ROCKY RIDGE TRADING COMPANY

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Rocky Ridge Trading Company is aptly named. Cameron County lies just west of the center of Pennsylvania in a mountainous region of the Allegheny Plateau. At the logging site, the company is harvesting northern hardwood and red and white oak. Pennsylvania has the country’s largest concentration of hardwood, accounting for about 90 percent of sawtimber volume. The state has an overabundance of larger old-growth tree stands, many located in tough terrain.

Successfully extracting large timber from these areas represents a great opportunity. It also demands innovative approaches that combine the best logging machines with the latest technology solutions. Steep-slope logging methods have been used successfully in the Pacific Northwest and New Zealand but have not been used in the Eastern United States until recently.

Rocky Ridge is one of the first companies in Pennsylvania to employ a tethered, winch-assisted traction solution. “We’ve always been trailblazers,” says Crissman. “We do things our way, using combinations of machines other loggers would consider unconventional, like combining cut-to-length with full-tree equipment. But it has worked for us.”

Tim Crissman’s father Gus formed the family company in 1964. Back then it was known as Crissman Lumber Company. “My dad had been in the forest products industry all his life,” says Crissman. “He started out with a sawmill and a few logging crews. Growing up, I’d help him with the business. I’ve done everything from running a headrig that makes the initial cuts in the sawmill to loading drying kilns. But our hearts were always in the woods, so we got back into the logging business.”

During the summers when Crissman was in college, he’d run a skidder while his father hand-felled. “He didn’t want me to hand-fell at first because it was dangerous,” he recalls. “But he taught me everything I know about the woods and logging.”

The most important lesson his dad taught him was to “work hard until you make it work.” “Failure was not in his vocabulary,” says Crissman. “You could always find a solution if you worked hard enough.”

Gus acquired the nickname The Legend at a John Deere fly-in a few years ago. “Each night he’d share story after story about how things were done out in the woods in the old days,” recalls Crissman. “They were funny stories but had serious messages as well. After a couple nights, everyone started calling him The Legend.”