Kennys Loggin – Tree Pullers, Sawlogs, and Conk Knots

Jul 17, 2024 - one year ago

With a company as big as M&B, there were always special projects going. Loggers were very innovative when it came to getting more production. One of the first special projects I got involved with was the Tree Puller.

Kennys Loggin – Tree Pullers, Sawlogs, and Conk Knots — *Photo courtesy Gordie Lee Collection*

They were trying to eliminate trees and debris from entering the streams and lakes. Len Audets’ dad was the inventor of this project. He got an old crummy and cut the back half off of the box. In there he mounts a winch and motor to pull trees over. I was working with Len Audet and his dad on this one. We had Stan Lowe as an operator and sometimes Kenny Taylor. We had a CO2 rifle with a harpoon-like thing fitted over the barrel. The idea was to shoot the string attached over a limb so we could pull up an extension to hook to the tree. Once this was done, we got the operator to tighten up the line so the fallers could fall the tree away from the water. This was pretty time consuming. One of the fallers, Gus Dobos, was looking at his watch, frustrated with the pace. Finally he said, “Get the hell out of the way!” and proceeded to wedge and fall the rest of the trees. “Enough of the BS,” he said.

I was working with Bill Gerluk and Sid Attfield down by the Driftwood Restaurant at Oyster River. This area had been logged years ago, but there were lots of sawlog cedar trees that weren’t big enough to be cut down by hand fallers. A helicopter brought the logs to roadside, where we used highway trucks. The logs were just covered with wispy branches. The loads had to be clean on the outside, so Sid and I spent lots of time cutting them off. Eventually, we chose the really clean logs for Bill to load, keeping the not so clean logs on the inside.

We even worked a couple of Saturdays and Carl Parker would come and help us. On Fridays one of us would go over to the restaurant and get Chinese food for lunch.

I was working with Bill Gerluk down in Iron River on the old haul road, where the first aid shack was at one time. The helicopter had been logging some single stem trees or “jerking” they called it. The grapple on the helicopter was designed to grab the tree from the side. A tree climber would go up the tree limbing and topping it. Later, a faller would put the falling cuts in the tree and the helicopter would come along, snap it off, and take it to the landing. It was really nice wood; broomstick size or better. Bill and I would measure and buck them into logs. We would get four or five fat truck loads a day.

One day I noticed a “conk knot” which was a type of rot. The inside of the log would not be merchantable wood. The wind would come along and blow these trees snapping them off where the conk knots were. It would be very dangerous for anybody to be working above these knots.

Bill got on the radio and called the foreman. When he came we told him about this problem. Immediately he called the Canadian Air Crane’s foreman and he came over had a look. He took off right away and went to get someone to host a seminar for the tree climbers on how to recognize conk knots.

This was a cool job for Bill and I. But it didn’t last, someone with more seniority bumped me, back to pulling rigging.

Ken Wilson worked in the logging industry in B.C. for over 50 years. Ken is a regular contributor to Supply Post newspaper with his column “Kenny’s Loggin’”, and resides on Vancouver Island, B.C.