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Going Deep And Weird In The Post-Industrial Forest

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The following is a guest post by Rob L. Thornton

 

North Idaho is a weird place, and the deeper you go the weirder it gets. I spent a week this past June going deep and weird, the end result of about six months of research into the history of our logging industry back in the early 1900s.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about what they did to the old-growth woods back then, and still do. But despite that, I found myself fascinated with the totally insane engineering required to pull it all off: Steam donkeys, logging trains, river drives, chutes, plumes—back in the day, getting trees to the mill took a Rube Goldberg machine of heavy equipment, each stage more hazardous than the last. I tried to wrap my head around it, even making a website to illustrate some of the process and the machinery involved.

Then a local old-timer dropped a bomb.

“You know,” he said, “a lot of that stuff is still out there in the forest.”

The post-industrial woodlands were calling, and I just had to go. So I did—camping out of my Jeep and toting my rifle over hill and dale in search of lost machinery and other relics. And boy, did I find them. I mentioned logging trains, right? Well here’s one of them—the Climax 103, to be exact.

It was common practice to send logs back to the mill by train, and they laid track all over North Idaho for that exact purpose. In some cases, that meant building trellises over ravines, like the one in the picture below. In others, it meant cutting a line straight up a mountain, and straight down the other side, and using miles of cable to raise and lower the trains—because no train was getting up a 45° incline under its own steam.

The story goes that Climax 103 broke free about halfway up and came down like, well, a freight train. You can imagine the commotion—people jumping out of the way and hollering down the mountainside for others to do the same. At the bottom of the slope it jumped the tracks, jumped the creek, and tumbled end-over-end for a couple hundred yards. And there it lies today, a massive testament to engineering, or foolhardiness, or both.

Probably both.

Remains of a logging railroad trellis.

I’d heard about logging trains and old trellises and dilapidated equipment out in the woods, but I still wasn’t prepared for it. At first, I thought it was the scale of these relics: 40-foot-tall structures, steam engines weighing god-knows-how-many tons, spools of inch-thick yarding cable nuzzled into the earth.

But as I continued to search, I realized it was more than that. Scale matters, but only to highlight the already-stark juxtaposition of machinery quietly populating an otherwise-wild landscape. Something else was going on here, even if I didn’t know just what.

Spool of log-yarding cable.

The more stuff I found, the more that feeling — whatever it was — set in. Some might call it spiritual, but I wouldn’t have gone that far, at least until my last day in the woods.

I was moving up a trail and looking for an old steam donkey—a massive wood-fired engine that reeled in logs on miles of steel cable. These “donkeys” were often taken deep into the woods, and were almost never taken out. I’d seen bits and pieces of them earlier in the week — that spool of cable in the picture above is from a steam donkey — but nothing like what came into view after the final bend in the path:

Incredible, surreal, breathtaking — those words and more came to mind, and I stopped dead in my tracks. Like everyone gathered around the campfire on this site, I’ve thought a lot about a post-civilization future and try to prepare for however much of it might play out in my lifetime. But that future had just been guesswork and projection, until now.

This steam donkey was already in a world after civilization crumbled. All of the logging equipment I’d found was. All week I’d been stumbling upon artifacts from a lost civilization — our own. The future I’d spent so time imagining? I was looking right at it.

I couldn’t help but wonder what future generations might think about this steam donkey—an object, perhaps, of fear and worship, a mystery to be understood through myths not yet told. Here with this donkey, I wished I could hear those future myths myself.

RLT, signing out.

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Jim Cornelius

Jim Cornelius

Born in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Jim Cornelius grew up dreaming of distant frontiers, of mountain men, long hunters, African explorers. His older brother gave him a tattered copy of Allan W. Eckert’s The Frontiersmen, a biography of Simon Kenton, and the twig was bent. Graduated from...

Comments

  1. Matthew says

    Great article, Rob! There is a certain surrealism to seeing those machines in the forest. Despite the major logging, it seems the forest won.

