A Little R&R

Canadian Forest Industries, Nov/Dec 2006 by Tice, Bill

That's neither rest nor relaxation for BC loggers Steve and Don Ramsey, who run CTL logging operations in both the far north and southern Interior of the province.

It's mid-September and Steve Ramsey is closely watching the weather reports and fire hazard levels. Ramsey, who with his brother Don runs R&.R Enterprises, is mildly concerned. It has been six weeks since they have had any rain in North Central BC, and the company's logging operation at Tumbler Ridge, near Chetwynd, has been shut down for over a week due to the dry conditions.

"The shutdown is not going to help us on our annual production, but I don't think it will have a major effect over the course of the season," notes Steve. "We did manage to get 250 loads into the mill before we were shut down in early September, and hopefully by spring break-up we will be able to catch up on the lost time."

Steve, who lives a five-hour drive south of Tumbler Ridge in Prince George, manages the northern operation, while Don lives in Vernon, BC, and looks after the company's other logging side, which is currently working in the Kamloops area. Wetter conditions around Kamloops have at least kept the one side operating, and Steve says they expect to hit a minimum of 200,000 cubic metres this year between the two operations and will be pushing hard for 250,000.

In Tumbler Ridge, they are logging for Canfor's Chetwynd mill, while the Kamloops production is for a major log broker who supplies local mills with wood from small business sales and private land.

For Steve, his first venture into logging was for the Tolko Lavington mill, which was close to the Ramseys' home town of Lumby, just outside of Vernon, BC. That was in the early 1980s, and Steve started the business as a hand faller before buying an old John Deere 740 grapple skidder for $25,000 at a Ritchie Brothers auction in Prince George.

"I didn't really have a job for the skidder, but I bought it on speculation as I was making enough money hand falling that I could afford the payments, even if I wasn't running it," he explains. "A month later, I was skidding with it so we started to see a return, but I did have to put $90,000 worth of repairs into it in the first year," he adds.

After a few years of working in the Vernon area, Steve took a hiatus from logging, returning to school for an aircraft mechanics program. Still, the logging business was in his blood, and in the early 1990s he jumped back in the seat of a skidder.

"The first time I went into the logging business, I was a one man operation," he says. "The second time around, Don joined me and we ran two machines, a line skidder and a grapple skidder. We just grew from there, subcontracting to some of the major logging contractors. We started doing a fair amount of work for them in the Prince George area and then some other opportunities came up for us around Prince George and we jumped on them."

In 2000, Steve and his family moved to Prince George and R&R started contracting to JV Logging. They then began harvesting a fair amount of volume for a log brokering company in the area, which supplies small business sale and private wood to a number of mills, with Abitibi-Consolidated Inc. in Mackenzie, BC, taking a large portion of the logs harvested by R&R. After a year, R&R became the log broker's biggest contractor in terms of volume, but for this winter, Steve's Prince George-based crew that is working in the Tumbler Ridge area, will be working directly for Canfor Chetwynd.

Shared gear

With the increased volume R&R is now harvesting, they have grown from the two-man operation they ran in the early 1990s to a company with 15 to 20 employees between the two operations. That includes the drivers for four of R&R Enterprises' own trucks, a number that will grow to five later this year when they take delivery of a new Peterbilt truck. The company already owned one Peterbilt and three Western Star trucks, which are shared between the two stump-to-dump sides.

In addition to the trucks, R&R runs a full fleet of iron, including two Timberjack feller bunchers, a 618 and an 850 model. They still run two skidders, which are both John Deere 748 grapple models, and they have two forwarders. One of the forwarders is a Timberjack 1710, while the second one is a Rottne 16-tonne model sold and serviced here by Rocan BC. For processing, R&R has a Caterpillar 320 equipped with a Waratah 620 processing head and two Volvo machines - an EC210B with a Waratah 620 head, and an EC210BF model, which has a newer Waratah 622B head. For loading trucks, die company uses a Caterpillar 325 and two Hyundai loaders, a 210 and a 250.

Steve is a big fan of the Volvo machines and the local Volvo dealership, saying he first experienced the equipment in 2002 when he rented his first 210 from Marcels Equipment Ltd., which was the Volvo dealer in BC at the time.

"Marcels was very good at offering reasonable rental rates on the equipment and then making it attractive to buy the equipment after it had a few hundred hours on it," he explains. "They worked with us on the financial end of the deals, and that really allowed us to make a dollar at the end of the day."