University of Nevada, Reno logging team highlights forestry
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Vanessa Arias grasps a double-sided axe with both hands, holding the head at eye level.
She toes a line in the sand with her left foot, steps back with her right and pauses; then, in one swift motion, she steps forward, raises the axe overhead and releases, sending it arcing through the air toward a log target.
The blade sticks just right of center.
Not bad for a University of Nevada, Reno criminal justice major who had never thrown an axe before this year.
Arias is one of a handful of students on the Nevada Loggers, the UNR’s logging team. The team formed about 40 years ago, and its membership has waxed and waned in the decades since.
The team all but dissolved during the pandemic, said coach Hunter Noble, a former logging team competitor who now manages UNR’s Whittell Forest and Wildlife Area, a swath of forest in Washoe Valley that serves as a living lab for research and instruction. But over the past several months, the team has grown its membership back up to seven students.
“The goal of logging sports is to preserve some tradition of the understanding of the way things used to be, but we just do it for fun,” he said.
The close-knit group gathers once per week in a vacant lot on the university’s Agricultural Experiment Station, just east of campus. The lot backs up to North Wells Avenue, so drivers sometimes see the students sawing, throwing and chopping.
A little harder to see is the team’s dedication to less physically demanding aspects of the sport, such as identifying trees and cones and calculating distances and angles in the woods.
The parcel is peppered with logs of varying sizes donated by private landowners and tree removal companies.
Most donations are Jeffrey and lodgepole pines damaged by drought and bark beetles, said Sarah Bisbing, the team’s adviser and an assistant professor at UNR. Wood they don’t use for practice gets cut into firewood and sold for $200 a cord to help purchase equipment and travel expenses.
“Most logging teams aren’t picky about what they cut into because it’s all donated,” she said.
Bisbing was a member of the logging team at the University of Illinois and University of Montana and coached the team at California Polytechnic State University, “notoriously one of the best logging teams in the West.”
Bisbing, who also is director of the Whittell Forest and Wildlife Area, said the sport “was kind of my first foray into gaining confidence through strength-building activities. … It was my first opportunity to not be treated as a petite city girl.”
Competing as a petite female, Bisbing felt she overcame stereotypes that the sport is “male-dominated and masculine.” She sees the UNR team defying that stereotype as well.
“As forestry has changed and become more diverse and inclusive, so have logging teams,” she said.
Come for the axe throwing, stay for the people
When Arias showed up to her first practice, she didn’t feel like she fit in. She was a young Latina from the farming community of Yerington and a criminal justice major who had never handled an axe or chainsaw.
She thought: “I’m the only person who’s not a forestry major. I shouldn’t be here.”
But she’d seen an ad for the club and, “They said they were going to throw axes, and I thought, ‘That sounds fun.’”
There was no axe throwing that first day. She tried chopping but found it scary each time the axe blade struck near her feet. Then, she sat with other team members and peeled logs — bark can contain dirt and small rocks that damage axes and saws — for about two hours. It was about as exciting as peeling potatoes for two hours, she said with a laugh.
Despite feeling like she didn’t quite fit in, Arias found herself drawn back to the club.
“I came for the axe throwing and stuck around for the people,” she said. “They’re just awesome to hang out with.”
She finally threw her first axe in February at a logging sports exhibition in Northern California. She placed first in both axe-throwing competitions she tried, besting about a dozen other female competitors.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I was shocked.”
Check out:Nevada logging sports team has strong showing at western expo
Now, axe throwing is one of her loves. Her birthday is coming up, and when her mom asked what she wanted as a gift, she asked for a throwing axe.
Senior Airica Gallaspy is another surprise addition on the team.
When she first heard about Nevada Loggers, she blew it off, thinking it sounded ridiculous.
But after taking a class taught by Bisbing, she went to a practice “and immediately fell in love with it,” she said. “I like getting to run heavy dangerous equipment I would not have had an opportunity to use.”
Gallaspy grew up in Reno, leading “an indoor city life despite the fact I was the crunchy granola one in my family.”
When she told her parents she’d joined Nevada Loggers, “they all kind of looked at me with their jaws hanging. It was unexpected for sure.”
At her first practice she was handed a chainsaw. She was terrified. She’d never held one before, and she was convinced she would hurt herself or someone else.
“I don’t even think I got it started,” Gallaspy recalled. But the next practice she was ready, and now she competes in as many chainsaw events as she can. “I feel really comfortable with a chainsaw now.”
“You’d think logging was just conservative curmudgeons but it’s a really diverse bunch – a really fun group of people,” she added. “Everybody’s different … and it makes for a really enjoyable club.”
Students interested in learning more about the team may contact club President Jess Paoli at ne***********@gm***.com or Bisbing at sb******@un*.edu.
“What I see from them is incredible team building,” Bisbing said. “They work together and inspire each other.”
Amy Alonzo covers the outdoors, recreation and environment for Nevada and Lake Tahoe. Reach her at aa*****@ga*****.com. Here’s how you can support ongoing coverage and local journalism.
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