The four traditional elements—air, fire, earth and water—are of significant importance when it comes to fire control and slashburning. Air, in the form of wind applied to a fire, can have disastrous consequences. Water, when added to earth, creates mud, which can cause problems when heavy machinery encounters it. Fortunately mud isn’t encountered too often during firefighting operations in the dry summer months, so wheeled equipment rarely gets mired down. At other times of the year, equipment that runs on steel tracks is more appropriate for the ground conditions. This is when bulldozers become invaluable.
The bulldozer, or Cat, is an ingenious invention, as it can climb steep slopes and go across soft ground that would defeat any wheeled vehicle. They’re not invincible, though, and when I started working in the woods, I soon discovered that when one gets stuck, it’s really stuck. Sometimes it can take hours to get one out, particularly if there aren’t any stumps close by to enable it to winch itself out. This was the case when a large Cat that was building fireguard on a steep block at Hope Creek got into difficulties while I was keeping an eye on it. The few stumps that were within reach of the winch cable were quite inadequate and popped out like corks as the operator tried to extricate himself using a combination of winch and reverse gear on the tracks, leaving the Cat bogged down deeper in the mud.
It took us several hours to get the machine unstuck, particularly since we didn’t have a chainsaw to cut pieces of log to place under the tracks. We had to scour the hillside for chunks of wood that were big enough for the job but light enough to be dragged down to the mired machine. The operator would push the blade down so that the body of the Cat was lifted off the ground, and we’d crawl under the tracks and fit the logs into place. That wasn’t a lot of fun, what with the mud dripping off the tracks that were suspended ominously above our backs and the swarm of blackflies waiting for us to emerge. They didn’t seem to mind the language we were using each time the blade was raised and the body of the machine sank back into the mud, taking all our hard work with it, but they probably couldn’t hear it over the noise of the engine. Each time I was underneath those tracks I’d wonder what would happen if the hydraulics suddenly let go, but eventually I decided that perhaps being crushed by thirty-five tons of metal might be preferable to being eaten alive by bloodsucking insects.
Getting a bulldozer unstuck from mud was a tricky business, but some operators were masters of the art. Ron was the best, having had much practice operating his Cat in the West Columbia loonshit. That stuff’s like muskeg, and once the machine’s tracks break through the surface and start digging down, you’d swear it’s bottomless.
Ron’s Cat became stuck while he was doing some work at the top end of Quartz Creek on a Friday afternoon just before the start of a long weekend. Not that the time and date made the mud any deeper, but anyone working nearby was probably headed for town to start the weekend, with the volume of their two-way radio turned down so they wouldn’t have to listen to tales of woe over the air. (If there should be an emergency situation, of course, they’d respond at once. But what classified as an emergency at the start of a long weekend was debatable.) We worked on getting the Cat out of its predicament, using both the main winch and the pony winch, but kept uprooting all the stumps I set chokers on so that the winch lines could be attached. One line snapped as I was inside the cab of the machine and nearly took off a few of my fingers. I’d been gripping the heavy steel grille at the back of the protective cage for support when I decided to change position, and the moment I took my hand away, the end of the severed steel cable whipped back and smacked against the outside of the cage. We were finally down to the last two stumps within reach of the winch lines, and I was thinking we’d have to get another machine sent in to pull us out, when suddenly we began to emerge from the primeval ooze. We barely made it, and I noticed how one of the stumps we were attached to was being lifted half out of the ground as Ron pulled on the pony winch at the same time as he operated the main winch with his other hand and worked the throttle with his foot. It was a masterly performance.
I’m eternally grateful for how he saved my neck the day we were fixing a road washout that had been caused by a blocked culvert. I was standing in the water, clearing debris at the intake end, when the culvert suddenly started flowing and the suction pulled me toward the jagged steel opening. Ron saw what had happened and instantly swung the Cat blade toward me so I’d have something to grab onto before I was sucked in and probably decapitated on the way through the pipe.