    Reply

  3. Lane Batot says

    Yes, haunting, but beautiful. I experienced something akin to this deep, deep in the Southern Appalachians years ago, finding abandoned, rusting, old logging equipment in isolated spots that the forest had reclaimed. To me, being something of a “primitive” at heart(since birth! Despite every effort of the modern world and “education” to conform me otherwise!), and the fact that–since childhood– my favorite part of Kipling’s “The Jungle Books” being the “Letting in of the jungle” in the Mowgli stories, you could perhaps understand WHY such a sight actually gives me hope for the planet–Nature will reclaim and heal itself just given the opportunity. It has always seemed far wiser to me to invest in a philosophy of accepting one’s self as a PART of Nature, as opposed to trying to conquer or just artificially(greedily) exploit it. Because Nature WILL win, in the end–we can only destroy ourselves with our modern lifestyles that refuse to recognize this–and despite the tragedy and unfairness of our taking out so many other life forms in the process, Nature WILL recover and start over, even if all that’s left is Desert. A lot of things can live in a Desert.…..

    Reply

      • RLT says

        I think the fact that there’s no plastic, rubber, etc might have something to do with it. Wood rots, and iron and steel rust back into the earth.

        Reply

  4. RLT says

    “It has always seemed far wiser to me to invest in a philosophy of accepting one’s self as a PART of Nature, as opposed to trying to conquer or just artificially(greedily) exploit it.”

    Amen. These machines were put there by men with the second philosophy. You can see how it’s worked out for them. Thanks!

    Reply

    • Lane Batot says

      .…I don’t doubt, though, that those involved in the harvesting/destruction of this forest ecosystem got about what they expected out of it(in sales of timber, and jobs) and moved on–at least Nature was allowed to reclaim it. And probably most of the humans involved never thought twice about their destruction, and are now long gone themselves. I DO prefer that Native American philosophy–however they came to develop it–that we humans must try and consider what our actions will affect for 7 generations into the future, and if it is too destructive and possibly impoverishes any of those succeeding generations, you JUST DON’T do it! But just try and tell THAT to our present U. S.A. guvmint! That are systematically working to destroy many of the few supposedly inviolate natural sanctuaries we have left. Just makes you want to pull out yer long buried monkey wrench, and blow the dust off’n it.…

      Reply

  5. Rick Schwertfeger says

    Terrific adventure and article, R.L. Lots to think about.
    Different ecosystem entirely, but two folks, Jaylyn and John, do a similar thing in their explorations of the Mojave Desert. They have a web site — https://www.thedesertway.com — and a cool Facebook page — https://www.facebook.com/TheDesertWay/. Lots of explorations of abandoned mines, settlements, etc. The fact that the logging stuff you explored is hidden makes me feel a bit more like it’s part of an industrial apocalypse.
    Really enjoyed the article. Thanks.

    Reply

  6. Carl says

    Excellent! I am a 3rd generation logger in north Idaho. There is a lot of ripe history here, from the wobblies and strike breakers of the early 1900’s, to the forest management practices of today. Great work.

    Reply

  7. Padre says

    Good read! In the Allegheny National Forest in NW PA there are pockets of heavy equipment left over from the oil boom days of approximately the same era as the logging equipment you found. Rusted horizontal pumpjacks still connected by rods and cables to a collapsed pumphouse where an engine once pushed and pulled for a whole field’s worth of wells. It’s a treasure trove to explore and investigate it all.

    And now the fracking boom of the past decade has put another generation of machinery out in the woods to be grown over and discovered by the more inquisitive of our descendants.

    Reply

  8. Sherry says

    NW CA another area of archival logging metal, trestles, corduroy rail roads. Trail riding/running to get off the beaten path, you could stumble across remnants. Also when working treeplanting contracts. One time our all-women’s planting crew set up camp in an opening where there were 20–30 single metal cots with springs, lined out in rows. I totally agree that there’s a spiritual element to some of it. Other times there was logger humor — like an old car they put up on top of a high stump & since then lots of huckleberry had grown in.

    Reply

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