"Gone Logging" in Monarch, Montana
Just let me preface this "Gone Logging, Montana" blog post: Sam owes Jake and me dinner. And not a Tombstone pizza from the gas station either. I mean a real dinner or a Howard's pizza at the office.
Here's how this whole project started.
Monday afternoon, 4 pm, the Great Falls office: Sam walks in and says: "Jake, Cutter. I have an idea."
I've only been working here for two months, but I believe these words will come to strike a note of trepidation, perhaps even full-blown anxiety into my heart if what follows them is anything like what happened after I heard these words first voiced.
90% of the time I am thinking about food (like the time we had to "field test" Wheat Montana cookies in the office), so my first thought was, "Are we leaving before or after lunch?" But no one could tell me a definite time, and Jake (who's worked here for more than a year) kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, "Who knows man, it's Sam. We may not come back at all."
These words kind of summed up the entire trip.
We set out to do a simple demo on a great log splitter we stock at the store (we actually did that)-that was the plan, and we even had a truck load of logs in the parking lot here at the office.
But I knew something was up when we stopped at the Great Falls store to, in Sam's words, "Gear up."
We ended up with Carhartt Double-Front Work Dungarees & Georgia 8044s, a Husqvarna 450 Rancher Chainsaw, and a lot more.
Anyways- this whole process, in the beginning, was set to take maybe an hour and a half at the Great Falls store. However, Sam "had an idea" and it ended up taking us six hours and 40 miles out to Monarch to the base of a beetle-killed pine standing about 70 feet tall.
"We're all about REAL here, Cutter. We don't just stage a photo-shoot or 'test' a product in the store. We need our customers to know why we stock these products. So today, we're going to cut down this tree. We're going to split and stack this wood... and we're going to get some real footage, and some great shots."
This blog is, of course, about pizza at the heart of it. Jake and I mentioned to Sam that pizza HAD been in the job description and Sam assured us, "Yep. That's right. We get this footage, then we get some pizza."
I think we hadn't really sized up the tree-felling situation, and Jake had to make the State Fair Concert at 9- so we did get amazing footage and some killer shots, but no pizza.
We demo'd the No-Spill Gas Can. We cut, stacked and split about a cord of wood.
We found out why Carhartt is the number one seller in our stores. We saw Daryl in a director's chair drinking Sprecher's Root Beer... but we didn't get any pizza.