After getting a Cat stuck one too many times in the West Columbia loonshit, I decided it would be best to have them working in pairs, as this really wasn’t any more expensive than having a single machine get stuck and then being forced to haul in another to pull it out. This worked well, except when both machines got stuck at the same time, which happened when we were constructing fireguards around a wildfire near Double Eddy Creek that had been started by a lightning strike. The fire was burning in logging slash and had been hit with a load of fire retardant from an air tanker, which often doesn’t do a lot of good in heavy slash, as the fire can simply burn underneath the retardant coating and pop up again when it gets beyond it. This fire had done exactly that and was heading toward the D8, which was the first machine to get stuck. The other machine was a D7 and was in the process of assisting its bigger brother when it too got stuck. The fire was getting closer all the time, and as rescue efforts grew more urgent, I was trying to estimate the extent of the insurance claim should both machines not make it out in time. They finally got themselves extricated after a lot of track churning, winching and cursing, which saved a lot of grief and paperwork.
Sometimes a bulldozer would get stuck in the most unexpected places, as I discovered when I got a radio call informing me that a machine working at the top of Goodfellow Creek had fallen into a hole that had suddenly opened up in the middle of a large landing. There were no trees or stumps anywhere within reach of the winch cable, and I ended up sending another Cat on a lowbed all the way out to the site. Once it was there and unloaded, the rescue only took a few minutes, but the bill for the lowbed move was substantial, as it was a long way there and back.
Whenever a Cat got stuck while it was working for me, I would sign for the time it took getting itself out, unless the operator got stuck through his own stupidity or deliberately ignored my instructions. This only happened once, to an operator who was sent to build fireguard for me against my protests. I didn’t want to use him, as I knew he was overconfident in his ability to build guard on steep ground, and on site he refused to follow the route I’d laid out on the cutblock, with the result that he spent a few hours wallowing in the mud. It didn’t make any difference in the end as it turned out, as he was a good friend of one of the company staff, who overruled my decision to reduce the timesheet by the hours the Cat was stuck.
Once or twice, when the operator wasn’t around, I had to borrow a parked Cat or skidder to fix up access to a mixing site on a block we were going to burn. The owners didn’t mind as long as they weren’t rolled over and they were put back when I’d finished with them. Usually the keys were left in the machines when they were parked, but it didn’t matter too much if they weren’t, as someone had kindly given me a key that would work on all the bulldozers and skidders made by the Caterpillar company.
From time to time a Cat would have to take a shortcut across a river, which left it clean and sparkling as it emerged at the other side but probably didn’t enhance our standing with the Ministry of Environment. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to get across a river, as was the case when we tried to get a Cat to the other side of the Incomappleux River (locally known as Fish River) south of Glacier National Park. We were unable to determine how deep the water was due to all the suspended silt, but the operator figured it would be safe to cross. I crossed my fingers as he started in and watched as the front end suddenly plunged into deep water and the machine was enveloped in a cloud of steam. The operator barely managed to back out in time, and we decided to wait until the river level dropped before trying again.
Things didn’t work out quite so well when the company D7 Cat ended up in Kinbasket Lake while I was working at Tsar Creek. The machine had been rebuilding the ramp used for unloading trailers for the logging camp we were setting up. The lake level was slowly rising, and the Cat had accidentally fallen in. This was the same machine I’d been borrowing on weekends when the operator had gone back to town so that I could teach myself how to drive a bulldozer. Now it was in a real predicament—only part of the cab and winch were showing above the muddy water, and there was no other Cat within miles we could use to pull it out. Eventually a D8 was sent up by barge, along with a scuba diver, and the drowned Cat was retrieved. The scuba diver was needed to attach the tow cable and release the brakes that had been thoughtfully applied by the operator as the machine headed for its plunge. Somewhat to everyone’s amazement, the latter hadn’t even got his feet wet when he abandoned his machine as it slid into the lake.
Moving loaded logging trucks across bridges could also lead to sudden immersion if the bridge was past the end of its working life. This happened to a truck crossing a bridge over the Blaeberry River when the spruce stringers (main support logs) suddenly snapped under the weight, dropping the truck with its driver and logs into the water. The driver swam to shore, and the truck was salvaged, but the accident led to closer inspection of all the other bridges. Fir logs were stronger than spruce but were more valuable when sent to the mill, so they weren’t always wasted on bridge construction. Other species like pine were even less strong and generally weren’t used, with one notable exception.
One day I was watching a loaded logging truck drive over a bridge across the Fish River while standing beside a forest officer and the logging contractor who’d built the bridge. This bridge had been constructed with cottonwood stringers, and as the driver gingerly drove across, the whole structure slowly sagged until it was almost touching the water. The forest officer and I watched in horrid fascination, expecting the stringers to snap and drop the truck into the river at any moment, but it made it across safely and the bridge sprang back to its original profile. When it was suggested that perhaps coniferous logs would make stronger and safer stringers, the contractor explained that cottonwood had properties that made it ideal for bridges—it was supple, much the way an archer’s bow was. In the logging business, an ideal temporary bridge is one that’s cheap to build and lasts until five minutes after the last load of logs is hauled across and it’s no longer needed, whereupon it will self-destruct into the river and save the time and effort of removal (unless the stringers are worth salvaging).
