Pack your flannel: ‘Ax Men’ follows loggers to the woods

PREVIEW. In a world where we can barely describe our own professions, the appeal of shows such as “Deadliest Catch” and “Ice Road Truckers” is obvious. They follow burly average Joes doing dirty, old-fashioned jobs. Now comes “Ax Men” on the History Channel, bringing latter-day lumberjacks to the profession-porn genre of cable TV.

“There is this wilderness, this last frontier, that people don’t know about,” says producer Dolores Gavin, who also worked on “Truckers.” In the backwoods of northwest Oregon, loggers fell hundred-foot trees on steep slopes, as far away from a cubicle as you can get.

Melvin Lardy, the 32-year-old owner of Stump Branch Logging, knows what people think of the job. “A lot of people are misinformed about what we do,” he says by phone from a snowy logging site in Oregon. “They just think we decimate the forest.” But preserving the sites is just as important as going chain saw-happy; the trees being logged by Lardy and his compatriots were planted by their fathers and grandfathers.

Lardy draws on his college education and almost 20 years of experience to run his company, and can’t imagine what he’d do other than log timber. On the show, logger Dwayne Dethlefs puts it more succinctly: “I always said I’d cut timber ’til I was 75 years old, then fall over dead and call that retirement.” Beat that, cubicle monkeys.