Terry Tales

Logging Data

I spent the summer of 1977 driving an International TD-9 Crawler-Tractor through the pine forest of western Montana. I was working for my cousin's husband, Kendall Dupuis, to earn money for my junior year at college. Kendall had a small logging operation, and my job was to drag the small logs down steep slopes to the logging road. It was one of those 'who you know' kind of jobs. I'd done a bit of general farm work for Kendall's father the previous summer, and I'd also worked the Flathead Lake cherry harvest for his grandfather, Pete. Oh, my brother-in-law, Greg Connor, also worked for Kendall as a log skidder and diesel mechanic. Just one big happy family!

The job was a thinning contract for the Flathead Indian Tribe, and we were working on the mountainside above the little town of Hot Springs (pop. almost gone). Old Pete was a full-blood tribal member, so that gave Kendall an inside advantage when it came to bidding jobs. The tribe wanted to make an investment in future timber, so they went through thousands of acres of second-growth forest and marked the best young trees to save. Those trees would be left to grow for another forty years or so after we finished our harvest. The logging slash (branches, brush, and other debris) was also left behind to help retain water and prevent erosion.
Kendall had a couple of sawyers who cut down everything that wasn't marked. They worked way ahead of me, and I barely even met them. Sawyers tramp through the woods on foot with their powerful, long-bar chainsaws. They cut trees and lop branches until the saw gas runs out. Then they return to the pickup to refuel, re-oil, and sharpen the teeth on the saw chain. The job is physically demanding and dangerous.

Greg was a sawyer until a tree fell in the wrong direction and sent a large branch from another tree spinning down on his head. His hard hat saved his skull, but the impact broke a bone in his neck and also his left ankle. His neck healed well, but the ankle was never quite the same, so he switched to skidding.

The sawyers were followed by the full-time skidders. Greg drove Kendall's D5 Caterpillar and another guy had his own rubber-tired skidder. They dragged the good logs down to the road to be picked up by logging trucks. Skidders were usually paid by the board foot of timber delivered to the sawmill, so they had no interest in the small stuff. They wanted full-sized logs that were 30 inches or more in diameter and 33 feet long.

There was a penalty, however, if usable wood was left on the ground. So, I was paid the princely sum of $5 an hour to clean up logs as small as 6 inches in diameter by ten feet long. I could have carried down some of that wood on my back. Harvesting them was barely a break-even proposition, but they could be made into two 2 by 4’s at the mill. Avoiding the penalty covered Kendall's cost of hiring me. I was actually pretty happy with my pay. I’d gotten only $2 an hour for working at the grocery store in high school.

There was a pretty good gravel road that wound up the spine of the mountain with a number of smaller logging roads that branched off into the woods every half mile or so. Kendall used a D8 dozer to scrape those side roads out of the dirt, and they were just barely adequate for the big rigs. It was scary watching the driver back an empty truck a mile or more along one of those dirt roads. They were narrow, with a blank wall on the uphill side and a soft shoulder on the other. There was no place to turn around once they left the main road, so it was safer to drive out forward with a fully loaded trailer. If a truck ever did slide off the road, it could easily tumble a hundred yards or more through trees and brush. It didn’t happen on our job, but everyone knew someone who knew such a story.

The real loggers had four-wheel drive pickups equipped with CB radio, but I had an RD250 Yamaha motorcycle. It was a road bike, with low pipes and street tires. Not a great choice for mountain trails, but I was young and stupid, and the bike was all I had. It was quite nimble, and light enough that I could dodge the bigger rocks and muscle it through the soft spots. I'm still amazed at how well it stood up to being abused in the dirt.

The log trucks were self-loaders, equipped with a small crane behind the cab, so they could pick up the logs by themselves. Sometimes a driver would start early enough to be coming down at the same time I was going up. They'd use the CB radio to warn any inbound vehicles, but I had to watch out for myself. They didn't get up to a really high speed, but they weren't able to stop very well with a heavy load on a downhill run. So, I had to dive off into the woods when a full load of logs came at me. It was a real adrenaline rush when I got caught in a bad spot and had to do a quick spin-around to avoid getting run over!