Our tankers managed to get stuck from time to time, usually when they had a full load of water, and often in the worst possible location. The Kenworth got bogged down while turning on a narrow road in pouring rain one day, and it was impossible to tow it out, as it was sitting crosswise on the road. After much wasted effort, I ended up driving to town to borrow a heavy chain hoist from the millwrights, and with the help of it and two come-alongs attached to nearby trees, we finally got the tanker unstuck.
The situation was a little more precarious when the same tanker became stuck while it was being filled up next to a small lake. It turned out the ground was softer than it appeared, and as the tank filled up, the tanker started sinking. Unfortunately only the wheels on one side sank in, so the whole machine began to tip sideways, to the point where it looked like it might fall on its side. We ended up draining the water back into the lake and then getting a tractor from a nearby farm to drag the tanker out of its predicament.
Pickup trucks got stuck in the mud more often; at least, it seemed mine did. An example was when I was backing down a nasty piece of road inside a cutblock at the top of Symond Creek in the Beaverfoot Valley. There’d been a recent snowfall, which had started to melt, and this added to the natural slipperiness of the local mud that constituted the road surface. My truck ended up sliding sideways, coming to rest at a steep angle, and I ended up exiting through the passenger door. I was unable to trip the radio repeater from where I was, so I couldn’t call for someone to come and tow me out. Eventually I started walking out, and I trudged along the roads for eight miles before being picked up by one of the Woodlands staff who was out doing a little hunting. As the game season had just started, I hadn’t been inclined to take shortcuts through cutblocks, as there were generally a few trigger-happy idiots out driving around the Beaverfoot who wouldn’t know the difference between a human and a mule deer by the time they’d got halfway through their bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I drove back up with the crew the next day to rescue my truck, but it wasn’t long before a second pickup slid back to join the first in the mud. Fortunately we had a third vehicle with us and eventually managed to get everything pulled back onto the road again.
Sometimes the mud was even deeper and stickier, as it was where I got stuck on a bad section of road in upper Quartz Creek. Two other pickup trucks also got stuck in the process of trying to extricate me. We finally had to get a bulldozer that was constructing fireguard nearby to come and tow us all out, strung together like a charm bracelet.
You knew you were in trouble when the truck was so deep in the mud that you couldn’t get the doors open and would have to climb out a window. Fortunately by the time summer arrived, mud would be replaced by dust, which, while annoying, was a lot easier to live with. It probably didn’t do truck engines much good, particularly if their air cleaners weren’t changed regularly. When it got really bad, they’d need to be shaken out every day, but not many drivers were that diligent. When the nut and end plate for the air cleaner on the Kenworth tanker fell off onto the road, the driver didn’t see the need to do anything about it and continued driving in the clouds of dust. I ended up fabricating a temporary replacement plate from the end of an empty juice can and fixing it in position with a bit of wire. This enabled us to carry on for another few days until it too fell off.
Following another vehicle that was sending up a thick plume of dust could be unpleasant on a blazing-hot day, as you’d have to keep the windows closed, and the inside of the truck would soon reach near-sauna temperatures. It could also be most disconcerting if it turned out to be a loaded logging truck up ahead, as if you got too close there’d suddenly be logs appearing in the murk uncomfortably close to your windshield. Most of the time the logging trucks would pull over and let faster vehicles like pickups overtake them, unless for some reason they didn’t particularly like the person following.
