The son of longtime logging truck company owner Denny Olson, Quintin had been out in the woods since first grade and “around trees most of my life,” working after school and weekends when needed.

When his grandfather died in 1999, the family took over his gravel pit on U.S. 2 across from the Billerud mill in Quinnesec.

Olson then started his own business, Quintin Olson Enterprises LLC, with a skid steer and dump truck trailer.

That didn’t involve trees as much as moving earth and fixing up private driveways and yards, using materials from the family’s gravel pit. Projects would include spreading topsoil and laying down gravel for septic system drain fields.

Aaron Schneider of Quintin Olson Enterprises feeds into a chipper the branches that Quintin Olson, below, had cut from a white birch being taken down on a property on Norway Lake Road in northern Dickinson County.

Then, in 2019, Olson was able to acquire several pieces of equipment from the former Cagles Tree Service after the unexpected death in mid-May of Glenn “Rip” Cagle at age 60.

When Lori Cagle decided to sell the business, Olson offered to help put the equipment on the market. She instead suggested he take over the tree service, giving him the first option for purchase.

At the time he said, “I had known Glenn for a number of years and I was able to spend more time getting to know him, his wife, Lori, and his son Chad over this past winter. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know the Cagle family more and I have always had a great respect for Glenn.”

He “talked and prayed” on it with his wife, Megan, before deciding to take the plunge.

The sale included a stump grinder, mini-excavator, chipper and pull-behind basket lift. “This will give him a good start,” Lori Cagle said in 2019.

The tree service side is now the bulk of his work. His wife, Megan, handles bookkeeping and other office duties. They added Aaron Schneider of Aurora, Wis., in the early 2020s.

The business does tree removal, trimming, stump grinding, chipping, excavation and skid steer work, Olson said. They also offer firewood for sale.

While he did have to learn some new skills, Olson said his experience working with the family and 12 years with the Dickinson County Road Commission, plus a year-long stint with the city of Kingsford, gave him some background in removing trees safely.

In 2023, he took down 120 trees at the Pine Mountain Ski & Golf Resort to make way for a tubing run. A house this year had eight to 10 trees that had to be taken out due to oak wilt.

But most of his jobs involve one to six trees. Olson will come out to a property within a week of being contacted — he tends to do that on rain days but there haven’t been many of those this summer — and draw up an estimate, then try to get the work on his schedule, depending on how busy he is, he said.

“I do my best to be fair with everybody, look at every job as if it were (on) my own (property), how I’d like to be treated,” he said.

Taking down a tree that’s close to a building can’t be done by simply sawing at the base. Olson usually has to get into the top of the tree with the basket lift, cutting branches and trunk section by section, working his way down while carefully dropping the pieces to Schneider waiting below. That way, none of it will potentially fall into structures.

Schneider then runs the branches through the wood chipper.

They try to work in the morning hours, Olson said, as winds in the region tend to pick up by afternoon, making basket work tricky.

He said it’s satisfying to “see the customers’ relief … how happy they are to see the tree come down safely.”

In the future, Olson would like to perhaps get a taller basket lift for tree cutting. But “keeping it on a small scale is fine by me,” he added.

He and his wife have four children, two sons and two daughters, so there’s family time to tend to as well.

“I’ve got plenty to do,” he said. “The biggest thing I appreciate with my customers is they have patience.”

Quintin Olson Enterprises can be contacted at 906-250-1827 or quintin.olson69@gmail.com. The business also has a website at https://www.quintinolson.com/ and a Facebook page.

Betsy Bloom can be reached at 906-774-2772, ext. 240, or bbloom@ironmountaindailynews.com.