The job site was several miles up into the mountains and each log skidder worked a separate patch. That meant I had to pack my food and water and work alone for nine hours a day. The only human interaction was when Kendall came by twice a week to refuel the TD-9 with diesel. There were no cell phones then, and without a CB radio, I had to ride my motorcycle back to civilization if I needed any kind of help.

Looking back, it seems incredibly unsafe. If I’d suffered a serious accident, it would have been hours before anyone missed me. But the risk wasn't a concern to the men who took on those dangerous and dirty logging jobs. It wasn’t bravado so much as simple necessity. The work needed to be done and no one wanted a babysitter. It was just the mindset of the time and place.

My safety equipment consisted of the TD-9 roll cage, a hard hat, caulked work boots, and leather gloves. Prescription glasses were my eye protection, and I wore them only because I was too near-sighted to work without them. Hearing protection never even occurred to me. The roaring in my ears faded at night but it didn’t completely go away all summer.

Work boots were expensive and caulked boots even more so. I wore a used pair that were handed down from my uncle Art. I’m not sure why the word ‘caulk’ hangs on, tradition I suppose. The caulks are actually small spikes somewhat like those used on snow tires. They give a logger improved traction for clambering over cut timber or for log-rolling competitions.

The mountain was either hot and dusty or cold and muddy, depending on Mother Nature's mood. Many days offered both, as a misty morning turned to scorching afternoon heat. It wasn’t unusual to shiver through the first hour of the day and then have sweat stinging your eyes by quitting time. Evening thunderstorms were common. Sometimes we'd get a drenching downpour, and sometimes it was just an electric display of bad temper.

The dry storms were the most dangerous. Once, I saw a swirl of smoke rising into the sky from a lightning-sparked fire less than two miles from where I was working. I wasn’t told to evacuate, so I kept working with an apprehensive eye on the smoke plume. Kendall leased his D8 dozer to the firefighters for a day and they were able to contain the blaze to a few acres. I visited the spot afterward to marvel at nature’s fury. The pine tree had literally exploded as the sap boiled into superheated steam. A splintered and charred stub still reached about twenty feet into the air. It was all that remained of a once eighty-foot tree.

Operating a tracked vehicle requires learning a whole new skill set. Instead of a steering wheel, there are two levers that stick up on either side of the driver like oversized joysticks. Each lever controls a track and they operate independently. Pushing the left lever forward makes the left track to go forward. Pulling it back reverses the motion. The same is true of the right lever and the right track. The levers are spring loaded to return to the neutral position, so the tracks stop moving when the levers are released. Pushing both levers forward moves the whole crawler forward, but the tracks aren’t coordinated. It's up to the driver to match the track speeds and to continually adjust the levers to stay on a straight line. It takes a bit of practice and constant attention to make the crawler go where you want. Making a turn means a shuddering, grinding twist against the ground rather than rolling over it. Intentionally slowing one track causes the crawler to turn in that direction. Slowing the other track will turn the other way. You can even push one lever forward and pull the other one back to spin in place. That really digs a scar into the ground!

After learning the basics, it was soon obvious that driving a crawler in the woods is a very different experience. It's nothing like driving a car, or even a farm tractor. Caterpillar treads with their metal cleats create a flat contact patch that's several feet long by two feet wide. Their traction is enormous compared to the ten or twenty square-inch contact patch of a radial tire, but it's applied along the ground in an arrow-straight line. There's no 'squirm' or cushioning like you get with rubber tires.

