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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 22:24:41 :
In Reply to: Re: winching posted by Jerry in Idaho on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 17:53:05 :
I don't think I'd have the nerve to try such big logs with any of my trucks smaller than the M35. That's a heavy log, and if it snags on a stump or a rock, something expensive is likely to break.
A lot of people have been skidding logs for a long time. Most of the time, they had to outsmart the load rather than overpower it. All the cedars of Lebanon and all the oaks of Olde England were logged out by muscle power. The best techniques depend on the available power and the ground conditions, but the basic principles never change -- number one is to keep the front end from digging into the ground. Lots of ways have been invented to do it -- a very short hitch to a team or a tractor, a "logging bell", an separate arch (often used in cat logging in coast old growth in the early days), "big wheels" (used in the Michigan) all manner of home-brew arches on the backs of cats and trucks, and of course high lead logging with spar trees, power towers, or Idaho jammers, which sometimes lift the logs clear off the ground but usually just keep one end in the air. Number two is anything else to reduce friction and "sticktion" -- chopping the corners off the front end with an ax, making sure all the limb stubs are flush, skidding on smooth skid trails, and best of all skidding on hard-packed snow or ice roads in the winter.
The trouble with any kind of skidding except on snow, is that it tears up the ground. This is a real problem on steep hillsides because the skid trails quickly become gullies, but it's also bad on the flats. If you care about the long-term health of your land, you'll try to lift and carry logs, rather than skidding them, whenever possible. If you have to skid, you'll do it in the winter and you'll avoid soft ground or steep hills. If I wanted to get logs out of a boggy place like that, I'd either try to float them out in the spring when the water is deep and I could just wade in and pull them by hand, or if the water never gets deep, get them all bucked and decked during the summer, and then skid them out in the winter when it's all frozen up and I could drive right to them. No sense fighting with a swamp when merely waiting for a better season will make it easy.
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