If mining made the Upper Peninsula great in the period up to about World War II, it’s logging that – along with, arguably, tourism – that is keeping the place viable. My late grandfather spent his whole life handling logs, either skidding them out of the woods with horses or driving log trucks from the forests to the mills, a job that his youngest son now carries on. My dad, too, trucked paper out of the U.P. mills for a while.
Nowhere is logging more evident in the U.P. than around my grandparents’ tiny town, Channing. The highways pass huge piles of logs, the main business is log hauling, most of the woods are second-growth or even “industrial forests,” the railroad tracks carry skeletal wood-hauling cars, and a short drive will take you to several hulking mills like this one, a facility in Sagola operated by Louisiana-Pacific to turn wood into “oriented strand board,” better known as chipboard.
The overhead view on Google Maps shows that the Sagola mill is a massive factory – probably one of the biggest buildings in the U.P. – and one that needs to be fed with innumerable feed of lumber:
That’s money, as my grandpa used to say.