The author
A native Vermonter who never took an inside job.
Shaftsbury, Vermont. Fifty years in the forest products industry, and a second act spent writing about it and arguing for it.
He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1974 and went to work in the woods the next day. Fifty years later he is still out in them, only now he writes about it in the evenings.
Since the first book came out he has spent his time travelling around Vermont, speaking about the outdoors and advocating for forestry, wildlife and land use issues before the Vermont State Legislature.
He is married to Shari, a teacher and the editor of both books. They have three grown children and four grandsons.
This is a story of how one small decision to get involved can lead to greater endeavors. From 50 Years A Dirt Forester
The long version
It starts in Worcester, Vermont, in a two-room schoolhouse. It runs through a B.S. in Forest Management from the University of Vermont's School of Natural Resources, with a minor in Wildlife Management, and lands the day after graduation at a small sawmill in Stamford.
Over the fifty years that followed he worked for lumber companies in Vermont, New York and Massachusetts, then opened his own forestry consulting business. He has been a consultant to private landowners, an industrial procurement forester, and a Vermont Deputy Game Warden.
In 2003 he started Hollow Hill Forestry, a log and timber marketing firm. His son Wes joined him in 2005. From a log yard in Cambridge, New York, they marketed logs for loggers and private landowners to buyers around the world until June of 2026.
He had never written anything before 2024. That spring, anti-hunting advocates pushed a bill through the Vermont Legislature that would have changed hunting in the state for good. He drove to Montpelier and testified before the House Committee on Environment and Energy, describing himself in his own testimony as fifty years a dirt forester and never a day behind a desk.
Afterwards, legislators, colleagues and family all told him the same thing. Get it down on paper. With Shari reading over the pages he wrote the first book, and he has written nearly every morning since.
The subject of both books is the same small state. He calls it his paradise, and he does not intend to let it be paved over without a fight.
- Home
- Shaftsbury, Vermont
- Degree
- UVM, 1974
- In the woods
- 50 years
- Firm
- Hollow Hill Forestry
- Family
- Shari, three children, four grandsons
Where he started
Worcester, Vermont, and a two-room schoolhouse. Small-town Vermont in the 1960s is also the subject of the book he is writing now, and most of what he remembers about it happened outdoors.
The work itself
A dirt forester is the one who walks the ground: marking timber, cruising a lot, sorting a deck of logs by grade in the mud. Fifty years of that is the reason the books are full of specifics rather than opinions.
From the yard in Cambridge, New York, the logs went out to buyers around the world.
The chestnut project
In his spare time he builds habitat for the wildlife that shares his land. The current project is a small copse of hybridized chestnuts, grown for animal forage, standing in for the native species the blight wiped out a century ago.
It will not be finished in his lifetime. He planted it anyway.
On the road, and in the State House
He has become a familiar voice in Montpelier on forestry, wildlife and land use, and he speaks around Vermont at libraries, historical societies, sportsmen's clubs and anywhere else that asks.
He brings the display boards, the photographs, and fifty years of stories.