Its been five years since the History Channels hit series Ax Men catapulted a few local loggers into stardom.

From the late-night talk shows to billboards around the country, Jay Browning, Mark and Clay Gustafson and Darrell Holthusen have found fame as poster boys for the television series in years past, from the creators of Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers.

The show made them money. And it also gave them fame.

But the show, in its fifth season, is anything but gold for the local loggers who are struggling with whether to return.

The History Channel has a little bit of a problem with me and I have a little bit of a problem with them, Browning said.

J.M. Browning Logging Company was involved in the first four seasons of the hit show.

Gustafson Logging, which includes brothers Mark, Clay and foreman Holthusen, participated in Season 1.

Season 5, on the air, does not feature either logging team. Instead, it is made up of Big Gun Logging of Vernonia, Rygaard Logging of Port Angeles, Wash., Siderius Logging of Kalispell, Mont., H.H. Horse Logging of Floyd County, Va., Papac Alaska Logging of Craig, Alaska, Shelby Swamp Man Stanga of the Louisiana Bayou, and S & S Aqua/Team Buck River of Suwannee River, Fla.

Weve gotten more fan mail this year than any other year when we were on the show. We had a lot of fans. And I had to hire two extra girls to answer all the fan mail, Browning said.

Browning Logging answers every one.

The fans are the reason Browning Logging didnt throw the towel in earlier. Browning calls the show a positive experience. He may have stopped for now, but nothing is forever.

Still working on it

Producers have been working to get Browning and his son Jesse back on the show, he said, even part time. He hasnt ruled out going back, but has said the show would need to make some serious changes before he considered signing up again.

I had to make a choice about whether I wanted to be a professional logging company or to basically stomp my integrity into the ground, Browning said. The one thing that I dont like to see is that the show has taken on a whole different direction of guys fighting and arguing and all of this screaming and yelling, all of this cussing, to me makes us look like were a bunch of Neanderthals.

It makes it look like this profession has never evolved since Day 1. Things change all the time in this industry as far as equipment and efficiency and safety. And logging companies like me, Ive been in this business for 30 years, we should have 10, 15 fatalities. We dont have a one.

We do have a guy who lost a leg, but were pretty proud that we dont have any fatalities. And sometimes I feel that the camera crews or the production people are just waiting for someone to get killed. There always wanting more and more out of us. And we just want to show people some of the interesting jobs we log. Because theyre jobs most people wont take.

This show set us back 50 years.

The Brownings

In a way I feel kind of bad that were not doing (the show) for some of the people, because some of the people really lived for Sunday night to watch the show, Browning said. And I worked real hard with my crew to really watch their language and I can do four-letter words with the best of them and it is sometimes in the woods pretty intense. But we wanted it to be a family show because most of the fan mail comes from kids.

We get, almost every day, colored drawings of the yarder or trucks from kids all over.

Browning and company are proud of the drawings they get and keep a stash of them displayed at their Knappa truck dispatch office.

Two students from Knappas Hilda Lahti Elementary School wrote to Browning when the show began and asked to have breakfast with the star. He treated their whole first grade class to a meal at The Logger restaurant.

Weve saved pretty much everything, Browning said. The reason we wanted to do the show was to let the people know what is going on in the timberlands. Because some of these are state timber, which belongs to everyone in Oregon. We wanted them to know that the loggers were professional. We go through some schooling and theres a lot of laws to abide by and theres an awful lot of planning that goes into planting trees.

So many people dont know it, but its been a law for a long time to plant trees and they have a year to do it in. We wanted people to know those kinds of things, that theres more out there to protect than endangered species. Theres the unendangered species. The bears, the cougars, the deer and the elk, and a lot of critters that live out in the woods. And these clear cuts are basically their only way of having feed because these animals cannot live in a full canopy forest.

Weve gotten a lot of letters from people saying they really appreciated this show or that show because we were putting logs in a stream or working in a protected wetland and they didnt know things like that happened in the woods.

Brownings biography on the History Channels website, under the title The King of the Mountain states: Browning Logging is now and has always been the one to beat. Known for hiring the best men, putting them to work on the best equipment and expecting miracles in return, owner Jay Browning has built his million-dollar empire over decades of hard work and personal sacrifice.

Season fours description, the last Browning participated in, says, This season, Browning is out to tackle the jobs its competitors can’t or won’t. Jesse Browning returns to lead his team through their most harrowing work, hoping to finally prove to his father that he has what it takes to fill his shoes. But with nearly impossible expectations to meet and personal tragedy to overcome, this season will push Jesse to his breaking point.

If Jesse is up to the challenge, Browning will prove once and for all that they are the indisputable kings of the mountain, but the faster the crew works, the more difficult it is to outrun the dangers that plague this industry.

Because we didnt do the show, that one log site made $400,000 more that summer. Because we werent screwing around. But it was kind of interesting, and a lot of what I get is, Oh youre not doing the show anymore because those people were a pain in the ass? No, actually they werent. Very seldom did we have any problems with those people. My son had a big problem with the camera. There were typically three or four cameras on us.

