A cold snap chilled the state and hardened muddy roads throughout Maine’s forests this week, allowing thousands of tons of felled timber to begin moving toward log-starved mills.

Pulp mills across Maine previously reported log inventories depleted from an average two-week backlog to three to four days, and in some cases slipping into day-by-day supply scenarios.

The shortage strikes home in the most forested state in the country, bellwether territory for a forest products industry struggling to reinvent itself in the face of global competition.

The most recent blow in that struggle has been the loss of logging contractors, underscored by the Aroostook County strike now headed into its second week. Driven by rising costs and continued depressed prices paid to cutting and trucking contractors for logs, the state’s logging force has dwindled by as much as 18 percent, to 2,141 loggers, since 2001.

That loss, combined with increased demand from mills restarting in a mending economy, has left too many mills competing for too few contractors to provide them with logs. Even as demand pushed up prices, a warm, muddy winter up to this week has stalled the supply chain. One land management operation last week said it was unable to reach as much as 70,000 tons of felled logs, stacked and stranded beside forest roads made impassable by unseasonable weather.

“The shortage has surprised people somewhat,” said John Cashwell, a former Forest Service director, now president of Seven Islands Land Co. “I don’t think that anybody expected it to come as fast and as furious as it appears to have come.”

On Friday, Gov. John Baldacci signed an order creating the 11-member Advisory Council on the Sustainability of the Forest Products Industry to address work force and other issues, including timber supply.

Department of Conservation Commissioner Pat McGowan announced Wednesday the governor also ordered an increased harvest of Bureau of Parks and Lands timber to help bolster supply.

“We’ve been instructed by the governor to do what we can,” McGowan told members of the state Agriculture Committee in Augusta.

The increased harvest from the Bureau of Parks and Lands could contribute an additional 20,000 cords this year, but with a mill network demanding more than 6 million cords each year, Forest Service Superintendent Alec Giffen said, the increase amounted to only “a drop in the bucket.”

Parties on all sides agreed to the need for long-term solutions, but first must race to lay in a four- to six-week supply of timber before the spring mud season again severs the flow of logs.

“There is not an immediate problem, but certainly a concern,” said Maine Pulp and Paper Association president John Williams. “This is the time of year when [mills] really should be building inventory, rather than just keeping a few days’ supply.”

Problems had cropped up as early as December, when Louisiana-Pacific Corp. announced a lack of aspen and poplar logs would force the shutdown of its Baileyville mill and put 99 employees out of work.

The log supply had been choked by the labor shortage and what was the second-wettest October on record according to the National Weather Service. Matters were made worse by the restart in June of the Finch Pruyn and Co. mill, a pulp operation on the New York-Vermont border that produces 240,000 tons of paper a year, as well as a Fraser Pulp facility in Berlin, N.H. The restarted mills drove up demand and prices for hardwood pulpwood and changed the flow of timber supplies in Maine.

“You can’t turn wood on and off,” Cashwell said. “So when [those mills] came back up they had to kind of kick their way back into marketplace for pulpwood.”

The result rippled across wood suppliers and mills to the north and east, finally putting Louisiana-Pacific’s Baileyville mill out of commission. The company announced it would restart the mill in April, typically the month when spring thaws and rain shut the logging business down, on average, for four to six weeks.

While the logging shortage thus far appears limited to Maine, the industry struggle and souring labor situation are not. As many as 10,000 loggers in western Canada voted to strike in November, stalling a vast softwood timber business where a reported 23,000 jobs have been lost during the last 15 years.

Unlike Maine, pay in the Canadian industry generally ranges from $22 to $39 (Canadian) an hour, with union-supported pension plans and government-sponsored insurance.

Maine’s wood truckers and cutters, who, the Labor Department reported, earned on average $27,574 in 2002, say that often entails 16-hour days, driving hourly returns to below wages earned in the fast-food industry. Loggers say those returns, and regulations that preserve the forest environment but limit when and where they can work, have been whittling down the work force for years.

“We all get a kick out of the fact that everyone is talking about there being a labor shortage now,” said Rep. Troy Jackson, a Fort Kent logger who earned a degree in business but was unable to find work near home, and returned to logging. In 2002, he decided to run for office to lend a logger’s perspective to the political debate in Augusta. “We’ve been jumping up and down, talking about this – for me personally it’s been six years.”

During that time, the number of logs cut per worker has soared. In spite of the shrinking work force, increased automation – new grapple skidders, delimbers and feller bunchers – have made up the difference, and Maine’s annual harvest has held steady.

That equipment has also made it harder for new contractors to enter the business. Keith Michaud, a heavy-equipment salesman with Frank Martin and Sons Inc. in Fort Kent, said the three pieces of equipment needed to run a basic modern logging business carry a combined price tag of $800,000.

A glut of used equipment on the market means loggers leaving the business are likely to lose a great deal of money. Most dealers are declining to take trade-ins. Banks and manufacturers are hesitant to finance newcomers.

“I’ve been at this for like 15 years and I’ve never seen it come to this kind of slowdown,” Michaud said.

The Canadian government required thousands of striking loggers to return to work on Dec. 16, with the understanding that timber interests would commit to an as yet unspecified compromise.

In Aroostook County, loggers were divided. Some agreed to talk to Irving officials one-on-one, weakening the stance of the newly formed International Loggers Union. Others held firm.

But Jackson said a work force increasingly hungry for more predictable jobs with benefits and reasonable hours suggested the timber business was about to find itself facing at least one more round of tough times.

“Surprise, surprise,” Jackson said. “There’s no one left to do it for nothing anymore.”