HAYWARD, Wis. — Every summer, thousands of people descend upon this northern Wisconsin "big small town," as some locals call it. They come for the local fishing and camping, bars and restaurants decorated with taxidermy, and a 4-and-a-half-story tall sculpture of a Musky, a toothy freshwater fish.
But the biggest tourist draw every July is the Lumberjack World Championships, the local equivalent of the Olympics. Crowds fill bleachers overlooking a glassy cove of water, watching timber sports athletes from all over the world swing axes, wield crosscut saws, and sprint across floating logs. This year's competitors came from 16 states, Canada, Australia, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Spain and Wales to participate in the 65th annual championship.
A male-dominated industry turned inclusive sport
Around the turn of the 20th century, the logging industry reigned supreme in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
"It really is what allowed the Midwest to flourish," says historian Willa Hammit Brown, author of Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack.
"The logging of that land was one of the biggest transformations [of the American landscape] in American history."
The almost exclusively male workforce felled trees, stacked logs, and pushed them down rivers. Women mainly played a supporting role as cooks at logging camps. So, a lumber sport competition may bring to mind big, burly Paul Bunyan types with facial hair and flannel shirts.
Think again! This year, nearly half of the competitors at the Lumberjack World Championships, 45 of the 100, were women "lumberjills."
Some get into it through college programs, like Erin LaVoie, a CrossFit gym owner from Spokane, Washington and 2024 female all-around champion. She was introduced to competitive lumberjacking as a forestry student in college, when she noticed a team speed-chopping wooden blocks down the hall from one of her classes.
"I wandered in one day [and said] 'Hey, what are you guys doing? Can I come try it?' And I fell in love with it pretty immediately. I loved the challenge. My hands were bloody before I was done with it, it took probably a day to finish a block of wood. And I was hooked," she says.
Now, LaVoie can chop through a log in under 30 seconds and saw through one in fewer than 15. She has won seven all-around titles, but was edged out this year by Canadian lumberjill Stephanie Naud.
A double-edged axe
Lumberjack Bowl is built around an inlet of Lake Hayward that was used as a holding pond for trees sliced down by loggers in the 1800s. Felled white pine was stored in water so the logs wouldn't dry out and crack before being shipped around the country.
Now, one side is the dock where the sawing and chopping competitions take place.
Women do not compete in all 20 events, like the 60-foot and 90-foot speed climb, where competitors race up and down towering poles. Although these events are open to women, they are very physically demanding, and women have not entered them so far.
But they have competed in women's single-hand crosscut sawing and the underhand chop since 1994. For the underhand chop, athletes stand on little flat spots on horizontal logs. The announcer yells, "3-2-1 go!" and six athletes at a time chop away at the logs underneath them, cutting a V shape into both sides until they're split through.
In more recent years, women also started competing in the standing block chop, where the log is vertical and 9 inches in diameter. This year, a competitor from Hayward, Kate Witkowski, blew through her vertical log in 21.17 seconds, a new women's world record.
Samantha Graves has also set records in that event. The lumberjill from Victor, New York, works in the office of a tree company. She says some people have misconceptions about what it means to be a female timber sports competitor.
"They'll be like, 'Oh, Sammy throws axes.' And then they just assume I'm doing, like, the little hatchets at the [axe-throwing] bar. So I try to explain to them that it's a little bit more than that. You know, we're professional athletes."
There is an axe-throwing event at the Lumberjack World Championships. But here, competitors throw large double-bit axes with a blade on each side.
Martha King, from Pennsylvania, is another standout in this year's competition. She explains that women's foray into competition sawing and chopping has evolved over time.
"It's not like they've blossomed overnight," she says, "but I've seen the evolution of it, I suppose, or the progression of it over the last few years."
It's a double-edged sword... or rather, axe.
"Earlier on, it was a little bit easier to win," she says. "[But] this is what you want. You want intense competition. You want to raise the bar. You want people to push you. You want to be pushing other people. That's the way that the sport is going to grow."
A legacy of log rolling
On the other side of the cove is the log rolling and boom running dock. The boom run event is a crowd favorite. Athletes sprint across eight logs that are floating in water and connected by a rope.
In log rolling, two competitors face off on floating western red cedar logs, switching up treading speed and direction to try and knock their opponent off balance without touching each other.
"When they [log-rolling competitors] fall on their butt, which happens often, we like to say: 'she got a little cedar in her seat-er,'" jokes Samantha LaSalle, event director for the championships and a competitor.
"Having fast footwork, a strong core, strong lower body [helps]," she explains, "but so much of log rolling is mental, too. It's a sparring sport, so it's just, it relies on your mental [focus] and not just the brute force like some of the chopping and sawing does, while there's technique there too."
The level of competition for women's log rolling is soaring. This year, 24-year-old Livi Pappadopoulos from La Crosse County, Wisconsin, became a seven-time US world champion in the event. 16-year-old Aini Anderson, from the same area, came in second.
The two say they are "like sisters." Pappadopoulos has mentored Anderson since she was a kid, and Anderson says she was inspired by watching her teacher out-roll some boys over the years.
"Just seeing her being able to get falls on them and compete with them and humble them. It's like, 'I want to do that too one day!'" says Anderson.
Pappadopoulos stands looking over the water. "No matter how many years I've been competing here, no matter how much time passes by or how much older I get, something about this view standing here at the Bowl makes me a little teary," she says.
"This is what our entire year is centered around. You know, there are some people that wait for Christmas or certain things throughout the year, but this is it for us. This is what we work for and what we look forward to."
WUWM's Katherine Kokal and Maria Peralta-Arellano contributed reporting for this story.
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