Discussion of Creative Logging

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Former stars of Axmen win an award for logging a difficult piece of ground.
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[catbuster]

I met Jay Browning in Astoria in 2004. I had no idea that he ran a good sized logging outfit at the time. I didn’t even notice the left hand until he was walking off. I think he approached me about some roadwork I was doing for the big K.

That Skagit tower is a huge piece of gear. That setup appears really impressive and the logistics of it all deserve some recognition. It’s a lot of steel up in the air, looks like a ****ed up landing and a lot of work just to get the wood to the haulback line.

 

[slowp]

I met Jay Browning in Astoria in 2004. I had no idea that he ran a good sized logging outfit at the time. I didn’t even notice the left hand until he was walking off. I think he approached me about some roadwork I was doing for the big K.

That Skagit tower is a huge piece of gear. That setup appears really impressive and the logistics of it all deserve some recognition. It’s a lot of steel up in the air, looks like a ****ed up landing and a lot of work just to get the wood to the haulback line.

So many roads were built in the woods for humongus yarders. I was impressed by the roads on the Siuslaw NF on the Oregon Coast. In SW Warshington, we had the problem of curves being too tightly planned for the yarders to get by. It took a bit of explosives sometimes to remedy that problem The tubes on the yarders were the problem. The engineers did not understand this when they planned the roads. You could tell when an outfit moved into a timber sale by the leaves and branched knocked down onto the roads. In those days, they would sometimes "outlaw" equipment in during the night to avoid getting all the permits. Cops were rare in that area.

I remember one unit out of Randle, WA where they put three high lead yarders on it and you had to think about where the lines were out in the brush. It was a short haul to the mill and they really put out the loads of lower elevation Doug-fir punkins. They swarped it. That had to be Fred Moe Logging, from Chehalis, because they had enough equipment and crews to do that.

We did have a unit where they had to go full suspension over a young plantation. It worked out OK. It was planned for.

Yarders have been my favorite logging system. I love to hear the whistles going, except when on the landing with no earplugs in, but that's another story. It was also kind of eerie to be out in the fog and hear the lines making the noises that they do.

There's more to logging than the falling.