A Life in the Woods: Bob Cunnngham, Logging Truck Driver

I had hauled for small contractors in the Lardeau but could never get on with Kootenay Forest Products. They kept bringing in trucks from other places such as Mission. The woods manager of that day, Al Larson, said to me, "You know. Bob, I just wish I had the say in who hires the contractors but I'm just looking after the woods operation. I'll tell you one thing. I have these poles over in the Crawford Bay area and if we don't get them out this year, the worms'll be in them and that'll be the end of it. So, if you want to go and look at that, that's all we have right now."

Kootenay Forest Products had given a pole contract way back up in Croasdaile Creek, which is very steep, but it was a wet spring and the road slid down a couple of hundred feet into Croasdaile Creek and disappeared, so thirty or forty thousand dollars worth of poles had been lying there for a year.

I met the contractor that had to get those poles down to the highway and we took a walking tour through there. When we came to this pole deck in the ravine, yes, there's room there and they had a good jammer capable of loading these poles. But there was a distance of two hundred yards or more where there was no road, just sheer rock face where this road had just slid away. There was a logging road a hundred yards up above where these poles were but it was built for hauling short logs so you can imagine the switchbacks were not necessarily wide enough and round enough for a load of hundred foot poles! So the only way out was up a skid trail to this road.

We walked up and then started down the logging road to these switchbacks. At the first switchback they had intended to build the road straight on. It continued for a hundred feet beyond, so that was suitable. The next switchback led in there to where the poles were and it was built in there for maybe fifty or sixty feet before it slid away. That was suitable so I said, "If you supply the Cat, we need the jammer of course and a D-6 crawler tractor to pull us out of here." And I came home and it took two or three days to extend the reach on my truck so I had forty-two feet between the bunks.

There were lots of sixties and seventies and eighties which we could load behind the cab, but we loaded all the nineties, ninety-fives and a hundreds over the cab so that the top logs, the long ones, went right over the cab roof parallel with the front bumper. Well, I can tell you that was no easy thing. They bounce and spring all over the place and the best place in the world to lose a leg was in between those poles, walking on them up there.

These were dry poles and according to the scales, we could haul about twenty-one to twenty-two hundred lineal feet of poles and still be within the weight limits because there were several restricted bridges at Wardner, Kidd Creek, etc.

We fastened a cable between the trailer and the truck so it couldn't slip back and pulled the truck and trailer and load of poles up onto this road with the bulldozer, then unhooked the Cat and got it out of the way. Now I went down to the first switchback and instead of trying to turn, I went up into that road that they had tempted to build and then backed that load of poles down to the next switchback. There were times going around corners when you couldn't see the trailer. It was completely out of sight and you're thousands of feet above Kootenay Lake. You could look almost into Nelson, you know. There were only two or three feet of room to spare divided between each side. I would be out on the running boards, looking underneath the load of poles and the contractor would be down over the bank signaling me which way to turn to keep the trailer on the road. We got fourteen loads of poles out of there that summer in fourteen days.

I hauled them right through to Galloway, a trip a day and we'd leave at four-thirty in the morning, be off the road at six, have breakfast at Yahk. We'd arrive in Cranbrook right behind the school busses, just as they were turning off the road and I'd arrive in Galloway right around eleven o'clock within five minutes every day at the same time, except if we had a flat, and they'd get me unloaded by noon. My pilot car could leave right away. As soon as we turned in the gate, he could turn around and go back and I would get back to Creston and gas up and go back to Crawford Bay and have a rest and then go up in the bush just about quitting time so that the logging trucks were out of there and then we'd put on another load of these poles and then come down out of there you see and park them for the night and leave again in the morning.

The second year that I hauled these poles and the price of poles was so good that in the fall of the year, KFP wanted me to haul a load of fresh-cut unpeeled poles and they'd put them through the mechanical pole peeler over in Galloway. We did all right. We had seventy fives and eighties but unpeeled, and we put about two thousand lineal feet on and got to the weigh scales in Yahk, and this is late October. I was twenty-two thousand pounds overweight. Eleven tons. Man. The guy in the weigh scale said, "Just park it over there." And he picked up the phone and he called the highway patrol and I went out and I backed the truck off the scales and I parked it. There was a phone booth across the road and I got on that phone.

You know you can't monkey with the law, but with a little appeasement, and one thing and another, they made a deal with the weigh scale people. I hadn't done any damage so far and if I unloaded enough of these poles to make it legal they would let me go. I had a pilot car and we went into a gravel pit and undid the wrappers. We pulled a third of the load off one or two poles at a time, and then went over the scales. I was close, so they said, "Okay, away you go." That was it for the winter. The remaining poles lay there all winter.

