that I was aware of that was using similar equipment and Scandinavian-based processes, procedures, techniques, and knowledgable owners and crews, and this was a company that I had started and run for three years. Logging companies were part of the problem. To achieve a level playing field, I was only too happy to show my basis for coming up with my bid on the Lake Vallecito project. From my previous career as a project manager and engineer in the mining and metals process development arena, I had written dozens of refined proposals and project estimates for a far more complicated industry – engineering and process develpment. What I was about to reveal to the Forest Service was for certain a very complete and comprehensive means of estimating large scale projects. I had already used this experience to propose all of the work we had been awarded thus far on private lands. In the forty, or so, projects we already had under our belt, my pricing was so well defined and transparent that I’d never had a single individual question a cost estimate. The work was spelled out clearly in the scope of work (SOW) and the estimate was formulated from that SOW, with absolutley no hidden costs or anything in the small print (there was no small print). Initially, I asssigned an hourly billing figure to each different task that was to be conducted, a standard way of showing pricing. If questioned, I had a pull-down menu that revealed the incremental costs of performing each task, right down to insurances for the company and Worker’s Compensation for the worker. When we began bidding government work, the contract required that prices be shown in $/acre. These were larger contracts most often treating hundreds of acres per job. For me, this would increase economies of scale and greatly reduce my costs (including time lost) for mobilizing and de-mobilizing so many times a year. A major factor in my decision to start chasing Forest Service and BLM public lands work was the sheer size of the contracted acreages. However, there was one very different risk and that was that if there was an issue that cropped up after the work was well underway, it could take months before the issue was resolved. My company of six employees was too small to handle these types of issues so, at a minimum, I made sure there would be a force majour clause in any contract I put my pen to. I was encountering that very thing now, and it was pushing my small contracting business to the brink of extinction. To these public officials, that seemed to be of little consequence, while for me it was devastating. Here’s what was I was told by Washington. When I was ready to present my case, the agency supervisor would fly out for a meeting in Durango with land mangagers and procurement people from different regional USFS offices throughout the state and parts of northern New Mexico (my company’s area of operations) for the express purpose of assiging real, up-to-date contractor costs for performing this kind of work while meeting or exceeding project expectations and, therefore, project specifications. While this was a great opportunity, it came at a time when we were already two-thirds of the way through the Vallecito project, a project we were already owed backpay for services rendered and I was closer to becoming completely broke with each passing day. Each day that I spent on this “dog and pony show” cost me a lot of money, yet cost each of those government employees could sit there yawning and drinking their coffee, getting paid as if it were any other day. They had nothing on the line while my livelihood and that of my employees was at stake. Were you there, I am sure you would both see and feel my sense of urgency to get the matter resolved. During the weeks ahead, Forest Service officials from throughout the West were asked by their management to view the project and the regional newspaper was covering the story. They wanted the best, most natural looking results and, on just this one high-profile project agreed to meet my costs. In return, they would reevaluate their contracts procurement protocol as a whole after, first and foremost, adjusting my cost per acre figure so that I could complete the work, and they could keep the logs. I simply wanted to get the work done as quickly as possible so I could return to doing private lands work exclusively.

