NEWRY – Don Bennett can count the number of zero or below-zero temperature-days he’s experienced while logging the Maine woods this winter on one hand.
But the owner of Bennett’s Lumbering of Bethel needs more than two hands to count the number of days that soggy ground from too much rain and warm temperatures have left him and other loggers unable to work the woods.
“We just haven’t had the deep freeze you need to have the deep frost for the truck roads,” he said late Tuesday afternoon, standing in a log yard off Lone Pine Road on the Bear River side of Mount Will.
Logging during a wet summer that has continued through a winter liberally peppered with unseasonal warmth, has been difficult for Bennett, but he has yet to lay anyone off.
“Logging is about establishing a rhythm, making things happen for three months or six months straight, but the real problem with this winter is you don’t have a rhythm,” he said.
“You just get things cooking, and you’ve got 2 inches of rain and you can’t take the same road in, because you’re conscious of the landowners you work for, and the landowner doesn’t want a piece of land rutted,” Bennett added.
Bennett and his crew has been doing mechanized harvesting with heavy equipment since December, thinning a 400-acre lot in Newry that is owned by Chadbourne Tree Farms LLC of Bethel.
“With heavy machinery, you have to stop and wait for things to calm down, so, you lose money and wind up with a great big belly full of aggravation at the end of the month,” he said.
A 35-year logger, Bennett said this fall and winter have been one of the worst he’s seen.
“Now, I know how the potato farmer in Aroostook feels when he’s trying to get potatoes in and out of the ground when it rains all the time. It’s terrible frustration,” he said.
From October through November at another job site, “we literally had about 15 or 16 days that we simply could not work. You can’t work on someone’s land when it’s totally saturated.”
In a normal winter, he said he could move on a job by middle to late November, then, by Thanksgiving, roads would be frozen and topped by at least 10 inches of snow.
“You could almost inevitably get through February, and, creep into March if you had any luck at all,” he said.
“With an established rhythm, you might have had a minor interruption with a January thaw, but, unlike this winter, you didn’t have 12 minor interruptions in three months,” Bennett added.
While trying to be optimistic, he said time isn’t on the logger’s side.
“If we don’t catch two to three weeks of something at least normal or pretty well below normal, those pretty bright orange posters come out. That’s when landowners begin to feel uneasy with the saturated ground mass,” Bennett said of the posting of weight limits.
He wasn’t aware that has happened yet.
Like loggers, this winter has kept saw-mill operators on edge, too.
“The markets, on the whole, are reasonable. There are some slumps with specific grades, but, on the whole, everyone is out buying. I was just speaking with a log buyer. His mill has logs sufficient for a few weeks, but they’re nervous,” Bennett said.
“They’re anxious about whether things will break up early. If we can squeeze out a couple of weeks of cold weather and a couple of old-fashioned snowstorms, their worst fears won’t come to pass,” he added.
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