Former logger still worksa logger's hours

Patrick Hanes may have changed careers, but he just can’t give up a logger’s hours.

“It’s something you can’t shake off,” said Hanes, a former timber faller, buyer and scaler whose sign at his current business, Copeland Cabinets, reads open 5 a.m. to 3 p.m.

He is one of many Boundary County residents who left the woods to pursue other careers. A logger for 22 years, Hanes has spent the last 13 years as a full-time maker of custom kitchen cabinets in addition to furniture.

“This has been a good year,” he said. “Surprisingly, I’ve heard from other cabinet shops all over the country that this seems to be one of industries not hit so hard.”

A native of New Castle, Ind., Hanes graduated from college and went to Colorado, where he began cutting trees for developing ski resorts including at Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Vale. He worked at elevations of 11,000 feet, where winters are far worse than North Idaho’s.

Hanes moved to the West Coast, where logging can be done all winter. Hanes lived on a sailboat while logging on the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast.

He came to North Idaho after trading his boat to a doctor from Sandpoint for a piece of land in the Pack River area.

Hanes continued to log, working on yarders up the Yaak River and as a timber faller.

He moved to Farm to Market Road in Copeland, where he and his wife purchased a home.

“Everything we had I bought with money I made from cutting timber,” Hanes said.

When he worked as a logger, Hanes built a little furniture.

“One year, when the timber was way down, during one of these recessions, I told my wife ‘we made a living doing cabinet work this year.’ It’s grown and has been good.”

So he turned his part-time job into a full-time gig.

He misses the woods, especially logging in the rain in the spring.

“It just kind of got harder and harder to make a living,” he said.

“You can’t imagine what this country was like in the 1980s,” he continued. “Log trucks every morning were at the cafes filled with loggers headed to work. It was a logging economy.”

Hanes noted, as an example, there was a time that when a lot of the guys at his church were loggers.

“Now there’s only two,” he said.

“Back in the early ‘70s, you could make $150 a day,” he said. “The problem was that’s what I was making when I quit in the 1990s.”