Reetsy's Rogues: A Minnesota Horse Logger

Reetsy's Rogues features my kind of daredevils, adventurers, swashbucklers, exemplars, etc. A Reetsy's Rogue is the kind of person who captivates my attention due to an uber adventerous attitude and creative engineering. I was going to stick to midwesterners with this feature, but I'd hate to exclude an acrobatic dolphin slayer from Cuba.

Through my dayjob, I've had the experience of working with Tim Carroll of Cedar River Horse Logging in Lyle, MN.

I saw his horse logging work featured on TPT last year, and I was captivated. The dedication, tradition, and craftsmanship that he invests in his enterprise impressed me.

Here's what I learned after speaking with him:

Having worked at a treatment facility for juveniles for 16 years, Carroll never planned to have a successful career in horse logging. Carroll married his wife, Doreen, who had three riding horses, and he soon grew attached to draft horses and began using them to plow his driveway. Down the road from his home in Minnesota, Carroll noticed a neighbor had hired a machine logger to clear their property of some trees. The loggers had left a mess on his neighbor’s property.

Carroll asked his neighbors if he could come by and clean out some of those logs with his draft horses. It didn’t take long and he had a crowd of people watching. People started asking if he could come out to their land too. Before he had his first job done, he had three contracts waiting. Soon, “equine forestry,” as Carroll calls it, became his new passion.

His horse logging enterprise is going to be spotlighted on Modern Marvels on the History Channel tonight (7pm and 11pm central).

More about tonight's episode of Modern Marvels.

[where: 55406]