The roads out in the woods were hard on pickup trucks, particularly since we’d often be driving up those that had been inactive for years when we were burning old landing piles. Washouts, rocks, logs and deep potholes all took a toll on vehicles, even though they were four-wheel-drive, and according to the claims of one Detroit manufacturer, “built tough.” A couple of weeks after I was assigned a brand new three-quarter-ton pickup, the clutch linkage fell apart while I was out in the woods. That was easy enough to fix with a paperclip I found lying on the floor of the truck, but it seemed an odd thing to happen to a truck that had supposedly been through a pre-delivery inspection quite recently. Other problems occurred now and then on that same truck. When I was driving out in the Beaverfoot late at night in a heavy downpour on my way to check for road washouts, the accelerator pedal suddenly went straight to the floor of its own accord, and the truck began to speed up rapidly. I couldn’t free the pedal with my foot, and I ended up switching off the ignition, which immediately affected the brakes and steering. Once I’d stopped, I lifted the hood and poked around to see if I could figure out what the problem was but soon gave up, as it was pitch dark and the rain was coming down in buckets. I slept in the truck until dawn, then had another go, hammering on various bits and pieces near the carburetor until I got things working again. I never did find out what had caused the problem, which never happened again, but from the sound of it, certain other vehicle models have experienced similar malfunctions.
I put twelve thousand hard miles on this truck in the first four months, since I tended to drive fast on the logging roads, where speed limits were unheard of in those days. I don’t think anyone ever beat my speed record on the A road in the Beaverfoot, and probably the same applies to the B road leading to Bush Harbour. After a while you get to know every pothole and which corners you can take at high speed with minimal sideways drift on the loose gravel. Consequently, I was rather hard on tires, and the purchasing department would use me to test any new brand they were considering. If I could get a year out of a set, the rest of the drivers would probably get at least two. Some tires didn’t even make it six months on my truck as I recall, but they must have been cheap imports.
I went through shocks rather fast as well, due to the effect of potholes encountered at high speed. Fortunately I was on good terms with the guys at the maintenance shop, as I’d drop off the occasional stack of skin magazines salvaged from the logging camps for their lunchtime reading pleasure. This meant they didn’t make a fuss whenever they were forced to screw, bolt or weld things back onto my truck whenever it went in for repair. One morning when I climbed into my truck after it had been serviced, I found a Do Not Start tag hanging from the steering wheel. When I asked what the problem was, they told me that one of the steering tie-rod ends had come loose and had been hanging on by only one thread. They seemed quite surprised that the truck had actually made it back to town in one piece.
Some problems were a bit more serious, as we discovered when I was travelling down to Fish River with one of the Woodlands staff. For some reason I was driving a pickup assigned to someone else in the company, and I discovered that the vehicle was behaving strangely when going around corners at high speed on the way to the Shelter Bay ferry. The truck kept trying to veer toward the ditch, and my passenger started accusing me of being a lousy driver. I told him that there was something wrong with the truck, but he didn’t believe me. We argued all the way to Shelter Bay and continued arguing as we were being loaded onto the ferry. Once parked, I decided to get to the bottom of things and lifted the hood to take a look. I got my passenger to turn the steering wheel as I peered into the engine compartment, and quickly discovered that the steering box was moving as the wheel turned because the truck frame was cracked.
When the welder back in town went to fix the damage, he discovered eleven more cracks in the frame. The person who was the principal driver was told that he’d been driving his truck too hard. He resented this accusation and went around the other trucks in the Woodlands fleet to see what condition they were in. He found cracks in other truck frames, which led to an official inspection of the entire fleet. It turned out that a number of other trucks had one or more cracks in their frames, and the problem was eventually blamed on driving on washboard and other bad road surfaces without weight in the back of the trucks. The bouncing and vibration were causing stress cracks at points in the frames where holes had been drilled.
We found out a bit more about stress and metal fatigue the day my partner and I forgot to take the pickup truck we were driving out of four-wheel-drive after coming out of a gravel road onto blacktop. This resulted in the rear U-joint disintegrating and the driveshaft bouncing along the road as we were doing seventy miles per hour down the Trans-Canada Highway. It was probably a good thing it wasn’t the front one, as it might have dug into the road with interesting results. We tied the loose driveshaft up and out of the way with a piece of rope, then carried on to town. Once back in the yard I removed the rope and wedged the driveshaft up underneath the truck, then drove slowly and carefully over to the mechanics’ shop. By a stroke of good fortune, the chief mechanic happened to be coming out the door just as I pulled in and applied the brakes, so he heard the driveshaft fall to the ground. After a quick inspection he congratulated me on my amazing luck, since the sudden failure occurred right there outside the shop.
