Breaking Out
Above: Amazing 1.5-metre DBH Spruce and Hemlock in a mixed species stand. one day and as we became airborne he commented “how long has that bear been there”. We were totally unaware that it was there, about 100 yards behind us. I carried the semi-automatic short barreled shotgun the next day and so became the gun BEARer. Peckerhead was a US Army trained pilot and had seen service in Vietnam. Dallas needed to return to mainland USA and was keen to take a salmon home with him for his wife, Nori. Early afternoon the day before his departure saw us trolling for a fish but we constantly hooked up seaweed, of which there was an abundance. We just couldn’t avoid fouling our lures. Our endeavours were interrupted momentarily by a seemingly massive whale surfacing for air within 100 yards of us – any whale seemed huge to me. We eventually did catch a fish for Dallas to take home. I asked Dallas if I could borrow his selfprotection device, a handgun, the calibre of which I’ve forgotten, while he was absent from camp in case I came across any bears (I didn’t, thankfully). He willingly agreed and by the time he returned and the gun was handed back, the ammunition count had diminished – for good reason. After work one evening, I was lure fishing off the stern
of the barge catching a dozen Dolly Varden which are a sea trout – fiesty wee fish of 2-to-3lb and fine sport – and needed to fire off a few warning shots. I spent three glorious weeks in that environment and the differences between logging in New Zealand and up on the Pacific North West are many. Over there, it still feels like pioneer logging in many respects, because these are all natural forests, not plantations and it’s like being one of the first to set foot there. Trees are typically one metre in diameter and much, much larger than anything we log here in New Zealand and you can get threeto-five long logs per stem. Where possible, trees are cut (bucked) to length on slopes that defy a Kiwi logger’s comprehension – a very skilled undertaking. They don’t have skids as we understand them and most extraction is via cable, even on relatively flat land, with extracted logs accumulated at road edge for loading. Trucks are loaded by track-based boom loaders with a very long reach, so they can recover any logs escaping over the road edge. I recall that the attention to full diameter square cut log ends was shabby by NZ
standards, but OK by theirs. Often barely half diameter square cut. I believe this is because the wood is so much more valuable so as little waste as possible is made. After my three-week stay I departed by floatplane back to Juneau, on to Seattle, then over the Arctic Circle and Greenland to Heathrow to rejoin my wife and spend four weeks touring the UK. My Alaskan experience is one that remains a wonderful memory and I’m forever grateful to Dallas for making it happen. There were times that I struggled. There seemed to be all manner of pesky insects constantly sucking your blood – mosquitoes, sandflies, no-seeums. You were always aware that there was something out in the forests that could make a meal of you in a much bigger way. And the high humidity and short night darkness hours meant that I never slept too well. However, the sheer beauty (I took a couple of hundred photographs) of the state, the animal presence, and the work experience made for a very special memory for me. Dallas’s operation had a further three months to be completed and the volumes were then to be tendered/auctioned for the real loggers to come in. That would have been a mammoth task. NZL
T O
52 NZ LOGGER | April 2019
Logger Logger Logger