Having a blast

[Tillaway]

Casts out and reels in just like you are fishing.  They are a multipurpose machine, yard logs, load trucks, shovel log (hoe chuck for our Canadian friends), and they can do a fair job at road grading, and minor excavation.  Take of the grapples and heel rack, put on a processor dangle head and do final harvest and process logs.  Most of the operators here are putting drums, either tong throwers or yarder packages, on their new shovels.  Those that have not are wishing they had.  Far too versatile a machine and often the most profitable machine in the woods out here.  The big land owners out here have either banned or have considered banning the use of traditional rubber tired skidders or dozers for yarding logs.  You will see them used here to assist trucks or swing logs on swing roads.  Swing roads are a road with too steep a grade for a truck to crawl out even with assistance.  You can get equipment down them so the yarders are walked in and the logs are cable yarded to a landing and then swung up the road to another landing for processing and loading.  There is a 527 being used right now to swing logs.  The operator had it, a 70' T-Bird tower and another smaller hoe stuck down at the bottom of a swing road for the past 3 1/2 months.  It has just now dried out enough to get the 527 moving again and they are swinging out the logs and have finished yarding with the tower.  They are going to bring in a D-8 to rescue the yarder now that they are through with it.

[Scott]

Any chance of getting pics of the rescue operation  ???. When you say they are going to ban rubber tired skidder and dozers...would 527s and those KMC skidders also fall into this category? By the sounds of things, shovel logging must have a very light footprint  You mentioned all the jobs that excavators can do in the woods. Before excavators it was dozers and before that horses, makes me wonder what the next big thing will be.

[SwampDonkey]

On the west coast of BC they use grapple yarders and as long as you have good deflection to help locate the best place for your roads, it's a great system. If not it's what we term the 'side hill gouger' causing serious erosion and even land slides in the heavy rain season. We always had to assess every gully on a harvest block for the potential of a slide. Some blocks where all laid out and mapped and so on and had to be defered from logging after being reviewed by the ministry. That gets expensive after awhile.

[Scott]

 Some operations i see pictures of the logs are completely suspended in the air while being yarded in. In other shots the logs look to just be drung up the hilll more or less. Is this because of differnt setup, size of equipment etc?
SD, what do you mean by deflection?

[SwampDonkey]

deflection: the maximum amount of line sage over a length of yarding cable so as a load can be carried clear of the ground.

[Scott]

gotcha  8)

[SwampDonkey]

Supersnorkel Handbook

[Tillaway]

Thats right, 517's, 527's KMC's, dozers and all rubber tire skidders.  I think Weyco has already started this and the other big boys are considering it.  I personnally would like us to do the same.  Virtually all the big problems I have to deal with are roads and damage done by skidders and dozers yarding logs.  Once you see what a good shovel logger can do you would not let anything else ground yard.  I would make exceptions for certain operators that have 527's and only if operated by certain individuals.  Unfortunately I do not see us moving in that direction real soon.

The 8 was out today and I have Friday's off.  I would have like to see it too.

[Scott]

SD, thanks for the great link, shed a lot of light on things.
Tillaway, I know what you mean about the skidder thing. Hopefully people will start to see things your way soon. Anyways, hopefully you can snap some pictures to put on the forum soon.

[SwampDonkey]

I thought I had some pictures of damage done by the sidehill gouger but I think they are only on negatives. I know one thing, on some of them old clearcuts on the coast it did alot of erosion damage and impacted the regen too. There was one eyesore above the logging camp that they had the replant 5 or 6 times, the hill kept sliding.

[Paul_H]

While I was waiting on sawmill parts to arrive,I got a call asking if I wanted to work for a few days.It is the same company that I was working for in this thread but now they are 25 miles South of me down Lillooet Lake in a area called Flood creek.
This whole area down the Lillooet and Harrison Lake has a rich history and was part of the Douglas trail that led miners to the Caribou during the Goldrush days (1860's)

My job was to pull loaded trucks up an adverse with an old D8H.Today was my last day for a while and I piloted two loads of poles in to town(two trips)










Geordie is bucking a short gang log off of the pole.We were 48' past the rear axle on the first load.We had to be really carefull when meeting a vehicle on a corner






I took this shaky pic while pulling the truck up the adverse





The longest pole was at the breaking point while going past the trailer on the side of the road but thankfully made it in one piece.


Across the Tenas bridge just below  Lillooet Lake heading back North toward Pemberton





This is Gunsight Mt or as the Indians call it, Innshuck Mt and is right above the bridge



This is from the bottom end of the lake looking North toward home



About halfway up the lake looking toward Pemberton




And finally the truck coming through the narrow rock cut at 1 Km at the North end of the lake just before the highway.

It was good to get out and work with those guys again and it's a real treat to not be waist deep in snow this time of year

[Kevin]

Paul, are those fir?
Are these utility poles, where are they headed?

