This probably won’t interest many, as it is just old home movies. I find it fasinating as I grew up knowing, and knowing of some of these people. The logging woods of the 1950-1970 era in Orick, Humboldt county, CA logging the Redwood’s then moving to the Shingletown Bench area of Shasta county CA and logging the Pine woods of the Southern Cascades. These are the areas that I grew up in and spent my young working years in, although I never directly worked in the timber industry almost everybody I knew did in one way or another; be it working in the woods, in the saw mills, driving log truck, or repairing equipment, all our livelyhoods were tied to the trees.

Hope you can enjoy this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITAMwEQIx34

Thanks for posting Rick. Reminds me of the times my family would visit this area in the late forties and watch these logging operations. We were driving to Oregon to see my Dad’s parents. He never missed a chance to take us to a sawmill or logging operation. The highways in Northern California in the late forties were packed with these big logging trucks carrying huge logs to market. Great memories. I believe I was in the second grade when I turned in a project diorama showing these logging operations!

Thanks for bringing back scents of yesteryear …

Dad was stationed at Tongue Point Naval Base in Astoria Or, I was 7-9 and being the youngest I was a free range boy and our quarters overlooked the Columbia river … I remember seeing timber rafts being floated down river to the Astoria sawmills and the slash burners fragrance graced our noses all day long. I rode the bus to school and logging trucks were everywhere.

The tracks of the Portland/Astoria line ran along the river and to make the curve they built a berm out into the flats along the river bank, we could see carp swimming in the shallows, imagined them to be huge salmon and wasted many a worm trying to catch them!

I have a Charles Mulvey watercolor of the Astoria saw mill hanging in my living room.

Since when is drowning worms a waste? I have spent many a relaxing afternoon, away from the pressures of life, downing worms at my favorite spot…a spot that is now behind a locked gate. (https://largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-frown.gif)

Read twice respond once…

The worms were wasted (drowned) and the time for this friendly reply.(https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-wink.gif)

I am impressed that you read the whole post!

Fascinating video. I never heard of anyone using dynamite to top a spar tree!

Ray Dunakin said:

Fascinating video. I never heard of anyone using dynamite to top a spar tree!

I have read some about this practice and it seems it was a quick but pretty poor choice. The safety issue for the Topper and the ground crew aside, it could possible split the Spar tree vertically and ruin the whole project befor it even got started.

Yeah, that’s what I thought would happen. BTW, I’ve read that when the giant redwoods were discovered, and the first attempts were made to log them, they tried using dynamite, with predictably poor results.

Ray Dunakin said:

Yeah, that’s what I thought would happen. BTW, I’ve read that when the giant redwoods were discovered, and the first attempts were made to log them, they tried using dynamite, with predictably poor results.

In those days black powder was what they had, dynamite came a few years later. When they got those trees on the ground they would drill holes and set charges to break the log into halves or even quarters lengthwise so they were lite enough to be skidded from the woods and handled at the mill.

Edit for completion of my thought;

After dynamite became available, early 1870’s it was used inplace of the black powder because the trees were still to big for the machines and animals to move, just try dragging a 32 foot log that is 18-20 foot in diameter or more.

… i miss the Timber Times!!

Ross Mansell said:

… i miss the Timber Times!!

Boy, me too, Ross