BERLIN, N.Y. You cant keep Tony Gale out of the woods.

Six years ago, he was sitting on the hood of a skidder a heavy-duty tractor loggers use to move felled trees when a coworker started the machine. Before Gale could move, the blade rose and crushed every bone in both his feet and ankles. The pain was blinding. Doctors told him hed never work in the woods again. But sure enough, the lumberman was back on the job two years later, chainsawing towering pines and oaks in the forests of upstate New York, where hes lived his whole life.

Gale usually works solo now, but hes still unstoppable. Four months ago, his grapple skidder, a beast of a truck built to pick up logs in big pincers, was incinerated in a fire started by an electrical spark; he suspects mice were the culprits, gnawing through the wires. The skimpy insurance check didnt replace the machine outright, but the woods were calling, and Gale needed to work. So he bought a smaller cable skidder. He recently arrived at a work site to find baby pacifiers fixed to the machines grill, a jab from one his woodcutter buddies working nearby.

Gale has tried to work as a welder. Hes a good carpenter, too. But he cant quit logging.

Us guys, we bust our butts. Its dangerous work doing what we do, Gale, 47, told HuffPost, leaning against the bed of his silver Toyota Tacoma pickup on a muggy July morning. But I love it out here. Theres nothing like it.

But the terrain for logging is fast disappearing, and with it the jobs. The number of loggers has shrunk dramatically over the past 20 years, making Gale one of fewer than a dozen working in the area of the Rensselaer Plateau now, he said. The milling companies that once owned huge swaths of forest across the Northeast are gone, leaving the wooded tracts largely in the hands of investor groups and private-equity funds. The local economy embraced tourism, and well-heeled visitors from the city attracted to the bucolic charm wanted what Gale called their own little slice of heaven. Eager to turn a profit, the investors have been divvying up the land and selling it to developers building massive summer homes in the middle of what was once dense forest.

The transformation may seem invisible from the farm-lined state roads that slither out from Albany. But you can see it from above. Clearings pockmark the lush, green canopy, making way for McMansions. On a helicopter flight last month, HuffPost counted nearly a dozen new houses under construction.

Now, you go by what used to be a beautiful piece of property and there are houses all over the place, Gale said.