The air was filled with sounds of sawing and chopping Saturday as lumberjacks and jills from New York and Pennsylvania competed in the fifth annual East Coast Lumberjack Roundup.

The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry hosted the event at ESF’s Lafayette Road Experiment Station near campus. ESF’s woodsmen team competed in singles, doubles and group events against teams from Pennsylvania State University, Paul Smith’s College, SUNY Cobleskill, Finger Lakes Community College and first-timers Alfred State College. The events included sawing logs, building fires and climbing poles.

The ESF women’s team finished in first place, and the men’s team finished second behind Paul Smith.

“Everybody out there just loves competing and all the spectators love watching it because it’s not something you see every day,” said Alex Jacobson, a sophomore environmental science major who is a member of the ESF team but did not compete this year.

The spectator crowd of more than 150 people was made up of mostly ESF students and faculty, as well as parents from other competing teams.

There were slight changes to the events featured this year including, most noticeably, the lack of the dendrology event, in which one person from each team has to identify local trees. Dendrology was omitted because many of the competing teams come from universities that don’t have a forestry program and would not be able to identify trees, said Trevor Diefendorf, a senior forest resources management major.

“It’s kind of boring,” he said. “It’s kind of an obscure event.”

Also in previous years, ESF President Cornelius Murphy has opened the roundup by leading the teams and spectators in the Pledge of Allegiance, but he was unable to attend this year’s meet, said Natalie Scheibeo, a sophomore aquatics and fisheries science major.

“It wasn’t really as formal as last year’s meet,” Scheibeo said.

This year, the day started with team sawing events in the morning, followed by singles events including the log roll and the pulp log throw, in which a competitor has to throw a log between two markers, Diefendorf said.

Another singles event was the cookie stack, where the competitor must cut as many horizontal slabs in a standing log as possible without any of the slabs falling off the stack.

The singles events were not as structured as the team and doubles events, so competitors were free to choose when they wanted compete, Diefendorf said.

The last events of the day were the doubles, including the ‘cross cut to hell,’ where two people cut through a horizontal log as fast as possible.

The Lumberjack Roundup is scored with a points system. The quickest time gets 100 points and other competitors get a fraction of 100 points, depending on their time, said Jacobson, who was one of the timekeepers.

This year’s roundup went smoother than last year’s and was accident-free, Scheibeo said.

Diefendorf credited some of the day’s success to the weather, which started cold but warmed up by midmorning.

“It was perfect competition weather,” he said. “You aren’t sweating when you’re competing, but you’re not cold, either.”

Diefendorf said the roundup is different from other sporting competitions because there’s no animosity between the teams and everyone tries to help each other.

“You’ll cheer on whoever is doing (the event), especially someone who looks like they’re having a hard time,” he said.

Scheibo said she hopes to see forestry sports become more prevalent in the world of college sports, and he said forestry teams at non-forestry institutions such as the University of Connecticut and Pennsylvania State University are a step in the right direction.

ESF ended the Lumberjack Roundup with a new tradition, closing the day with an impromptu game of tug-of-war between the teams that acted as a capstone event.

“It was a lot of fun,” Scheibeo said. “That was the first time we did that, and I think it will be an annual thing.”

 

Published on March 31, 2010 at 12:00 pm