The metal tracks don’t provide any shock absorption, and the undercarriage doesn’t have any suspension either. The front end rises into the air as you climbed onto a bump, teeters for a moment at the top, and then crashes back down as the weight shifts forward. The up and down rocking motion is like a ship going over ocean waves, but much more violent. The only cushioning on the TD-9 came from a vinyl covered foam rubber seat and two similarly padded armrests. The mountainside had many rocky outcrops, and the ground was littered with big branches and small logs. The constant up and down pounding gave me a sore back. After the first month, I started riding on my elbows, putting most of my weight on the armrests to lessen the impact on my spine.

But there’s more to log skidding than heat, cold, and jolting over rocks. The engine noise is deafening, the smell of diesel exhaust is enough to turn your stomach, and there’s a constant vibration that turns your guts to jelly. And you don’t ever forget the dirt. Crawler grease, pine sap, mud, dust, and a dash of pollen all mixed together with rancid sweat to make a really memorable funk. The first thing a logger needs at night is to strip off his work clothes and take a shower. Well, the first thing might really be a cold beer, but that could be taken care of on the drive home.

Imagine a hillside of young trees spaced fifteen to twenty feet apart in a mostly random pattern. Add in a tangled layer of slash left behind by the sawyers, some flattened underbrush, and logs of various sizes nestled in the mess. That was the scene that greeted me each morning when I fired up the TD-9. The areas where I was sent to work had already been gone over once by the other skidders, so there were trails up and down the mountainside that I could follow. The scars left by dragging the big logs through the woods made their paths pretty obvious. Those skid trails went mostly straight up and were spaced twenty to thirty feet apart. Their length varied from a few hundred yards to a half mile, depending on the lay of the land and the vertical distance that separated the horizontal logging roads running across the face of the mountain.

I'd drive my TD-9 up to the top along a trail that I’d already cleared and then swing over to the next trail to look for usable logs on my way back down. If there were a lot of small logs, then it might take multiple trips. In truth, that TD-9 was pitifully underpowered for the work. I could drag only eight or ten small logs at a time, so that’s how many ‘chokers’ I had on hand. Chokers are the steel cables that you use to hook up the logs to the crawler. They were hung from brackets on the back of the TD-9 until needed.

The chokers I used were about fifteen feet long with a crimped loop at one end, a steel ball crimped on the other end, and a sliding 'eye' in between. To set a choker, you wrap the ball end of the cable around the end of the log, insert the ball into the sliding eye, and then slip the looped end of the choker over a hook on the back of the TD-9. Putting tension on the cable causes it to tighten around the log like a noose, with the sliding eye acting as a slipknot.
A choker is made from braided steel wire and it's about as thick as a man’s finger. It’s not very flexible, so you have to take up the slack before hooking it up to the crawler. If it's too loose, it can pull off the log instead of tightening up. Then you get to back up, climb down, and start over. As a choker wears out, some of the wire strands fray and the broken ends stick out like thorns. Those steel ‘thorns’ can pierce leather gloves if you’re not careful. And only a fool would work with bare hands.

Circumference is calculated as pi times diameter, so a twenty-four inch log requires six feet of choker to make one wrap. That means the crawler has to be within about eight feet of the log to hook up the choker. A lot of stops were necessary for each load because I rarely found two logs close together. And a large log might need one choker just to wrap around the end and another in a ‘daisy-chain’ to reach the crawler.

Of course, you can’t set a choker without getting off the skidder, so I jumped down and climbed back up a couple of hundred times a day. It got old in a hurry. And aching knees were just a part of the job to be endured. There was also the little problem of getting the end of the choker around the log. It's easy for the small logs. Most of them can be lifted or levered up with a five-foot metal pry bar. But a larger log jammed tightly against the ground requires a bit of trenching in order to slide the cable underneath.

Once I had enough logs hooked up to make a load, I’d drive the TD-9 all the way down to the logging road. A wide turn would put them along the side where the self-loading log trucks could pick them up and put them on the trailer. Removing the chokers wasn’t always an easy job, either. The pry bar often came into play, and sometimes I had to ‘wiggle’ the pile with the crawler to release the tension and get enough slack to remove a choker. Then I’d hang all the chokers on the back of the TD-9 and head up the hill again.