The television show has recorded bright spots of the loggers lives. But the cameras were still rolling to record the pain.

Jesse Browning and his father suffered a personal tragedy during that season when Jesse Brownings stepdaughter, Ashlynn Anderson, was killed by the family dog in his Svensen-area front yard.

A Rottweiler, one of two that belonged to the family, killed the 4-year-old blond they lovingly called Princess in February 2010 when Anderson stepped outside to play. Her mother was only seconds away inside the house cleaning up lunch.

The Anderson family, Ryan Anderson and his father Don Wing, have since launched DADD Dads Against Dangerous Dogs, an organization that helps education children and adults about animal behaviors and dangerous situations that can sometimes come along with them.

The Gustafsons

The Gustafsons – Mark, Clay and Wade – participated in the first year of the History Channels hit show.

Wade has since left the company that the trios father started in 1974.

They now have 25 employees and another 25 involved in the process.

Its been a great great career and life, Mark Gustafson said.

Mark Gustafson says the brothers have no regrets about participating.

But hes disappointed in the way the show was edited and wished it had focused on honesty rather on drama.

It was very exciting for me personally to be approached, Mark Gustafson said. Who wouldnt be happy with the opportunity to be on TV, the chance to show people what we do all the time out there.So it was easy to say yes to. Ironically, we were talking to two different production companies who were looking at doing a deal on logging at the same time. Original Productions happened to get here first so the other just kind of faded in the background. But as for agreeing to do it, that was a no brainer as far as I was concerned.

Clay also says he was excited to participate in the show with his brothers, It was a show perceived to demonstrate what actually goes on out in the woods, he said.

But once he saw the show on the air, several months after the crew had finished filming, he was also surprised at how the show shifted from the outdoors to outlandish.

To show all the stuff that we go through on the day to day basis, we thought that was pretty cool. But as it turned out, it was anything but. As time went on, and after we saw what the series turned out to be, it was a bit of a letdown for us, Clay Gustafson said. The first couple of episodes were pretty general, but then after that, it just became a whole other beast.

They were going more for the drama aspect of what was going on out there, between the crew and the bosses and whatnot. And that was what they were focusing on more than what we thought they were going to focus on, like the industry and the dangers out there. They were focusing more it seemed on dysfunctionalism that can happen out there between people.

Mark Gustafson added, To me, because it was a new concept to them, the first episode or two was kind of generic and once they started seeing characters and how they could move the program to what they wanted to show, then it became in my eyes worse and worse and less and less educational and less positive because of the direction they wanted to take. And so much of it was pure fabrication through editing. Some of it was just outright false information because they thought it was cool to spin things a certain way. When we watched it, we were just kind of going, That didnt happen, or That didnt happen that way.

Clay Gustafson also said he didnt like the way some of his crew members were portrayed, hardworking members of the crew who were pigeonholed into being the screw up or the angry guy even if they only acted that way 10 percent of the time.

Blame it on our naivety, Clay Gustafson explained of it being a television show and expecting drama on the screen. We thought they were going to show things like it happened out there. But that didnt turn out to be so.

I never dreamed that they would have come up with what they did. For one thing, its going to be on the History Channel, Mark Gustafson said. Its like if someone took all the snippets of the worst things that ever happened to you in your life and the dumbest things you ever did or said and putting them all together and saying this is (your) life. Because people want to watch that.

Been there. Done that.

No regrets

Still, neither regrets participating. They wouldnt do the show again, but they wouldnt take it back either. The show helped their business and opened doors they never thought possible. They also didnt rule out participating in a different program that had a more educational outlook, like the show on the Discovery Channels Swamp Loggers of a similar style.

Thats what I had hoped Ax Men would be, Mark Gustafson said.

They were initially contacted for season two of Ax Men but when the Gustafsons brought up issues about the contract and changes they would like to see, they werent contacted again.

It was a lot of fun to do the show. The camera crew and the sound guys out there were great, Clay Gustafson said. Out there everyday, they are working right along side us. They were in the trenches with us. It was exciting and it was fun.

Mark Gustafson said he was proud of the professionalism of his company that was filmed. He didnt have to tell crew members to watch their language or act a certain way, they just did it and they made him proud to own Gustafson Logging. He also said if he was too boring to be added back to the show, hes OK with that, too.

I think for our industry in general, it did provide a lot of people some insight into how dangerous it is, what hard work it is, those are good things, he said.

We started our website, were selling merchandise and were contacted from people all across the U.S. and then overseas in Scandinavia and all across Europe, we started being contacted from all across the world. Very complimentary. That was positive.

It opened a lot of doors that we never would have been considered for otherwise.

The Gustafsons were once contacted for assistance in a clearing job for a powerline in jungles of Brazil and offered a job in Tennessee. Theyve also been featured on magazine covers and spoken to groups at their alma mater, Oregon State University.

Not only has Gustafson Logging left its mark on the world through the television opportunity. Mark Gustafsons son, Chad, 34, is in line to take over the family business, keeping it alive.

Thats pretty unique in our industry right now. There arent many next generations coming up, he said with pride.