News is obsessed with the flashy questions: “Is God Dead?” “Who Killed Kennedy?” “What is a Kardashian?”
Yet for years, a quieter question has divided our community, pitting man against woman, brother against brother: “What is the best way to stack wood?”
The debate rages in homes throughout La Plata County, where a cursory tour of the region reveals the wood-stacking season to be nigh as families prepare for a long winter.
Serious wood stackers agree that the fundamental aim of a good stack is for it to not fall over.
But beyond that, wedge issues – such as “bark up or down?” and “horizontal stacking or circle stacking?” – abound.
Among local wood stackers, bark in particular is a lightning rod.
Clark Behner, a custom-home builder who has three cords of wood stacked in his shed, said, as a general principle, he likes his bark turned up, so if it rains, only the bark gets wet. (A cord is 8-by-4-by-4 feet worth of wood.)
But Art Rieke, a firefighter, insists the bark should be down.
“It doesn’t get that wet in rain, and the wood dries faster with the bark down.”
Meanwhile, veteran wood stacker Rick Morris rejected the premise altogether.
“Oh, no,” he said. “You have to take the bark off. It creates too much ash when you burn it.”
In this turmoil, Durango is not alone.
A 12-hour public television special about firewood recently spurred Norwegians to conduct a searching national dialogue about bark.
Dominant stacking
Without question, the dominant style of wood stacking in La Plata County is horizontal stacking, whereby wood is stacked in long rows, with wise wood stackers often employing the “tower style” – or wood stacked in square towers – on either end of the stack as an architectural buttress.
The style is evident at Rainbow Ranch on County Road 240 (Florida Road), where Randy Clark and Cole Hyson, who work at Colorado Trading Co., have split and stacked about four cords of wood on the porch outside of their mother’s house for her use throughout the winter.
Hyson, who only agreed to participate in this article on the condition that “you’re not going to write that I’m stacking wrong” – he’d read somewhere one wasn’t supposed to stack wood up against a house – said, done properly, the tower method of stacking produces reliable, sturdy stacks.
Ramshackle wood stacks can inspire serious wood stackers’ derision.
Asked whether he was judgmental of inferior wood stacks, Trevor Ehlers, a website designer who lives in downtown Durango and prefers traditional horizontal wood stacking, said, “If it was really bad, I would be.” He said it was lucky “most of my friends are really good at wood stacking.”
Nonetheless, if he encountered a wood stack “with lots of spaces between the wood, or if it’s really curvy and it looks like it’s going to fall down, you look at it and just think, ‘That’s subpar. Whoever did that is lazy or just doesn’t know what they’re doing,’” he said.
“I’m not the sort of person who’s way, way into it,” he clarified. “But probably there are people who take a lot of pride in it and have a whole social hierarchy based on wood stacking.”
This sort of scrutiny perhaps explains wood stackers’ timidity and occasional defensiveness.
When accomplished wood stacker Drew Barber of BC Fabrication was asked whether the Herald could photograph his wood stack, Barber was adamant his stack wouldn’t be fit to be seen until after Thanksgiving.
Instead, he sent pictures of his stack taken last year, which showed his shed bursting with meticulously layered wood.
A similarly spectacular wood stack at Jean Walter’s house is visible from the bottom of Riverview Drive. Walter, too, used the traditional “tower stacking” for support. Though a triumph of engineering, when Walter was asked about her wood stack, she demurred.
“Everything I know about stacking wood I learned from Art Rieke,” she said, describing him as the Yoda of wood stacking.
The Woodstock of stacking
Rieke’s wood stack indeed is the Taj Majal of local wood stacking, a ravishing 7-foot-high wall of immaculately arranged wooden billets, with specially built escape tunnels for his cat in case of a coyote attack.
Rieke allowed that he had been stacking wood since he was a child and spoke fluently about the optimal distance between billets and the necessity of leaning the billets downward from the wood towers on the outside of the walls.
But he said his achievements paled in comparison to others’. He quickly retrieved a 3-year-old email documenting a series of elaborate wood-stack structures manipulated to take the form of an eagle, giant mushrooms and an enormous unfurling leaf, replete with veins.
Rieke’s wife, Mary, said Rieke nonetheless was an artist. She said many visitors complimented the couple’s gargantuan wood stack.
“Usually we hear things that are profound – like ‘that’s a lot of wood,’” she said.
Anecdotally, wood stacking plays an interesting role in many marriages.
Rick Morris said he’s very close to his wife, Cathy. But while she is very involved in splitting wood, she’s forbidden from stacking.
“If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” said Rick, who stacks horizontally.
Like many serious stackers, Rick said a good splitting makes for good stacking.
“You want to get it pretty much as uniform in size as you possibly can,” he said.
Rick said while he is dedicated to the horizontal style of stacking, his brother Robert inexplicably stacks wood in circles.
“I don’t know why he does that. I’ve always asked that question,” he said.
Rick resolved to finally call Robert, who lives in Montrose, and ask him to explain his stacking.
Robert did not return his brother’s call.
“He’s hardheaded,” said Rick, laughing.
But the mysterious tradition of circle stacking is alive at a green house with a green roof on County Road 240 bedecked in “do not trespass” signs, where there’s a circle stack in the yard, one visible from the road.
Its owner, Randy, declined to give his last name, citing the notoriety his circle stacks already have caused: Last year, when he had eight or nine circle stacks in his yard, a series of international tourists disembarked, asking whether they could photograph them, he said.
Nor would he explain his stacking method, saying only that he learned it as a boy in Canada.
But he was adamant that his way of stacking is best.
Pointing to his wood stack, which looked like an improbably warm igloo, he said, “If you stacked it like a city slicker would like it to look, it’s still three or four cords of wood. (Heck), I didn’t realize stacking was a science.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
