At the Southern Forestry Conclave, the marquee event is the crosscut.
The TV cameras gather and the screaming intensifies. The atmosphere is more like a frenzied football game—except for the glinting, 6-foot saw.
Two men or two women—or a man and a woman together in the “Jack and Jill” event—work with graceful coordination to be the first team to saw through a piece of wood 8 or 10 inches thick. The top team accomplished this task in less than 5 1/2 seconds.
And although UF was not the top team in the crosscut competition—that title went to Stephen F. Austin State University—the high turnout at last weekend’s Conclave has the UF Forestry Club hoping to expand its visibility on campus.
The team placed fifth overall out of 15 schools, including a second-place finish in the technical events and sixth in the physical events.
It was UF’s best ranking in more than 10 years.
Fourteen members of the club made the 13-hour drive to southern Arkansas for the competition, which also included events like tree felling, archery, wildlife identification and log birling, in which two people on opposite ends of a floating log try to roll each other into the water.
“That water was freezing, too,” said Josh Havird, a UF forest resources and conservation junior who placed fifth in log birling. “Arkansas isn’t too friendly for water sports.”
Havird placed first overall in two events: timber estimation and pole classification.
In timber estimation, participants cruise a 10-acre pine stand for an hour and a half to estimate its total tonnage of wood.
After walking through the forest, Havird’s answer was 705 tons. The correct answer was 710 tons.
Havird, whose father is a forestry consultant in Lake City, has been cruising timber for almost half his life.
“When I called my dad to tell him I won, the first thing he said was, ‘Well, how far off were you?’” he said with a laugh.
Todd Hannah, a UF forest resources and conservation senior and the club’s president, was the only team member who also went to the competition last year. For him, the event is about a link between the history and the present of outdoorsmanship in the U.S.
“Some of this stuff is historic timber sports from the 1800s, 1900s, but a lot of it is also common stuff that foresters have to do today,” he said.
Havird will be the president of the club next year, and the club plans on getting more involved with campus activities and increasing publicity for its events, like the April 10 cleanup on the Santa Fe River.
One of the club’s most starry-eyed dreams is to procure a new crosscut saw for Conclave.
“Ours is OK, but some of the other schools have really, really nice saws,” said Kristen Summers, a forest resources and conservation senior who will be the club’s secretary next year. “If we got a new saw, we could be serious competition in the physical portion.”
