Megan Bujnowski, a senior at UNH this fall, finished the stock saw event in 16.62 seconds, just hundredths of a second behind Hutchins. She’s been using a chain saw since she began competing in high school meets, and stock saw is one of her favorite events. “Every saw is different,” says Bujnowski. “Being around them for so long, you really learn to listen to the RPMs—when there’s too much pressure or too little. [It takes] skill to get that equilibrium. I love to continue learning on them and figuring out more.”
Bujnowski is majoring in forestry at UNH, which has had a woodsmen team since the early 1960s. During the school season, she practices twice a week at the university and four times a week with a professional lumberjack who lives nearby. Those extra sessions
ready Bujnowski for the summer, when she competes on the New England professional fair circuit, hitting about 15 to 20 fairs before school resumes.
“I think I enjoy it as much as I do partly because it’s something that you can never really perfect,” she says. “You’re never too good to get better and learn from someone else.”
Splintered Stereotypes
Bujnowski enjoys breaking stereotypes. “If I were a guy in the sport, I wouldn’t have tried half as hard as I have as a woman,” she says.
At the Dartmouth spring meet, few stereotypes are left intact. Women wearing tie-dye spandex leggings, camouflage tank tops, or pink hair ribbons and makeup stand alongside women dressed in Carhartts, T-shirts, and baseball caps. Bujnowski, Hutchins, and the seven other women in the STIHL challenge—a standalone event after the intercollegiate meet—were the first to compete in the challenge’s inaugural women’s division. Although college meets have always been co-ed, STIHL’s collegiate series, which is aired on ESPNU and is one of the driving forces behind the growth of the sport, has offered competition only for men since its inception. The inclusion of a women’s division in the Northeast this year is an acknowledgement that lumberjills are making their mark.
Images of Paul Bunyan are being shed in other ways. Some of the men at these college meets wear sneakers, sport mohawks, or saw through a log in a collared shirt and khakis. Richard Russ, who spent three years on the woodsmen team at Unity College—a small, liberal arts institution in Unity, Maine—was a three-sport athlete in high school. A football player, he remembers seeing professional timber sports competitions on ESPN. “Whenever I saw it, I watched it,” he says, “[but] I was never big into the logging aspect.” He was an outdoorsman, though, and he was drawn to the physicality of training for woodsmen events. “I’m the kind of person that likes to trick my body into thinking it’s having fun and not working out,” Russ says. Sawing and chopping at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. four days a week did the trick.
For Russ, however, the bigger draw may be the relationships that result from team cohesion. “You are bleeding and sweating with each other,” he says, “you build this nice bond with each other…you kind of become a family. Most of the people I hung out with in college were either woodsmen or in my major.”
Unlike many competitive athletes, these students extend the good will and friendship onto the field as well. “It’s a competition, but we’re all out to help each other,” says Bujnowski. “I have so many friends from so many different teams. It’s not cutthroat.” She says it’s not uncommon for a team to lend another team a bow saw to replace one that broke. And clapping and calls of “C’mon!” and “Breathe!” and “Whole saw, whole saw!” or “Keep that angle, let’s go!” don’t stop with the first, second, or third finisher in an event. The chopper finishing last at the Dartmouth Woodsmen’ Weekend had her rivals and members of every other team in attendance cheering her on until the final, breathless cut.
The single buck, or "misery whip," event evolved from informal competitions at remote logging 
