Paul Bunyan Days

On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, at the west end of Redwood Avenue in Fort Bragg, two sawyers set a double buck saw into a log and pull it back and forth until the round drops. The ground is the Skunk Train lot. The contest is one of a dozen at the Paul Bunyan Days Logging Show, the center of a four-day festival the Paul Bunyan Days Association has put on, with a handful of years skipped, since 1939. Cars come in from Oak Street, run north down Celeri Drive, and enter the grounds from Redwood Avenue. Admission to the 2026 show was $15, with children 12 and under free, and the Association puts the crowd at more than 1,000.

Saws on the Skunk Train lot

Competitors register at nine. Elimination trials begin at eleven and the show at noon. Most entrants are men and women from Mendocino, Humboldt, Lake and Sonoma counties, and a drawing admits up to ten amateurs from beyond those four. The Association supplies the saws, so anyone fast and strong can enter, and each event pays $200, $100 and $50. Women are scored separately when at least three enter a category.

The program runs through the axe throw and the single and double buck handsaws. There are Jack and Jill and Jill and Jill handsaw pairs, choker setting, stock chainsaw bucking and horizontal hand chopping. In the obstacle-pole power saw race, competitors run the log, make their cut and sprint back. The Association’s list includes a pole climb, but The Mendocino Voice reported in 2024 that the climb was still not back, because it would need a suitable pole installed on the borrowed Skunk Train property.

The block carry returned that year in men’s and women’s divisions, with competitors hauling a heavy block as far as they can. The Voice traces it to the stone-carrying contests of the Middle Ages in Iceland, Ireland and Scotland. The Association’s 2026 posts called it the Block Pack: “No training. No preparation. Just pure strength, determination, and questionable decisions.” Children get sack races and a mini axe throw. At the 2026 show Ian Blundell took Men’s All-Around Logger, and Cassandra Renteria and Iona Moyer shared the women’s title.

Food sold on the grounds benefits the Safe & Sober graduating class. The beer is local, donated by North Coast Brewing Company and the Skunk Train. John Skinner, a past Association president, has served as MC.

Beside the arena stands the Forestland Expo tent, with exhibits from forestland owners, foresters, ecologists and habitat restorationists. Among them are the California Department of Forestry, Jackson State Demonstration State Forest, the Mendocino Redwood Company, Trout Unlimited and the Mendocino Coast Mushroom Club. The Voice describes it as a place to learn how scientific logging is correcting past mistakes. Heather Webster, the Association’s president, gave the reasoning to the Voice in 2024: “Logging was what built this town at the beginning, not just this town, San Francisco, and more. And we will all live in and put up houses for the foreseeable future. So let’s celebrate and enjoy our heritage. And then talk about what’s happening now. How can we do this sustainably?”

At about 2 p.m. the Belle and Beau of the Redwoods are crowned at the show. The contest is nearly as old as the festival. Contestants dress in old-fashioned or theme dress and sell raffle tickets around town, $5 apiece or five for $20, and keep 10 percent. The rest funds the Paul Bunyan Scholarship for a Mendocino Coast local studying forestry, logging or ecology. The Association’s page says men ran for the first time the year before 2026. The 2026 Belle was Carlina Milani. The $500 raffle grand prize went to her grandmother, Joann Yunker, who asked that it go to the Mendocino Coast Humane Society. In 2024 the field included Nancy Kann and 90-year-old Yuki Holland, a longtime cook for Fort Bragg Food Bank volunteers. The two ran to raise money for the food bank.

Hoses on Stewart Street, dresses at St. Michael’s

The days before the logging show spread through town. The Gem and Mineral Show fills Town Hall on Main Street all four days, and the Friends of the Library hold a book sale on Laurel Street.

On the Saturday of the 2026 festival, tricycle racers lined up at ten on Laurel between Franklin and McPherson. Classic cars parked at Main and Pine, and the craft fair took the field at the CV Starr Center. At eleven the Kiddie Parade set off from Laurel and McPherson with Paul at its head, and horseshoe pitchers began their tournament in Noyo Harbor. Log rollers took to the CV Starr pool at one. At two the Fort Bragg Fire Department turned its hoses loose for the water fight on Stewart Street between Spruce and Elm. The (Not So) Ugly Dog Contest followed at three at the dog park, and the Fireman’s Ball ran from eight to midnight at Pentecost Hall.

Also at two that Saturday, the Old Fashioned Dress Review met at St. Michael’s and All Angels Church. The festival, in the Voice’s words, has always traveled “back to a mythical view of the 1880s.” Joseph Sverko, longtime organizer of the review, has emceed it with women and girls in vintage dresses, each keyed to a theme and decade. In 2024, when the parade theme was the 1980s, he expected both 1980s and 1890s fashions. “A lot of people are into the ‘80s theme,” he said. An Advocate-News article of the 1950s noted that women had to pass up grandma’s attic and search out great-grandma’s instead.

