“Dolly’s Song:” A film about legendary crosscut sawyer Dolly Chapman
In the backroads of Northern California while making Dolly’s Song, my producer and I started thinking about legends and how they’re made. We passed by signs with Paul Bunyan and museums decorated with crosscuts, touting the legend of this giant man and his blue ox. We reflected on myths, and how perhaps he was once a person who was very much a human being…and how storytelling wove hyperbolic lines around his truth.
I had heard about Dolly Chapman for years while digging bench out in the Four Corners the same way folks hear about Paul Bunyan. The one woman who sharpened crosscut saws for all of the West Coast. A name whispered whenever we got the crosscut out, as we logged out trails—a sense of awe and reverence always present. I imagined her, seven feet tall, a mythic figure of sorts.
When I first approached Dolly about making this film, I envisioned a very different story. I thought it would be a poetic meditation on the crosscut saw—the rhythm of it, the trance it pulls you in as you move back and forth through wood, steel singing against grain.
But what Dolly’s Song became is something else entirely.
Dolly’s Song chronicles more than 30 years of Dolly Chapman’s life in trail work. She is one of the few remaining crosscut saw sharpeners in the country, maintaining a skill essential to Wilderness trail crews. As one of the first women to join professional trail crews in the late 1970s, she never had a mentor herself. Now, she teaches the next generation of trail stewards, passing on both technical knowledge and a deep love for public lands.
Dolly is humble, straightforward, and quietly hilarious. She can nerd out on crosscuts—and I mean nerd out—I probably have hours of unused footage of her and Robert Parks talking about tooth types, vintage saws, and many other rabbit holes. As I traveled across the West Coast talking to people who had taken her classes or worked alongside her on trails, one thing became undeniable: Dolly is revered for a reason.
One of the hardest parts of making this film (and really any film) was deciding what to leave out. There were so many side paths I wanted to follow, so many stories and small legends that could have become films of their own. Distilling a life into 13 minutes means choosing one trail and leaving the others for another time.
I hope you like this one small story from the many-storied life of a living legend.
Dolly still offers the best classes out there, you can find them here: https://www.sharpcrosscut.com/
If you are interested in following along on any other films I’m making follow me on instagram @_sarah_hamilton_
