Grab Your Hot Saw and Show Them How It's Done
Alissa Wetherbee, Axe Women Loggers of Maine
I'm taking you down another one of my personal fixation rabbit holes today with the awesome Alissa Wetherbee from the Axe Women Loggers of Maine!
I was first introduced to the Axe Women Loggers of Maine when they were on the program at the Topsfield Fair, here in Massachusetts where I live most of the time. My dad has been involved with the fair forever, I grew up kicking around in the vegetable building helping to set up and break down every October, and even though my days of growing championship veggies are long behind me and my kids are only interested in the midway rides and ripoff games, I still try to get there every few years to get my fix of greasy pole climbs and fried food (and maybe a little bit of tractor pulling or demolition derby!)
Which brings me to Alissa Wetherbee. A few months back I saw something on Instagram that reminded me of the one time I saw the Axe Women Loggers at the Fair. And I was thinking, these women are total bad-asses, I should have one of them on the podcast. So me being me, I went into web stalker mode, and was relieved to find that the group was founded and headed up by a woman, Alissa - I was a little afraid I’d find out that some guy was pulling the strings, but I shouldn’t have feared!
Alissa’s logging sports domination came pretty organically, since she spent a lot of her childhood and teenage years cutting and processing wood for her family’s use. When she got a little bit older, instead of taking some thankless waitressing job in the summer, she parlayed her chainsaw skills into being the token girl in a local tourist trap lumberjack show. Eventually she realized that there were actual timber sports competitions that had actual prize purses, and even though it was a lot of the same women competing in all of those competitions, there were other women - period!
Alissa made some great friends on the circuit, and as she looked around at what some of the guys were doing in their off season, namely getting paid to demonstrate logging skills, her creative juices started flowing…
I loved this conversation for so many reasons.
First, because seeing the Axe Women of Maine way back when was the seed that grew into me taking a chainsaw class last summer - yes, I donned chaps, steel toed boots, helmet and gloves AND a mask on one of the hottest and humidest weekends of the summer and drove an hour there and back both days just to learn and get comfortable with a chainsaw with a women’s only group.And it was epic.
The second reason I loved this was because Alissa basically created her own new thing. She met some people she liked, doing an activity she liked. She saw men doing it one way, and decided to do it a different way. And even though it was risky, and she’s hit a few speed bumps and a freaking global pandemic along the way, she’s keeping at it and bringing others along in her success, making room for more women to enjoy the fruits of what she created. Love it!
You can find more information about the Axe Women, becoming an Axe Women Pathfinder, upcoming events, all the things on the web at Axewomen.com, and you can follow them @axewomen on Instagram and Facebook as well, they share all kinds of pix from their travels and you might just be the first to know the next time Alissa has one too many shots and rolls a log down the Erie Canal or whatever...
Other fun links:
That time Alissa tried to teach Peggy Keyser how to throw an axe on the 207
Awesome log rolling video (in which 10 year old Libby embarrasses a grown man)
World’s Open Lumberjill Contest (part of NYS Woodsmen’s Field Days)
Lumberjack World Championships (part of Mountain State Forest Festival)
Get your own synthetic log to roll from Abby in Minneapolis! (Key Log Rolling)
Riverview Roadhouse (for the next time you’re in Le Claire!)