Saturday, July 19, 2025

Hard Men Make Good Times

 


8 comments:

  1. Why is the cut so high above the ground?

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    1. It's usually to get above the butt swell, but this particular tree sure doesn't have much, if any.

      This was long before the days of 'maximum utilization' and zero waste. They thought these trees would last forever.

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  2. Because of the miners and the loggers, the Grass Valley/Nevada City area never experienced a Great Depression. They only experienced Cornish Christmas, baseball games between the rival cities, horse racing at Glenbrook and swimming and dancing at Lake Olympia. They were the best of times.
    Now, because of the new arrivals from the cities to the Marin County of the Sierra, resource extraction is a dirty term.

    It's funny. Logging and Mining were going on here for over a hundred years, yet this is still the place they all wanted to move to.

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  3. I know you appreciate loggers by the pics, but most of West Virginia was completely logged off, and with it, a billion years of top soil ran out to sea. There are some trees here that for whatever reason, escaped the axe, but most trees here are about 85 years old, and topple over because the ground won't support their weight.

    I don't begrudge the men for working, but the companies who employed them destroyed an entire state, and most of the lumber was shipped overseas to Great Britain.

    Instult to injury, The Federal Government planted Rosa Multiflora, a prolific invasive species, in order to stop run-off. No indigeneous species of plants will grow where it grows.

    Hoo rah!

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    1. Don't worry, your soil will be back. Sadly, you'll never see it. Here in the Berkshires all the soil was removed when the ice sheet scraped everything to bedrock 100,000 years ago. In the valleys the topsoil is deep and extremely fertile. The mountains are all forested with much nice timber. On a hillside by me there are white oaks probably 5 feet at the base and 40-50 feet before the first branch.

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  4. The scowling suit is wringing his hands and thinking hurry up and take your picture, man. These boys is costing me ten cents an hour. Each!

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, the Walking Boss doesn't look happy, does he?
      That's okay. If he wasn't a prick he wouldn't have taken the job to begin with.

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