Tne thing that had happened to cause such an ordeal was that the stud mill in North Fork (about 90 minutes away) closed its doors for good. This mill had been a regional mainstay of the logging business for generations. Now it had been removed from the picture. I no longer had a means of selling the logs that were coming off this project, an element of revenue I was relying on to meet my operating budget. On this job, I essentially bid the work on a cost per acre price but there was clear language in the pricing section of the contract that once felled and skidding to one of the many log decking locations, that I would take ownership of the logs and that amout of money generated from the project would provide much needed aid to my pofit margin. Obviously, without a means to sell the logs, my profit margin would be drastically impacted. Since it was “an act of god” under no one’s control that the largest sawmill in our area had declared backrupcy, the force majeure clause in the contract should be enacted and enforced so that my company could afford to continue with the work. The mill closure was no secret as it impacted many of my competitors, as well. Initially, I wasn’t overly concerned (at least for my bottom line on the given project) because of the “force majeure” clause in my contract and this would undoubtedly mean the criteria for paying me would need to be amended. It would have been a simple adjustment as I’d cruised the project area myself prior to saying yes, and had esimated the total volume of logs to be derived, along with estimates for how much firewood and poles were to be generated. The Forest Service had signed off on these estimates. But in true government style, they waited and waited to move on my proposed amended price to complete the work. Eight weeks past while I waited, patiently, being told all the while that I’d be getting my first adjusted check “any day now”. Of course, they didn’t understand that, If I wasn’t getting paid to do the work, I’d obviously been bankrolling a government project as a private contractor and that it was breaking me. This was big news and I wanted to get this “wrong” out into the public eye. The proposed meeting between me and the regional officials and their DC supervisor did happen and, a day later, my area procurement supervisor met with me to establish the adjustment to the contract, an amount approved by his boss in Washington and an amount that would save me from going under, but leave me in a break-even position for what would be, when completed, a six to seven month long project. I had only two more months of work and I’d be out of there. It came as no surprise when yet another month went by and still no reimbursement check. I had been as patient as I could have possibly been while slowly losing my business week after week. The stress was finally breaking me and, at that point, the Forest Service owed me a substantial sum. That day I made the tremendously difficult decision to pull off the job and, at least temporarily, lay off the crew, most of whom had become close friends. They didn’t hold it against me and knew I had kept them going for as long as I possibly could. While we were loading up the equipment, one of the regional foresters dropped by to see how things were going. I said “they weren’t” and that I had no choice but to pull off the job, that his boss had broken me with empty promises and that I’d put a lot of potential clients on hold until I had completed this job. I had broken no promises in terms of when I could get to them, but many of those clients had gone elsewhere to get their needs met. By now I would be so broke that I wasn’t sure I could continue anyway. Initially, I’d had such a good rapoire with my clients that, when told of the project, they seemed to understand what the Vallecito award meant to me and my business. The project was high-profile and was being covered, at least topically, by newspapers and journals throughout the Southwest. Ecologically, it was the most important thing going on in that part of the country. Lake Vallecito was a cherished vacation spot, lending a lot, economically, to the region. The forester and I shook hands and he wished me luck in the aftermath. He was one of the good guys and was in-tune with the intense physical nature of the work, watching us gain ground and meeting contract specifications each week. It was well known that, though I was operating at a loss, that I was trying to do so for the greater good and that I would eventually be remunerated to a point that made it worthwhile.

Not an hour later, I got a call from the regional contracts officer who had the audacity to threaten to sue me for failing to meet the requirements of the contract. As I had taken copious notes and made recordings of all of our meetings over the ordeal, I kept those cards close to my vest and simply invited him to do so. The fact is that I carried that project without an adjustment for four months was deplorable. Virtually anyone would see that my company had been wronged by an agency of the federal government. I had gambled everything on the word of a regional forest service official who never came through. Did I have a case to sue the Forest Service? You bet! I also had an ace up my sleeve in that my wife at the time was the owner of the most successful marketing and public relations company in the Four Corners Area and this would be a slam dunk for us. Of course, the regional office decided to let sleeping dogs lie and I never got anything from them but at least the threat to sue my company died a quick death. They simply wrote me and my dreams as a small business owner off. By winter, they had some marginal logging company out there attempting to meet the project criteria and emulate the roughly three-quarters of the work that had been completed by my company. I had everything I needed except a way to sell those logs. But the nearest operating sawmill was now four hours away meaning that it would cost more to ship the logs than the market value of that timber. I could easily make a case for bringing the force majeure clause out of the cobwebs at the back of the contract and have it applied in this case. But I was thoroughly exhausted from my own personal war with a huge government agency. I’m a competitive, hardworking person, but I am but a force of one. They ran right over me and did so, I believe, with a sense of malice. I suppose that instead of being perceived as the owner/operator of the best timber thinning company in the state, they somehow saw me as a threat to their livelihoods simply because me and my company were emblematic of change and that change could, potemtially, interfere with how these foresters went out to make a living. The thing they couldn’t comprehend was that it was highly unlikely for any of them to lose their jobs or to have their jobs changed in any significant manner. Only for the better. About a year later, the Forest Service gave the logs away and even at that, the logger taking charge of the logs lost money on the deal. I told him precisely that beforehand, but he was “his own man” and did it anyway. There were a lot of loads remaining and at a haulage rate of $450 per load, I don’t see how he’d have remained in the business after such a blunder.

I’ve never been one to work for any given company, whether it was during my twenties and thirties while working as a young project engineer and then projects and staff manager for two renowned mining and minerals engineering process development companies, or later in my career as a senior project manager and, ultimately, a regional director in the midstream natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL) industry. I was always networking and keeping my options open for a “rainy day”. It was much the same when I developed a “safety net” by doing contract consulting work during my many “mud seasons” or other slower periods while getting my forestry business established. That work was done for both of the midstream natural gas contract engineering firms which serviced companies like BP, ConocoPhillips, the Williams Company, and others, in natural gas production and processing in the San Juan Basin of Southwest Colorado and Northwest New Mexico.

I had performed well for these companies and had connections in the natural gas industry well before things went south with my forestry business, so when it came time to sell off my company, I was able to do so while stepping almost immediately back into engineering and pipeline and facilities design and construction. I felt extremely fortunate to be able to make such a radical change so seamlessly. I would go on from there to finish an engineering career that I had started some twenty years before, in 1986.