The 2024 program also carried a remodeled model train exhibit. It is a basketball-court-sized layout running through miniature redwood forest, old-fashioned mills, towns and winding mountain roads. That year also brought a troupe of Keystone Kops from Sacramento and Fort Bragg’s own Kangaroo Kort. Old-timers told the Voice the Kort once held anyone recognized as a local to the theme. Men without beards and top hats, and women seen outside old-fashioned dresses, risked harassment.

Noon on Labor Day at Main and Pine

The parade steps off at noon on Labor Day from Main and Pine. It runs east to Franklin, south to Oak, west to Main and north back to Pine. Main and Franklin close at ten, and the Association advises coming early and allowing time to walk in. Spectators sit along the route on curbs, camp stools, lawn chairs and the backs of trucks. Judges watch from a reviewing stand on Main in front of The Company Store.

The Voice lists logging trucks, Mexican rope tricksters and riders, young football squads, and cheerleaders building pyramids. Politicians, fire trucks, clubs and labor unions march, and Shriners ride tiny cars. No one may throw candy from a float, which the Association notes is against California law. At the rear marches the Humboldt State band, now Cal Poly Humboldt, which by the Voice’s count has closed the parade for 50 years. Afterward the Chamber of Commerce and City Hall staff hold a barbecue and pie sale in Bainbridge Park, at Laurel and Harrison, until six. “It’s still our traditional and fun goodbye to summer, back to work and school, although the students go back earlier now,” Webster said.

Six feet eight, in Levis cut 46 by 36

Four men have played Paul. The first was Charles Alfred Buck, born in Little River on August 10, 1904. His mother died when he was five. Seven months later the family’s new home in Comptche burned with everything in it, with no one there to fight the fire.

In August 1919 a local paper ran “Some Boy This! Six Feet Four at 15 Years.” The storekeeper John Silva had stood him against a wall and measured him with a step ladder and a yardstick. Buck followed his father, a logging camp foreman, into the woods. In May 1938 he beat ten “husky opponents” for the log-bucking championship at a festival in Scotia, in Humboldt County. On New Year’s Eve that year he married Lucy Angle, a cook at Camp 20.

When the first Paul Bunyan Days came, the Kelley House Museum writes, he must have been an obvious choice. A 1939 photograph gives him at six feet eight and 298 pounds. A handwritten note in the museum’s Buck family folder records his Levis as 46 by 36. He played Paul for many years and died in Crescent City in 1981.

Chet Shandel came next. He was a former wrestler, heavyweight boxer and longtime lumber mill worker. In 1959 he stood atop a truck on the Golden Gate Bridge with a huge ax and a bigger shotgun, which Bay Area captions said was for the gigantic squirrels in the redwoods. His nephew Norm Shandel played the part for 40 years. About 15 years before 2024 he handed it to Mike Stephens, who tops six-six and works in the woods studying spotted owls. In plaid shirt and with giant ax, Stephens turns up at the dog contest, the pie sale and the gem show.

A posse on the Super Skunk Special

The Voice writes that the festival grew out of serious competitive logging shows in Fort Bragg. Those shows drew competitors from all over the country but lacked spectators, and adding Paul, Babe the Blue Ox and other folk-legend fun made the formula. Some early contests, among them the usually bloody bare-knuckle fights to be Bull of the Redwoods, will likely never return.

The Kelley House cites an Advocate-News article of June 29, 1989, for 1939 as the first year. The Voice notes that 1939 is generally counted first, but that a 1939 Advocate-News seems to indicate the festival had been held before and was making a comeback. Planning took up most of that front page. Fort Bragg business and political leaders left at the crack of dawn to promote the event to Mayor Angelo Rossi at San Francisco City Hall. Comrades Hall, later Eagles Hall, had a part in the 1939 celebration.

According to the Kelley House, the festival was held on Labor Day for its first three years, then halted during World War II. For a while after the war it moved to the Fourth of July before returning to the September weekend. In later years the Fort Bragg troupe went to ball games, and Paul was interviewed on Giants radio broadcasts. The country north of San Francisco then sold itself as the Redwood Empire, and old news accounts report the Calistoga Skydiving team parachuting in at Virgin Creek for the festival. The pandemic canceled the 2020 and 2021 editions, and the Voice reports the festival returned in 2023 as Fort Bragg’s biggest annual event.

In 1967 the Association treated members of the San Francisco Bay Area press corps to a free trip to Fort Bragg aboard the Super Skunk Special. The train entered the redwood forest between Willits and Ukiah with food and drinks flowing. There a posse on horseback waylaid it and moved through the cars, firing into the air and hollering “robbery.” The desperados came from the Chamber of Commerce, and the holdup was outreach by the Paul Bunyan Association.