Logging Puts Woman Right In Her Element

Janie Miller’s brush with the dangers of logging started innocently enough: “I heard a little crackling sound.”

Miller was walking down a steep hillside below the site of her timber operation when she heard a sound “like tiny branches breaking.”

She stopped. Looking over her shoulder, she studied the stack of cut trees that pointed uphill from where they had fallen - jammed together like pickup sticks. One tree seemed to be moving.

Snow covered the ground. The early morning sky was overcast. Her crew sat in the skidder, within sight but some distance away.

That one tree, almost 2 feet in diameter and at least 150 feet high, arced slowly over the stack of fallen trees. It was heading in her direction. There was no wind, no explanation for this sudden threat.

Miller did not stop to think.

“I started running,” she said.

She jumped brush, dodged trees, slid and crashed her way down the steep hillside. She plunged down the hill, reached a 6-foot embankment and dove over it, landing on her stomach on the logging road. The tree crashed to the ground inches behind her.

“I think that’s the only really close call I had,” she said, confessing that afterward she and her crew, who had watched in horror from the skidder, “decided to quit for the day.”

Miller, 32, is known as Clark Fork’s lady logger. The quality of her work is so good she has received commendation from Crown Pacific for “the best of the best” and also for “perfectly manufactured logs.”

She has teased her friends by telling them that the Crown Pacific letter had said “perfectly manicured logs.”

“I’m still learning,” said Miller, who just started her own logging operation last October.

For the previous four years she worked indoors at Coldwater Creek, but has always loved being outside, winter or summer.

In the woods, Miller wears logging boots, protective chaps over her blue jeans and layers of warm clothing. She operates a Stihl chain saw.

“I never fall the trees, I don’t do that,” she said.

Her crew cuts trees and operates the skidder. Miller hooks chokers, does her share of limbing and after the trees have been measured, cuts the lengths. She keeps the books but hires a driver to take the logs to the mill.

Miller earned her first money with a chain saw eight years ago when she cut firewood.

“I don’t know how many cords I had to cut to buy my hutch,” she said, pointing to a prized china cabinet in the corner of the living room.

Her second foray into the woods came when she cut “six-fours” - 6-foot-4-inch cedar used for fence posts and rails.

She cleaned up slash from a logging operation of her father’s, loaded the cedar onto the farm truck and sold them to Welco.

Although she continues to look at new property to log, Miller does not foresee a future in the woods.

“As long term,” she said, “it’s not going to be the way the little guys have done it in the past. When one guy on a machine can cut a forest in half a day, I don’t see how a little guy is going to make it.”