Sunday, February 12, 2023

Pacific Northwest Logging in the old days. Safety managers would croak watching some of these guys work.


Thanks, Joe!

7 comments:

  1. 101 ways to get maimed or dead

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  2. Enjoyed that. Thanks for posting it.

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  3. First locomotive shown was a 2-truck Lima Shay. Shay's used gear driven power trucks to help navigate rickety and temporary tracks in the woods.

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    1. I thought it was interesting that outfit didn't use flatcars, they used two separate trucks instead. It was a better setup for hauling 40' logs.

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  4. My wife's uncle was out there in those days. I wish I'd heard some stories. He was back in Tennessee making furniture and building houses. We have some pieces he made.

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  5. At 2:30 I see the guy unhooking the bell hooks was actually standing on the two bunk logs when the loaderman plopped the third log down. Talk about trusting your co-workers.

    To a man, these guys were all hard workers. No slackers allowed in the timber industry.

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  6. My father and my mother's uncle worked outside Matlock, Washington, cutting some HUGE trees. They'd spend weeks preparing a bed for the tree to fall on, so as not to break the tree. They cut holes into the tree to hold the springboards where they stood to chop into the tree with double-bitted axes. The "misery-whip" saw (in the video) was the last step for the two of them to fall the tree. Then the limbing of the trunk, cutting it into manageable lengths, dragging them out of the woods with a steam engine donkey. Loading on a single truck to take to a near-by sawmill in Matlock or Shelton. Most of the time it was raining heavily as this was not far from the Olympic Rain Forest that gets over 200" of rain a year! My mother visited briefly from Montana, but left because of her allergies. I guess she was there long enough for them to conceive me. I was born in Montana 9 months later. My father had since moved back to Montana to be a father!

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