Salvaging Superior logs.

A unique "logging" operation is bringing up sunken treasure in the form of virgin timber cut and lost 100 or more years ago.

Paul Bunyan might have blanched at the sight: A logger diving into water rather than climbing trees, wearing webbed fins rather than leather boots, and working with eye-bolts and airbags instead of axes and saws.

Then again, mighty Paul may well have admired the initiative, ingenuity, and finish-what-has-been-started attitude of 35-year-old Scott Mitchen, a veteran deep-sea diver who now spends his summers salvaging sunken logs from the bottom of Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay near Bayfield, Wisconsin.

There are thousands of submerged logs in the large bay, logs that became waterlogged and sank while being floated from the Apostle Islands and elsewhere to sawmills that dotted the shoreline in the second half of the 19th century and the first decade or so of the 20th century. The logs are virgin white and red pine, bird's-eye (sugar) maple, yellow birch, hemlock, oak, elm, and other types of wood--slow-grown, fine-grained, well-preserved logs in lengths (most are 16 feet long) and diameters to make lumbermen salivate.

The state of Wisconsin grants Mitchen permits for 40-acre sections to conduct the log-salvaging operation. Last summer, Mitchen and company worked four adjacent 40-acre sections off Roy's Point, once the site of a large sawmill.

Most of the logs, says Mitchen, "are just laying on the bottom, every which way. There are stacks of them." With recycling and forest preservation such significant issues today, Mitchen thinks his salvage operation amounts to "perfect timing."

"The logs are piled up at the base of a slope," explains Buz Holland, a diver who works with Mitchen. "When they sank, they would hit the slope and just roll down." Their average depth is 30 feet, and the low oxygen content of the water there "preserves wood beautifully," he explains. Most of the softwood logs have deteriorated slightly at the ends, but the hardwood logs are in near-perfect condition.

Adolph Mashlan, an active 80-year-old logger and sawmill operator, was largely responsible for piquing Mitchen's interest in Lake Superior's sunken wood treasure. "The old-timers talked about all the logs," he told Mitchen, and urged him to check out the legends. "It was all logs, logs, and more logs. I didn't know they would hit a jackpot of hardwood logs like this, though."

Working with a deckhand, and sometimes with a second diver, Mitchen pilots his 28-foot boat to the allotted area and dives in search of prime-cut logs that will satisfy the needs of Bacon Veneer, a wood-veneer company in Des Moines, Iowa, that has bought the logs.

Mitchen takes down a deflated plastic airbag attached to a long airhose. The airbag is to Mitchen what a chainsaw is to a forest logger: his most essential tool. After finding a log he wants to salvage, he screws in an eye-bolt near the end of the log, hooks on the airbag with a quick-attach device called a caribiner, and opens a valve to fill the airbag. The inflated bag rises to the surface with the log in tow. After a 30- to 40-foot ascent through water, the log explodes vertically several feet out of the water.

Mitchen often brings up two, three, or four logs simultaneously by popping eye-bolts in all of them, stringing them together with nylon webbing, and attaching an airbag to the webbing.

After being brought to the surface, the logs are towed to shallow water and stacked. An industrial crane is brought to the site on a barge to lift the logs from the water.

Last summer (1993)--Mitchen's second of serious salvaging--he brought up about 100 logs between early June and early September. Mitchen estimates that there are enough good logs between the Bayfield area and Ashland--about 20 miles away--to keep him and his divers busy for at least the next 20 summers.

Although Mitchen wants to make as much money as he can from the logs, his profit margin is not the only item on the bottom line. Some of the wood will be sold to musical-instrument builders, woodworkers who handcraft fine furniture, and other artisans. Mitchen has already received "letters from every state and a few other countries" from people interested in making use of this historic wood.

"Even for veneer-grade plywood, it's not the sort of thing that should be just thrown into a standard production type of utilization," says Holland. "More than half the timber's worth is its history and uniqueness--it's a time capsule."

Mitchen says he feels "the presence of the lumberjacks" when he is with the sunken logs, many of which were chopped down with axes. He experiences satisfaction in knowing that in some measure, all the hard work those lumberjacks put into harvesting these logs is now finally being rewarded.

Mitchen hopes to use some of the salvaged wood to build an 1880s-era sawmill-camp-museum complex in Ashland, and route most of the salvaged logs through that operation. Visitors would be able to watch the underwater salvage operation on TV monitors while at the sawmill. Some proceeds from the salvaged logs now being sold will be used for the $1.2 million project.

Salvaging ancient logs from the deep "is like bringing up a treasure chest and finding a thousand gold doubloons inside," Mitchen says. "People in and out of the industry are interested in seeing a tree cut open that's been on the bottom for 125 years. It sparkles. If you have any appreciation for wood, that's the exact pull you get."

Buz Swerkstrom is a freelance writer/photographer from Luck, Wisconsin.