These are "learn from stupidity" stories, aren't they?
With that thought in mind I'll share one with you. It wasn't entirely my stupidity that brought this about. More of a collective stupidity among all present and accountable. But I helped.
We were logging in the Sierras in February. We weren't very high up and below the snowline was nothing but mud...lots of mud. We were trying to finish a piece without having to leave it 'til Spring and all the attendant moving in and out of equipment.
The mud was so bad that we had to tow the trucks in with a 'Cat, skid them around on the landing, drag them into place with the shovel,take the trailer off, pull the truck ahead with the 'Cat again, and then load . We're talking about mud up to the running boards here.
I was driving truck that day and I was the first to load. We got it all done,figuring things out as we went along and it seemed doable. Miserable but doable.
To get out of the landing we figured one 'Cat pulling and one 'Cat pushing should do the job and we'd just go all the way to the road like that. This is where things started to go awry.
The two 'Catskinners had no means of communication and didn't like each other very much anyway so they didn't really formulate any kind of plan. I hooked up the pull 'Cat, jumped back into the truck, and watched as the shovel moved off and the push 'Cat started to get into position.
That's when things really went to Hell in a handbasket. The pull 'Cat just took off, and I mean took off fast, with about twenty feet of slack bull line laying on the ground and the push 'Cat hadn't even snugged up yet! I just fell over in the seat and figured I'd stay there until the noise stopped and the accident,whatever it was going to be, was over.
The bull line broke just behind the winch. Why it broke and didn't just pull the front end of the truck off I'll never know. The end of the line whipped back and took everything off above the windshield...marker lites, horns,stacks, headache rack and then whipped over and caught one of the mirrors. If the line had been a couple of inches lower I wouldn't be here now. Big noise, lots of flying chrome pieces. One extremely pissed off truck driver. One superbly pissed off siderod.
We put a new bull line on the pull 'Cat...and a new skinner, too. Got the truck out to the road, surveyed the damage, and finished the day with two more loads out of the same place. This time the 'Cat skinners worked together. I went back to falling the next Spring...figured it was safer.