For the longest time, Holce Logging Co., Inc. here had harvested and transported treelength material from Longview Fibre forests to various Longview Fibre prescribed markets, including Douglas fir export logs to a sorting yard in Clatskanie which bucked and sorted the material for shipping overseas.

Now in its third generation, K. House & Son Lumber Co. is a vertically integrated, family business that traces its beginnings to the state’s coal mining heyday. Owner Harold House, 68, the ‘son’ in the company name, recalls living in logging camps as a child where his dad, Kenneth, and mom, Gertrude, worked as a foreman/sawyer and cook, respectively.

In early 2001, when Mike Burgess returned to locally based Barko Hydraulics LLC as president, he soon realized that the venerable knuckleboom loader and feller-buncher manufacturer was at a crossroads. He surmised that if the company continued to plod along the same well-worn path, it might not survive.

Following a short meeting January 8 between four contractors and J.D. Irving officials, loggers and truckers contracting with Irving’s Maine Woodlands operations in Ashland, Me. agreed to continue a widespread work stoppage that began January 5 after Irving truckers refused to sign their 2004 contracts and loggers joined them.

Tom (Doc) Walbridge has been a leading forest engineer, researcher, educator and logger advocate for more than 50 years. He is well known and respected in the industry and, at 85, still occasionally visits the Industrial Forestry Operations (IFO) office at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg where he spent so many years in the classroom.

For all the years I have observed this industry, loggers have lamented the lack of long-term contracts or commitment from mills, which makes it tough for suppliers to develop long range business plans. So you would think you’d hear cheers from Minnesota loggers after a group of their counterparts followed the example of the farmer and formed a logger’s cooperative.

A national fundraising goal of $2.5 million has been established for 2004 by the National Log A Load For Kids Advisory Group, which recently met in San Antonio, Tex. In announcing the goal, Florida logger Allen Boatright, leader of the group, commented: “Log A Load For Kids is a program that the whole forest industry can be proud of.

Your editorial in the last issue expressed concerns about the lack of logging contractors and asked the question, “Will logging capacity come back?” Being a logging contractor/timber buyer, I think I am qualified to answer the question from a logger’s perspective. I am not a disgruntled logger, nor do I have an ax to grind.