NH Outstanding Logger Award

2024 – Dick Hazen, Hazen Brothers Logging

Dick Hazen started logging while in high school in the late 70s. After brief time as a dairy farmer and then a beef farmer in the 1980’s he went to work in the woods. He worked for Dave Parker for four or five years in the late 80s and early 90s before he and his brother, Charlie, went out on their own in 1993. After his brother got hurt in the woods many years ago, Dick became a one-man operation. He hand cuts with a chainsaw and skids with a John Deere 548 grapple skidder. All of his work is within 30 minutes of his home in Merrimack. Most of his work is done as a sub-contractor to Wilkins Lumber in Milford. When we visited him at Beaver Brook we saw minimal scarring and virtually no crown damage in the residual white pine stand. Varying sized cutoff boles used as bumpers to protect the residual stand adjacent to skid trails. Numerous timber mats were used on his skid trails where it’s wet to mitigate rutting/soil disturbance. Other wet areas of his skid trails were armored with corduroy and tree tops. The woods are very clean due to excellent utilization. Dick uses a John Deere 648GIII grapple skidder, Stihl 500i chainsaws, and a pick-up truck as his transportation and toolbox. His skidder is a 1995 with 17,000 original hours. This many original hours is a testament to how well he keeps his equipment maintained. Despite the equipment being older, it’s in excellent condition, no oil leaks were visible. He produces white pine sawlogs, 8-footer pine pulp for shavings, long straighter pine pulp for camp firewood, long pine pulp for paper, hardwood logs, and hardwood firewood. His utilization of the harvested products is excellent. His landing is neatly sorted in separate piles by him with the grapple skidder so the trucker can quickly load up and head out.