Firewood anyone ?

Locally, none of the wood cut for burning gets as large as the largest wood piled, it is mainly new growth, but I spent much of last summer hauling wood larger than the smaller wood in that picture. Much of it was over 12" across. These were all sticks being cut to lumber. Cutting it is trivial compared to actually carrying it.

-Cliff
 
"when wood was cheap"

Part of me hurts when I see those pictures but we built the better part of this country out of wood. If we had trees like that with todays technology we'd make it go a lot farther.

there are still some big ones left, my dad is almost 6 feet.
dadbytree.jpg
 
I work for a hores logging outfit several times a year as a faller (and a yarder operator on some jobs). Those pics are just amazing and there are tons more on the net. I'm grateful that cameras were such a big deal back then that the crews would stop and pose for the phtographer.
 
There's still plenty of wood like that in west coast forests. The middle elevation forests of the Sierra, where I spend a lot of time, have plenty of sugar pines that are about 200' tall and 4-6' diameter. And a lot of ponderosa pine and white fir that are almost as big.

I believe there are forests in the pacific NW where the trees regularly get even larger - trees like douglas fir, grand fir, noble fir, etc.

And then there are the redwoods and sequoias. I went on a 10-mile loop trail through the Redwood Mountain grove in Sequoia National Park yesterday. Plenty of trees over 20' diameter, with a few in the 30-35' range.

Near where we go every year for our family camping trip there is a lot of logging going on. Interestingly, they are taking the ponderosa, and leaving all of the sugar pine, incense cedar, white fir, etc. Evidently, the ponderosa is worth more.
 
Could a pile like that really be pulled by only two horses? Seems to me that no matter how big and bad those horses are, they couldn't get that thing moving on the flat, much less up an incline. Is it just for show?
 
Nope! That was what they did. The logs were loaded on sleds with huge wooden runners that sometimes had iron strips on the bottom. The roads they hauled on were actually two ruts that were continually iced over. They had a crew that had a big sled with a water tank on it that traveled the roads at night or real early morning (before the loggers hit the woods) that would spray water on the ruts to freeze and create the ice "roads" they hauled on. They had wood stove heaters to keep the tanks from freezing over too. I believe the guys that drove the water haulers were called "road monkeys". Imagine, everything heavy was done with horses! All the lifting, hauling, pulling and transportation. What a hard life. No wonder they died in their fifties!
 
I certainly believe that they did all that haulling with horses -- I just find it amazing that they could haul that load with a team of just two. Seems to me that they'd need a lot bigger team than that, but then everything I know about horses could be written on a postage stamp. In crayon.
 
Note when you are pulling something sliding you are only pulling the frictional weight, waxed runners on dry snow have a very low coefficient of friction and would reduce the amount of wood by a factor of about 25. Thus for every 25 logs there is in reality one of them being pulled. You can haul *much* greater loads of wood in the winter than you can in the fall when the runners are on wood/dirt/rock. Locally the slides were never however loaded above what a man could pile.

-Cliff
 
Wait a minute am I reading this right ? 30-35 foot diameters ? Now I have heard of a hole in the base of a tree big enough to drive a car through but 35 foot diameter is huge .
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Note when you are pulling something sliding you are only pulling the frictional weight, waxed runners on dry snow have a very low coefficient of friction and would reduce the amount of wood by a factor of about 25. Thus for every 25 logs there is in reality one of them being pulled.
-Cliff
Click to expand...
I just can't get my brain wrapped around two horses hauling that load up any kind of incline. Some quick estimation: (I can't help myself. I'm an engineer) Assuming the guys in the picture are about 6' tall those logs look to be about 12 feet long and between 1.5 and 2 feet in diameter, on average. Let's go with the lesser. I count 54 logs. Assume further that they're pine (0.5 g/cm^3) and you have a minimum weight of around 35,000 lbs being pulled by animals that go (according to some google searches) around 1800 lbs each. Go with the 2 foot average diameter and that goes up to over 60,000 lbs.

I assume there was some sort of breaking mechanism for the downhills, but what did they do for going up an incline? Friction or no, that's a hell of a load to be hauling. Maybe this particular load was just to go down a gentle slope?

I don't know why I'm so intrigued by this picture. I may have to go break into some draft-horse forum and ask them, unless one of you can clue me in and put me out of my misery.
 
Kevin the grey said:
Wait a minute am I reading this right ? 30-35 foot diameters ? Now I have heard of a hole in the base of a tree big enough to drive a car through but 35 foot diameter is huge .
Click to expand...

Yep, come out here and I'll show them to you. Saturday after we did the Redwood Canyon loop, we cooled our heels sitting on the bench by the General Grant tree (kind of crowded after the trail we were on because it is right by a parking lot, but it is a magnificent tree). It is the third largest tree in the world (the first and second largest trees are nearby). Anyway, it is 40' diameter at the base and 267' tall. Not as tall as the coast redwoods (the tallest of those is 368'), but much more massive. It is 20' diameter 100' above the ground, 12' diameter 200' above the ground. And the Sherman tree is even larger, it is still 16' diameter 200' above the ground. The Sherman tree had, until this winter when it came down, a branch 130' above the ground that was almost 7' diameter. It still has other very large branches, that was just the biggest one.

Winter before last a medium-sized sequoia (meaning about 15' diameter) came down after a heavy snow and completely flattened a jeep cherokee that was parked on the side of the road. Imagine coming back to your vehicle after a hike to find it turned into a thin pile of scrap metal.

BTW - Rededge77, that is a picture of loggers cutting a sequoia. I have seen a lot of pictures like that. Some of the surviving records show that it would take a two or three man crew up to a week to cut one down. You can't do that any more, cutting sequoias has been banned for a hundred years.
 
Imagine the skills these men musta had . Kerfing , sharpening , reparation .
Above this is the judgement they must have posessed . I imagine some days just making it home in one piece was a job in itself .
 
Joel Stave,
The horses could pull the weight because horses don't know how to do math. Well. there WAS a horse who could count, but he was in show buisness.
 
Joel Stave said:
I just can't get my brain wrapped around two horses hauling that load up any kind of incline.
Click to expand...

Probably not because you start lifting a significant percentage of the actual weight. On flat ground, on snow, one 50 lbs dog can pull 2500 lbs over 25 feet in a minute, yes those are actual numbers. I'd be curious how they stacked it.

-Cliff
 
Lambertiana , If I ever make it out that way we,ll take a look . You know I have heard strong men of today cry that our anscestors could never have pulled 140 pound bows because these modern men cannot . When I see the pics of those boys working like that I understand that we are (or most of us) just not the same breed . Too much McDconalds I guess ,
 
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