PAUL SMITHS, N.Y. — Ax throwing is encouraged in lumberjack class. It’s also OK to dump your classmate in the lake as long as you’re both frantically trying to stay upright on a floating log.
The annual Adirondack Woodsmen’s School is held in the summer amid the tall pines and placid waters of Paul Smith’s College. Despite the course’s name, there are no bushy beards here, no flannel shirts, no suspenders, no oxen.
Instead, 18 students recently took part in a weeklong crash course on old-school lumberjack skills such as sawing, chopping, ax throwing, log boom running and pole climbing. While the course is for college credit, many participants echo Tommy Grunow, who said he wanted to learn the “lost art of lumberjacking.”
“I looked at the list of what we’d be doing … and I got to ax throwing, and I lost it. I had to come,” said the Paul Smith’s freshman from Riverside, Conn.
Paul Smith’s focuses on environmental studies, and the woodsmen’s summer curriculum includes the “history of axes” and the “art and science of hand-hewing logs,” but there’s also a lot of fun stuff with axes and saws.
On a recent afternoon at a lakeside clearing on campus, students strapped spikes around their boots to scramble up a 45-foot pole and raised long-handled axes over their heads executioner-style to send the tools tumbling into a bull’s-eye painted on a log end. They sawed solo with a bow saw and in pairs with a 6-foot crosscut saw. They practiced their underhand chop, which required them to stand on the log they were axing (with metal booties to protect against errant swings).
“It’s like a brave, new world out here,” Liam Gilbert of Blue Bell, Pa., said with a smile. “I had not thrown an ax (before), and on my first throw, I managed to break a handle, so I have not thrown one since.”
Later on at the lake, the students in their late teens and 20s took turns trying to dash across a log boom stretching from the shore and climbed on a floating log two at a time to see whose fast footwork could keep him or her vertical on the spinning lumber the longest.
Instructor Brett McLeod oversaw it all, offering tips on fluid ax swings or crosscut techniques. McLeod is a former logger who chopped and sawed in woodsmen competitions, as do some of these students.
Late in the afternoon, he divvied the students into relay teams involving cutting, climbing and throwing, which looked sort of like the “Hunger Games” as imagined by Paul Bunyan. The races hone students’ timber sports skills, though McLeod sees a larger value in the course.
Students, he said, will need these skills if they go on to work as park rangers in wilderness areas that don’t allow mechanized equipment. Others could use their newfound skills to build their own log cabins. And all of them will get a hands-on experience about natural-resources management and the history of the Adirondacks, where loggers have been swinging axes for centuries.
“The idea was basically to get students to think about things besides video games and really sort of bring them back to nature,” McLeod said.
The first one-week course is for beginners, with more advanced training the following week. The first week’s group included three female students. One, Madison Lemoine of Chepachet, R.I., said she’s used to competing with men in lumberjack competitions.
“It’s tough, actually. … You just try as hard as you can,” she said.
