October 27, 2014

Portraits from time of change in Western Washington logging industry

“I’ve had my leg crushed; been in a full-leg cast for 16 months; put more of my buddies six feet under than I care to think about; been frost bitten and treated for heat exhaustion; and had every one of my fingers and most of my toes broken. [But] when I’m at the top of that mountain of one of those perfect mornings and the sun is just cresting the ridge, nothing else really seems to matter. I guess I was just meant to be a logger.”

So George Gulbransen of Stanwood, Wash., once told photographer John Tylczak.

On exhibit this month in the Forestry Club Room of UW’s Anderson Hall are 10 images from Tylczak’s project “Views from the Northwoods: 1983-1995.” The images capture the faces of the Washington timber industry during a time of great change and transition, from a rapidly shrinking workforce to more mechanized production.

At work and depicted in portraits are workers with jobs as fallers, choker setters, chasers, hooker tenders and more, captured at Western Washington logging sites. Tylczak, who currently teaches at Rogers High School in Puyallup, worked more than a decade on Views from the Northwoods, which includes more than 1,500 images taken with large format black-and-white film.

Tylczak said forest landowners hadn’t yet gated access roads as they did when protests started heating up about wildlife issues surrounding spotted owls.

“In the mid-80s it was pretty easy to simply follow a logging truck over a dozen or so miles of dirt road to a work site,” Tylczak said. “I’m not sure that I could do so now.”

Logging can be strenuous, dangerous work. Among the images on display is a clearing in the woods where logs are gathered for loading onto trucks. A 100-foot-high pole, rigged with steel cables pulls felled logs across the forest floor up to the landing, but that morning a cable had become snarled. In the photo Will Flowers, the 72-year-old hooker tender, hangs from a cable and harness to remedy the problem. Just part of the job.

As Sedro-Woolley logger Bob Cole once told Tylczak, ““My brother had straight A’s in college and had a job teaching logic at the University of Wyoming, but he bought himself a chain saw and headed for the woods. It’s hard to see the logic in that.”