Horsepower fuels local logging operation

A windstorm back in March blew down a lot of lodgepoles on Frank LaMotte's Trout Creek property. This fall he wanted to clear the downed whips off his land, so he hired a commercial logger with a skid steer to pull them out.

It didn't work. The ground was so saturated and soft that the logger's machinery bogged down and created huge ruts in LaMotte's property. The logger suggested LaMotte hire a horse-drawn outfit to come in and do the job instead.

Enter James Yoder from Plains, along with his children, who form a ready-made and experienced crew of horse loggers.

Yoder, a congenial Amish man with a ready handshake, took a short breather to visit with us while working with two of his older daughters at LaMotte's place last week. On this particular day, daughters Bethany and Ketorah were busy applying chokers to the logs and guiding them out of the woods with two black Percheron mares, Dorothy and Amy. Standing by to relieve the Percherons when they tired were two young Belgians, harnessed and ready to go. Two days earlier when the children were out of school, there had been more young Yoders on the job there, ranging in ages from 7 to 17. They worked like a happy, well-oiled machine. While some children rode the horses hauling out logs, others guided horses from the ground. They applied and removed chokers (the cables attached to logs and horses), and the youngest child counted the logs they had carefully lined out for a logging truck that would soon arrive to pick them up. Yoder estimates he and his crew pulled out at least 160 logs that day.

It's clear that the Yoder family enjoys what they do. They work as smoothly and efficiently as the gentle giant equines they employ. "It's an environmentally friendly way of logging," Yoder says with a smile of satisfaction. "You don't need the big heavy machines to do this."

"It's a lot less wear and tear on the ground," echoes Frank LaMotte, "plus it's just fun to watch them work!"

Yoder runs a sawmill where he makes posts, and LaMotte's blown-down lodgepoles are perfect for that. The mill goes through 27 tons of timber a day, so the demand for timber is constant. While Yoder thoroughly enjoys working in the woods with his children and horses, he hopes to put a full-time professional crew together so that he can dedicate more of his time to the sawmill at home.