... narrow gauge getting the old growth to the sawmills? Most of the lower's rivers are too narrow and winding to float logs.
| Gradually, largely because it can transport wood year-around, trucking has replaced the river drive as a way of supplying the paper industry with its growing demand for wood pulp. “It was just gtting more and more difficult to drive the volume we needed,” explained Arthur Stedman, the assistant woodlands manager for Scott's Northeast operations. “It's just more economic to go by truck.” Scott had decided back then, he said, to build its new kratt-process pulp mill at Hinkley, 13 miles upriver, and to use tree-length wood that, because of the power dams, can no longer be sent down the river. The plant will handle some 520,000 cords of pulpwood a year, about 1,500 more a day than the old mill. | . . . | In the old days, the woodsmen, clad in layers of red flannel shirts and caulked boots, lived in rough camps irt the woods. Lumber was cut in the summer and fall. With the winter, snow was packed down to form roads and the felled trees were hauled out by horses and stacked, surrounded by booms, on frozen lakes. When the thaw came, the rafts of logs were towed to the outlets and dumped into the running water, joined by other logs set along tributaries. In boats or sometimes standing on the wood, the men would work with poles or peavy hooks, a pole with a spike and clamp arrangement used to turn logs over, to prevent jamups. A jam, which would sometimes take dynamite to loosen, could unleash tremendous, sometimes fatal force. The logs would be caught by booms set below and eventually fed into a mill. Today, huge new mechanical harvestors are beginning to be used in the woods here. They run a hydraulic device up a tree, shearing the limbs, then snip off the base, working around the clock, three shifts a day. Skinners pull the trunks out of the woods and devices called stackers can unload a truck of tree-length lumber in three minutes. “I suppose you can have a lot of nostalgia,” said Mr. Stedman. “But the good old days had some disadvantages. I guess I don't miss the old iceman” |
Why are the putting planks down like that?A few reasons. In wet seasons the forest floor can be unpassable for hikers in spots. Deep mud and large puddles. Those plank runs also help preserve the forest floor and flora present. My wife and I always joke that it's not a real Maine trail unless it has "planks" in some part. They can be real buggers if in shady spots that let them get slimy and thus super slippery. Some builders crosshatch them with chainsaws, some staple on chicken wire, all in attempts to give at least passable grip when wet. I was in PRR's neighborhood last weekend on a beautiful trail that had plank sections like this as well as some impressively built wooden bridges over a stream and boulders. I theorize there must be retired engineer types residing there that volunteered time with the trail crew and owners to design them.
Thanks Shoeman.. I haven't seen anything like that out here in CO, not that planking doesn't exist here.Colorado... sure looks like heaven in the mountains to me. But I don't do vertical so well anymore. But we're going there someday for sure.