Grendel
TreeHouser
The Golden Spruce, by John Vaillant.
Couple quick excerpts.
"If you run across an old photo of a man with an ax perched high in a tree, you are not looking at a faller, you are looking at the far rarer high rigger. Like the steelworkers who build skyscrapers, these men were a breed apart; they were the ones who prepared the spar trees to run high-lead cable. A high rigger's duties included hanging the huge pulleys--three feet across and two thousand pounds--that carried the cable, and setting the guy lines that anchored the spar tree from all sides in order to keep it from being pulled over by the tremendous loads it would be supporting. It was a job that required an unusual combination of raw courage, gymnastic strength, and technical skill; the success of a logging operation hung, literally, on the competence of its high rigger."
and
"It is always amazing to consider the things a man will risk his life for, and the promise of a case of beer on Friday could mean the difference between life and death. But as the machines got bigger, more powerful, and more expensive to own and operate, the expectations only rose. Neil McKay remembers an enormous machine from the 1920s called the Washington Flyer; it was a steam donkey eighteen feet long by eleven feet wide; it rode on a ninety-foot sled made from logs that were five feet in diameter, and it could work 3,500 feet of two-inch skyline cable. "It was a monstrous goddamn thing," recalls McKay; "you could clear a whole mountainside with it." And so they did, the gear running so hard that pulleys and cables sometimes glowed red hot and set fire to the surrounding woods."
Cheers.
Couple quick excerpts.
"If you run across an old photo of a man with an ax perched high in a tree, you are not looking at a faller, you are looking at the far rarer high rigger. Like the steelworkers who build skyscrapers, these men were a breed apart; they were the ones who prepared the spar trees to run high-lead cable. A high rigger's duties included hanging the huge pulleys--three feet across and two thousand pounds--that carried the cable, and setting the guy lines that anchored the spar tree from all sides in order to keep it from being pulled over by the tremendous loads it would be supporting. It was a job that required an unusual combination of raw courage, gymnastic strength, and technical skill; the success of a logging operation hung, literally, on the competence of its high rigger."
and
"It is always amazing to consider the things a man will risk his life for, and the promise of a case of beer on Friday could mean the difference between life and death. But as the machines got bigger, more powerful, and more expensive to own and operate, the expectations only rose. Neil McKay remembers an enormous machine from the 1920s called the Washington Flyer; it was a steam donkey eighteen feet long by eleven feet wide; it rode on a ninety-foot sled made from logs that were five feet in diameter, and it could work 3,500 feet of two-inch skyline cable. "It was a monstrous goddamn thing," recalls McKay; "you could clear a whole mountainside with it." And so they did, the gear running so hard that pulleys and cables sometimes glowed red hot and set fire to the surrounding woods."
Cheers.
