Mackinaw City — Remember lumberjacks? The guys with the red-and-black flannel shirts, dirty blue jeans, scruffy beards, and big axes? We know them through grainy black-and-white photos in history books. There they are in the middle of a damp pine forest. They look up in awe at a giant redwood scraping the sky.
They are sitting on stumps circled around a smoldering campfire on the edge of civilization. Dirty boots, worn hands, tired faces. A figure of the frontier, a part of our Northern American collective subconscious.
We don’t see too many of those fabled lumberjacks in our backwoods these days. But they’re still around, in some way, if you know where to look. In Mackinaw City, you can watch a couple guys in sawdust-covered flannels, wielding polished axes with the precision of sushi chefs, hack away at logs every night, all summer long.
Jack Pine Lumberjack Shows is easy to find. Head south from Mackinaw City on US-23, and a few minutes later you’ll see a big sign, wooden bleachers, and a couple American flags atop two tall cedars to your left. The guys at Jack Pine aren’t cutting wood because they have to. They’re doing it because they want to. And they aren’t cutting wood like your grandfather did. They’re cutting it harder, faster, and with more accuracy and strategy than I ever knew was possible.
They do something called the Spring Board Chop. They take two big logs and stand them up straight. Each lumberjack stands on a board sticking out from a wedge and hacks away at about eye level until they’ve cut a slot. Next, they take a second board and shove it in that new spot, hop up, stand on that plank, and chop away at the top of the log until they make their way all the way through. Whoever does it fastest wins.
It’s an insane competition. Anyone who has spent any time chopping wood knows how strenuous it is. Growing up, we heated our house with a wood-burning stove, so my brother and I chopped a lot of wood. Chopping at a nice leisurely pace gives your back quite a workout. After about 15 minutes, you’re taking off your coat and scarf because you’re sweating. These guys in the Spring Board Chop are slamming these logs over and over again, as fast as they can. Wood chips are flying, logs are cracking. When they hop up onto that second board they are standing with their feet about 8 feet off the ground, and yet they don’t miss a beat. These guys are, to put it simply, thin, jacked, daring, and agile.
They do another competition with massive saws. They take two logs, one for each competitor, lay them down on a few braces, and each guy takes a massive saw and goes to town. The first one to get through his log wins. The saws are huge—at least 6 feet long. Standing on their ends, they end up taller than the men welding them. Anyone who has sawed through anything knows how hard it is. Sawing through a four-by-four is annoying. Imagine sawing through a log bigger than your head, and doing it as fast as you can. I don’t know if the guys at Jack Pine go to the gym, but I don’t think they need to. They’ve got enough of a workout already.
In addition to the chopping and the sawing, they also do a speed climb up the two tall cedars you see from the road. They scale the poles, reaching the top, which appears to be at least 40 feet high, at an insane pace. Not only am I, obviously, unable to even think about performing such a feat, I think I might become sick simply due to the height at the summit.
These men also do log rolls, boom runs, and axe throwing. There are a couple demos they do with chainsaws, and put on a little show for the audience, which everyone loves. My daughter was the lucky recipient of a thin disk one of the guys shaved off during the sawing competition. She held it on her lap all the way home.
Jack Pine is part show and part competition, but the skills of axe and saw are not just for entertainment. It’s a sport, because of course it is, or why wouldn’t it be? Skill, strength, agility, daring, and competition. Yes, it’s certainly a sport, and an American one at that. Both lumberjacks told me that what they love most about it is the camaraderie, that “you get to meet a bunch of people from all around the world” and “when you go to a competition, you are with 50 other guys, and everyone is helping everybody.”
A French lumberjack? An Italian lumberjack? Don’t make me laugh. The lumberjack is American. He is of the new world. His archetype is one of the frontier. The image of him—a rugged and daring individual of the north woods is part of our story.
Though those admirable traits seem to have subsided, people still want them, or at least long for reminders of them. That’s why we gravitate toward the image of the lumberjack, and that’s why people go to see the Jack Pine lumberjacks in Mackinaw City.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @OW_Root.
