Of a cobblestone road five minutes from campus you can find the Penn State Woodsmen vigorously chopping and sawing in preparation for an upcoming competition. The coed team practices three times a week in a variety of lumberjack skills. They are trained in everything giving them the most well rounded skillset to compete throughout the year.
“Some of the things we do at Woodmen’s is underhand chop and vertical chop, blot spit, buck saw and bow saw and axe throwing. There is also pole climbing, team events and water boil,” explains Kelly Hower.
Hower is one of the incoming captains for the 2014-2015 Woodsmen season. At their upcoming competition she will be competing in the crosscut-to-death event along with axe throwing and other team events.
The small club gets little funding from the university so they have to raise the money to pay for registration and transportation through out the year, which they do by selling firewood. The Woodsmen sell, cut and gather the wood, which they then deliver to local community members. The Penn State Woodsmen are the self-titled “Lumberjacks and Jills” here on campus.
While most of the members are agricultural related majors you can still find a couple engineers and psychology majors on the team. Anyone is free to join they just have to be willing to throw an axe over their head and in between their feet.
“It’s traditional forestry activities so that the root of it,” explains one of this years captains, Adam Wentzel. “But we're open to everyone body, we’ve had just about every type of major and every type of person and its just a lot of fun.”
While they all make is look easy it is not the safest sport to get involved in, and injuries do happen. Wentzel knows this first hand after he injured his thumb with a chainsaw, “but like a true lumberjack I put some gauze on it taped it back up and went back to it.”
Videos: Battle Stories From Competition
No matter how many years you have been competing mistakes can still be made, or repeated. Two years in a row Kelly saw a competitor lose part of his finger during the water boil event. The competitor not only finished the event, he went on to win it.
This year’s Woodsmen captain Adam Wentzel saw a fellow competitor chop all five toes off during an axe event. All of his toes were found and are now safely back on his foot.