I wasn’t alone when it came to problems like flat tires and flat batteries. A logging contractor’s crew bus wouldn’t start one morning, and we didn’t have any jumper cables. I ended up driving my pickup up to the crew bus so that the front bumpers touched, and then we connected the two positive battery terminals together with a steel choker. This actually worked, but the next time I tried to improvise like that, it wasn’t so successful. In a benevolent mood one day, I tried to assist a tourist whose vehicle wouldn’t start at an Arrow Lakes ferry landing. I cut off two lengths of barbed wire from the top of the fence surrounding a nearby structure, much to the tourist’s horror, and attempted to use them to connect my truck’s battery to his. Unfortunately it didn’t work, so the damage was all for naught.
I eventually purchased a cheap set of jumper cables with my own money and carried them around in the company truck. They were adequate for starting pickup trucks, but not designed for use on logging equipment, as I discovered the day we tried to use them to jump-start a Cat from a skidder. When the Cat operator tried to crank over his engine, the heavy current draw instantly melted the plastic coating on the cables, which fell onto the dirt like water dripping from a washing line. The warehouseman back in town was most sympathetic when I lamented my loss, and he sent me off to the nearby industrial supplier to get a new set made up from heavy-duty welding cable on the company’s tab.
It wasn’t just Cats, tankers and trucks that got into difficulties from time to time. One spring I went into the Glenogle Valley with my supervisor to check snow conditions. We had to run the company snowmobiles on gravel in places where the snow was gone from the logging road, but once we got higher up the snow was continuous. The other machine was up ahead of me, and when I got to a sharp corner in the road, I found its driver standing in the snow with no snowmobile anywhere in sight. He was speechless, and when I asked him where his machine was, all he could do was point over the bank. I looked down, and there it was: hung up in a spruce tree. It seems he’d approached the corner too fast and had bailed off at the last moment when he realized the snowmobile was going to fly off into space. We managed to get it down out of the tree but were unable to get it back up to the road, as the ground was too steep. It would have to be lowered down the hillside, then driven alongside the creek upstream to the next bridge crossing. We didn’t have any rope with us, so the two of us rode back to the trucks on the remaining snowmobile and returned the next day to salvage his machine.
We even managed to get a lowbed stuck—on the CPR main line, of all places. This was a serious matter, as the steel body of the lowbed trailer was effectively shorting across the train tracks, which might make it appear on the track monitoring system that a phantom train had suddenly appeared from nowhere. Normally the lowbeds had enough clearance to make it across the tracks without a problem, but this one was a low-slung unit we hadn’t used before. Fortunately I had a slight acquaintance with the local CPR Roadmaster, having met him from time to time at local functions, usually near the bar. I called him on the radio telephone to confess what we’d done and promise that we’d be clear of the tracks within a few minutes, while the lowbed driver frantically unloaded the Cat in order to take the weight off the trailer. The Roadmaster generously agreed to turn a blind eye to our situation but warned me that if it happened again there’d be the likelihood of a substantial fine, as track blockages of this kind affect train movements all along the line.
I spent a lot of time in my truck, as I’d have a lot of ground to cover in the burning season, what with taking readings from the weather stations and checking slash conditions on the various blocks slated for burning. I’d drive as much as five hundred miles in a day when our operations were widely spread out, and I got so tired sometimes that I’d hallucinate after working a few weeks without a break.
I was driving out of Bush River after many long days when I suddenly spotted a tree lying right across the logging road. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop, only to have it vanish into thin air. A mile or so later I saw another tree on the road and stopped again. By now I’d realized I was seeing things that weren’t there, so when I encountered the third tree hallucination, I sped right through it. After a while I started wondering if this was a good idea, as perhaps there might be a real tree on the road somewhere up ahead. The hallucinations got worse, and I started to see some really weird things at the side of the road: stumps turned into strange figures that writhed and twisted as they leered at me. Eventually I ended up pulling over to the side of the road and digging out the filthy sleeping bag that was jammed behind the seat. It was a US Forest Service disposable fireline sleeping bag that I’d scavenged some years before from the IFFS base, and I normally wouldn’t have crawled into it in daylight, as it harboured a variety of insect life. That day, however, I was happy to curl up inside it down in the dry ditch next to the truck and get a bit of sleep.
Slashburning crewcabs have the following special options, which are not found on regular pickup trucks:
- The floor is shaped like an ashtray and the dash is designed as a boot rest.
- Tire sidewalls are designed to allow for bouncing over logs, boulders and medium-sized roadkill.
- The exterior and interior never need cleaning, and the space below the seat is designed for the accumulation of food waste and empty beer cans.
- They can be driven up to one hundred miles with the low-oil-pressure light flashing.