Flashes of Panic

We went up to the Conway “Festival of the Hills” this afternoon, a cool pocket fair held on recreation-department fields in the center of that pretty little hilltown. There was a lot to like there, including a hilly 10-K (I didn’t race) and a small corral of goats, sheep, ponies and llamas patient enough to be patted by a swarm of fascinated kids. A series of bands played on the tennis courts; on one edge of the field a small group of people gazed thoughtfully as two people and a hydraulic contraption the size of a boat trailer carefully sliced up a good-sized log, a portable sawmill.

Next to the sawmill was the wood-splitting contest. Yes, competitive wood-splitting. It took me a few go-arounds to figure out what was happening here, other than that people were taking turns splitting wood.

In fact, there was a store of wood of firewood length (about 18”, but I may be wrong about this) which needed to be split to stove size (defined, roughly, as one end fitting through a ring set up nearby). People (men and women) signed up for two-minute segments splitting as much wood as they could with an axe. Everything split to acceptable size by a competitor was put on a big scale and weighed; sticks which remained too large or not completely split were tossed on the pile with the previously-weighed firewood of previous competitors.

The biggest total wins, and to be really competitive, you had to split over 150 pounds of wood in two minutes. The winner was over 200 pounds. Judging from the guy I saw wandering around with a shiny-new axe afterward, either the winner gets an axe or this guy brought his own equipment. (The 2007 champion defended his title, for those who are close followers of the competitive wood-splitting circuit.)

We watched two splitters, one pretty good and another not so much, and three weigh-ins, and figured some strategy. You have to hack at each stick long enough to get it down to size; it pays to not lose much work to the “too-large” pile. It also pays to be up early in the order, with a good selection of heavy logs to cut. (If you’re experienced, you know which sections will weigh more.)

Of course, strength pays: if you can quarter a log with just three chops (once through, then splitting the resulting halves) rather than wasting time on an axe stuck three inches into a log, you’re going to get more wood on the scale. The better of the two guys we watched was splitting the log on nearly every swing; the worse had to take two or three swings for every weighable chunk he got, and a lot of his chunks were rejected as too large.

You definitely don’t want to be a rookie in this sport. These guys threw the axe around like a lacrosse stick, but if you can swing an axe that heavy, that quickly, you’re risking toes if you aren’t precise with your placement. (This is why woodsmen wear steel-toed boots.)

Whoever supplied the original timber probably got two or three cords of mostly-split firewood in the end. Not a bad deal.