And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
When I was a young man I was at the scale ramp one day when another truck was getting his one log load scaled. It was a 32' Sugar Pine that was 7 1/2' at the butt. The driver told me to load it in the woods they had dug a trench for the truck to back into, then dropped the stakes and shoved the log on from the side. The guys in the landing painted "In 1830 I was a pine nut" on the back end of it. It was a permit load that the driver guessed was around 12 to 15 thousand pounds over a legal load. That one log scaled 8,330 board feet. Funny how a guy remembers stuff like this 45 years later.
Day after day, all season long, the log trucks rumble past my house on the way to the last mill in town. Loaded with what we used to call "pecker poles" 6" or 8" if that. Maybe get a 2X4 out of some of them and the rest is chips.
You're lucky you still have one mill running. 40 years ago I had 8 in my immediate area (north central Sierra). Now the only one left is a little gypo mill. The big ones are all gone. I went from hauling 3 log loads to processing and loading 300 log loads. But it's all good. The woods looked like a fire safe park when we'd get done thinning and chipping.
We always called a log that big a "Pickle", my home town had 5 sawmills and a lake tugboat outfit towing logs, they are all gone and in the next town over the last small veneer mill just closed. When I was a kid you either logged or were a miner, that was your 2 main career choices. My dad and my uncle were tugboat guys. In the late 70"s mills started dying, I bugged out for the Wy oilfields.
When I was a young man I was at the scale ramp one day when another truck was getting his one log load scaled. It was a 32' Sugar Pine that was 7 1/2' at the butt. The driver told me to load it in the woods they had dug a trench for the truck to back into, then dropped the stakes and shoved the log on from the side. The guys in the landing painted "In 1830 I was a pine nut" on the back end of it.
ReplyDeleteIt was a permit load that the driver guessed was around 12 to 15 thousand pounds over a legal load. That one log scaled 8,330 board feet.
Funny how a guy remembers stuff like this 45 years later.
I remember when you would see an occasional one log load. Those were the days when a three log load was common. Days long gone.
ReplyDeleteDay after day, all season long, the log trucks rumble past my house on the way to the last mill in town. Loaded with what we used to call "pecker poles" 6" or 8" if that. Maybe get a 2X4 out of some of them and the rest is chips.
ReplyDeleteYou're lucky you still have one mill running. 40 years ago I had 8 in my immediate area (north central Sierra). Now the only one left is a little gypo mill. The big ones are all gone.
DeleteI went from hauling 3 log loads to processing and loading 300 log loads. But it's all good. The woods looked like a fire safe park when we'd get done thinning and chipping.
We always called a log that big a "Pickle", my home town had 5 sawmills and a lake tugboat outfit towing logs, they are all gone and in the next town over the last small veneer mill just closed. When I was a kid you either logged or were a miner, that was your 2 main career choices. My dad and my uncle were tugboat guys. In the late 70"s mills started dying, I bugged out for the Wy oilfields.
ReplyDelete