Chain saw artist Bob King rolled down the driver’s window of his big red pickup Thursday at the entrance to Timber-Linn Memorial Park, looked out at everyone gathered around and asked rhetorically, “Is he still there?”

King, 44, a self-taught carver from Edgewood, Wash., was referring to the muscular wooden lumberjack strapped to the bed of his pickup. The statue will serve as the mascot of the reconstituted Albany Timber Carnival, which runs today and Saturday at the park.

“Oh, he is so awesome,” Karen Carver shouted back at King. Carver is president of the Albany Timber Carnival Association and got King to carve a lumberjack for the carnival.

King’s 10-foot tall carving weighs about 800 pounds and replaces Tim Burr, a lumberjack that greeted Albany Timber Carnival visitors for years. All that remains of the old Paul Bunyan-like figure is a torso, and that sits in Peggy Alex’s front yard in Tangent.

King, who has won numerous chain saw competitions, said it took about 13 hours to carve the statue from a log of western red cedar donated by Starker Forests Inc. of Corvallis.

“I modeled him after the Paul Bunyan pictures I saw as a kid,” he said. “He has the body I saw in one of the pictures, and the face is from another picture.”

It took King about four hours going 60 to 65 miles an hour to drive the lumberjack to Albany. When King got off the freeway at Highway 20, Albany police officer Jed Wilson was waiting in a pickup to escort King to the park with lights flashing and siren blaring.

“No problems getting here, but we did hit thunder, lightning and heavy rains until we found the sunshine north of Portland,” King said.

In a flatbed trailer behind the truck, King placed a number of his other carvings that will be on display during the Timber Carnival. They are for sale. The figures include bears, gnomes, deer, eagles, trees, a Statue of Liberty with a Christ figure behind it, and a boy sitting on a dock looking at a sea lion while a pelican and an eagle fight over a fish above him.

Once the Timber Carnival is over, the wooden logger will remain in Albany.

He will be available for promotions and parades and to anyone who wants him to advertise his business.