[Paul_H]

Kevin,
They are Western Red Cedar and they are for utility poles.There is a pole yard a half a mile away from my house that buys poles and peels them on an old Continental peeler.They ship all over North America and if I remember right,sell to Bell Pole too.They have a rail spur and ship most out by rail.

I was thinking today on the way home that I should ask Drew to call me the next time they peel.It's a really interesting operation he has going there and they design and build loghomes too.

Here is a link to his website  Continental Pole

[chet]

Once again great pictures. Someday I'm gonna see dat country.   ;)

[Tom]

Great set of posts, Paul.

[Paul_H]

Thanks,it really is pretty down the Lake and tonight at the supper table we were wondering why we don't kick around down there more often.I worked down there a couple of years ago in early Spring and the buds broke down there almost two weeks before it did up our way and it would only be 35 miles away.

When we were crushing gravel to cap the road,the electro magnet picked up what we figure was a mule shoe from the Goldrush days.There are 3 Indian villages that are thriving in that area and more people are moving in but there is still a lot of freedom to move and live.

[Jeff]

Paul are you trying to get me to change my travel plans with those photos? Whadya say Tom? TOo cold for us to go there for a side trip? ;)

BEAUTIFUL PICS BUDDY!

[Tom]

It's a trap.  He took them in July. :D

[SwampDonkey]

Geordie is bucking a short gang log off of the pole.We were 48' past the rear axle on the first load.We had to be really carefull when meeting a vehicle on a corner

Now that's what we used to call a sweeper and heaven forbid if ya meet one on a 90 deg turn. 

[Norm]

Beautiful part of the world you live in Paul, in my corporate days I was based out of Seattle and can tell you one of the few places I've ever wanted to live but here is the Pacific Northwest. Running a d-8 even an old one wouldn't be too bad either, thanks for the pics.

[Kevin]

Paul, I was going to say cedar because that's what's common here now as the pressure treated pine poles are a real hazard to climb .
They get hard with age and now the pole companies are injecting them with a polymer to improve the climability.
I wasn't sure if cedar grew on the hills, here the eastern white cedar prefers swamp land.

[SwampDonkey]

Here in New Brunswick if you have a soils map showing the calcarious (lime) bedrock that is where you find the most cedar. Just happens that alot of those areas are wet where alot of other species can't grow well. We do find them on ridges here, but usually not far from gullies or seepages.

Western red cedar have both Coastal (up to 400 m ASL) and interier varieties. I've seen it in the plateau of the Prince George region.

[slowzuki]

Interesting, in our area there are a lot of cedar but I didn't think it is a lime bedrock.  Some of the cedars around here must be several hundred years old, huge diameter trees that where obviously left when fields were first cleared as rock piles exist around them.  Also there is hundreds of miles of cedar rail fence around here so it must have been a common species perhaps during the regrowth after the initial clearing of the hardwoods that dominated this area in the 1600's.

[sawguy21]

Incredibly beautiful country. There was a news article the other day about the villages in that valley. There is a major power transmission line running through it to supply the coast yet the villagers have no power. They depend on diesel generaters that cost $350.00/day to run but BC Hydro says a substation would be too costly.  There are no schools so the children are bused to Pemberton when the road is not flooded or clogged with snow. It is not far from a heavily populated area yet is quite isolated.

[SwampDonkey]

Interesting, in our area there are a lot of cedar but I didn't think it is a lime bedrock.  Some of the cedars around here must be several hundred years old, huge diameter trees that where obviously left when fields were first cleared as rock piles exist around them.  Also there is hundreds of miles of cedar rail fence around here so it must have been a common species perhaps during the regrowth after the initial clearing of the hardwoods that dominated this area in the 1600's.

Yup, the ridge down your way is moderately calcarious sediments, up my way it's moderate to high. To your east is silicon bonded sediments and alot less cedar. Up here we have large almost pure stands of cedar 50 acres or more in size. Of course there are smaller stands to. Out in Holmesville (behind Bath) Doug Lloyd has had an open lime pit for years. They cut the cedar off it and stripped off the humous and dredge the lime out, didn't even need to be crushed. He has a lime spreading buisness. Even around Napadogen there is cedar, but not large pure stands like up here. There are large cedar over there I know close to 300 years that they left in harvest blocks to fall down.  : I've aged some 200 year old cedar on the farm that were only 14 inches in diameter, some alot less.

We had a small field under the hill that was left to grow up for years and a local contractor cut cedar from it as well as poplar and he harvested over 300 cords on 7 acres of ground. The Dutch that bought the farm had plans to clear it back again. But she's all up for sale now.  :

http://www.riverrealty.nb.ca/listings/205_602.asp

I got looking on a couple MrSID maps of my area and most all the cedar stands have been cut off. Kinda hard to show cedar stands when they're growing back up in birch and poplar species. Well there are cedar coming back in the understory. : Down around Landsdowne there are/were some large cedar stands that were harvested with thick fir/spruce growing back. You can see it along route 2 above Hartland, it was thinned, but it's still way to thick. I thinned out 15 acres there a couple years ago, 80 % cedar.