The novelty of learning the new skills soon wore off and my days became a monotonous blur of chokers and logs. The jarring ride and constant up and down to set chokers left me with achy muscles and sore joints. The heat, noise, cold, and dirt provided a base level of discomfort that made me wonder why I ever took the job.

Only once did I get to feel like a real skidder and work with big logs. One of our logging roads circled a patch of level ground that was surrounded on three sides by a steep slope. It wasn’t that far up, but it was too steep to climb, even with a crawler. I know because I tried. I think the incline was more than sixty degrees. The TD-9 almost went over backwards as the tracks scraped at the hillside without climbing up. The only way to get to those logs was to make a fifteen-minute trip down the road and then come back through the woods above the road.
The other guys hadn’t wanted to add a thirty-minute trip to each load, so they ignored the few dozen full-sized logs and moved on. I was being paid by the hour, and it fell to me to clean up after them. The TD-9 would only drag two of those logs at best, and I needed to double-up the chokers to get enough length to hook them up to the crawler.

It was a real struggle to wrestle the choker around a 36-inch log, and then I’d have to wiggle the crawler from side to side to break the log loose and get it moving. The ground in that patch was mostly level, and the crawler could barely drag the logs without an assist from gravity. Sometimes I’d hit a soft spot, the log would dig in like an anchor, and I’d have to wiggle sideways to get it moving again.

But the real excitement came when I got to the steep part of the slope and tipped my dozer over the edge. The log wanted to stay horizontal until its weight came forward, and the TD-9 would sort of hang from the choker for a second. Then the log would tip over the edge behind me and we’d race down to the logging road below. It was a real adrenaline rush, bouncing down a sixty-degree slope while wondering if a multi-ton log might catch up with the crawler, jump into the cab, and crush me.

Fortunately, it was only about forty feet to the relative safety of level ground. Once in a while, a log would catch up and get its choker tangled in the track. If I could stop quickly enough, then I could clear the choker from the track by myself. If I couldn’t stop, then the tangle could get bad.

A bad tangle meant one of two outcomes. Either the choker snapped, or the track slipped off its drive wheels. Kendall didn’t get upset about a broken choker, but he did get a little peeved about having to put the track back on the crawler. That took an hour or more, and I had to leave the job site and find him before he could even start. I lacked both the tools and the skill to do it myself.

That patch of big logs took more than a week to skid down to the road. Kendall didn’t mind because I rescued thousands of dollars’ worth of timber. He told me later that he broke even on my summers’ pay in that one week. And he said that I actually broke down less than most of the guys he hired. That might have been due to luck more than skill, though.

My only serious breakdown came when I got too close to the edge of the road one day and the soft shoulder slipped away beneath me. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, but the TD-9 slid onto a stump in exactly the wrong spot and broke a part in the track drive. It took a couple of days to get a replacement part, install it, and get the crawler back on the job.

By the end of summer, I was getting a little loopy from the lack of human company. I have to confess that I sometimes found myself talking to the trees and singing along with the birds. The animals were mostly drowned out by the noise of my engine, of course, but I occasionally spooked a deer or woke up an owl as I worked. I could hear the birds and wind in the blessed quiet when I shut down for lunch hour, and once I even saw a bear walk by while I was munching my baloney sandwich. I tried to stay very still and very quiet as he passed by at a distance of only fifty feet.

The experience created lasting memories and served me well with fodder for stories. Kendall was satisfied with my work and said he’d hire me again the next summer. But the three months of back-breaking physical labor ‘got my mind right’ and I never went back. I found a new enthusiasm for college and an indoor job, so I took a position as an electronics technician at Summit Engineering in Bozeman. I made only $3.71 an hour there, but it was a nice, safe, two-hundred mile distance from the woods above Hot Springs.