Well, during the winter months, there was a slack period, I think there was a strike, so I went up to Prince George and hauled logs up there. I would haul three loads by myself and get four-five-six hours sleep and then go again and by golly, I'd haul one load on Saturday, and then go into town, do my laundry, buy whatever things I might need for the truck. Coming out with a load on a Saturday before noon, the snow banks were ten or twelve feet high and the road was like a bob-sleigh run. You just herded your truck down between these snow banks.

There was a straight stretch for a mile or so and I could see this black object down the far end and I thought it must be some moose. But when I got closer, twasn't moose. It was an other trucker. His winch brake was slipping and the self-loading trailer would gradually move back. Every now and again he had to engage the winch and pull it back up again. Well, he turned his head to see of the trailer was slipping down and in the process, he turned the steering wheel a little bit and he was up in that snow bank and buried. The heat of the vehicle caused it to sink into this snow. Well, that chap lived just east of Creston and he was just driving for another trucker in Prince George.

I had a cable wrapped around my bumper and with it we pulled his trailer off and parked it. Then we just kept bumping and bumping until we pulled the truck out of the snow bank and onto the road. And the engine had stalled. We got that going and we got his trailer loaded and he said, "Bob, I don't know how I'm ever going to pay you, you know" And I said, "Oh, some day you might help me, or you might help somebody else, that's the way it goes in trucking."

Well, here I am with these poles laying in this gravel pit over at Yank and I have to get them out of there. It's my last trip of the fall a year later and I knew where he lived so I dropped into his house when I was coming by empty one afternoon. His wife said, "Well, he's not here, but he'll be here tomorrow night and I'll let him know you want to see him." So the next day, I dropped down to see him and he says, "What can I do for you?" So I told him about these poles. He said, "When do you want to move them?" And I said, "Monday. I'll be coming through with my last load and I want to clean them up." "I'll be there," he said.

He cut some skids and he got some cables and he brought one of his old single axle logging trucks. We took the extensions out of my stakes and we cross hauled those poles up onto the load and the weigh scale operator sat and watched us do all this. We got all these poles on and tied down and I said, "Now, what do I owe you?" He says, "Well, I guess we're square." Can you imagine all the way from Prince George to Yahk,

After that pole haul I became truck number one for KFP.

My first job up here was loading and hauling logs with a truck and trailer from here to Robson. Nineteen-forty. Thought it was a big thing in those days to have a three-ton truck, and trailer made out of the rear axle of some other old truck. The heavy duty three-ton Chev truck in those days was called a Maple Leaf. Single axle, hydraulic brakes with vacuum assist. The trailer was made out of another old truck axle that had mechanical brakes on it. You had an extra hand brake handle in the cab with a clothes line wire running back along the reach to the trailer brakes. Going around a corner to the left, you'd have to pull the handle right back to the seat and going around a comer to the right, why you probably wouldn't be able to pull it at all, and the brakes would start coming on themselves.

These poor little trucks with less than a hundred horsepower would drag loads of logs up these hills and snowing, and you'd be putting the chains on. If you left them on when you got over the top, well, you'd beat them all to pieces going down, so you took them off. Come to the next hill, you'd put them back on and it was quite a game. But we really thought we were doing something in those days.

It’s scary to think of how we loaded the trucks. You'd have a deck of logs above a bank held by chips and rocks and one thing and another, and you'd put skids from the bank onto your truck and two men would get up there with peaveys. The winter I got that job to haul logs at Waldie, I had been playing hockey on New Years Day and I broke my wrist. There was a big slough over here and we had about an acre of nice clear ice and I fell backwards and broke this. I thought I'd just sprained it, so I didn't bother going to a doctor. Well, early in January I took this job hauling logs-but I couldn't hold that peavey in my hand. I had to lay it in the crotch of my arm and work it.

Of course, you wore caulk shoes and stood on this confounded skid and you'd start the log coming down. You'd hold it at the bottom of your reach, down as far as your arms would go and the other guy would jam his peavey i» and hold it up there so that you could unhook yours and he'd let it roll down. Well, there's nothing in the world to stop this thing from slipping. There's snow and sleet coming down and those skids are slippery and you get the first few logs on that way; if you're still alive. And you start the next batch coming. Well, that was one way of doing it.

Another way of loading, and I'm referring to the earlier days that I worked in the beginning, they would have log deck on the ground, level with the truck, and skids up to the bunks. You would have a team of horses on the other side. You'd have a crotch line which had two anchors. These logs were all laying on skids so you could poke the cable or chain underneath this log and pull it over top and hook on with the horse and it would roll the log up onto the truck.

Then there was the gin-pole. The gin-pole was a good sturdy pole thirty or forty feet long with one end in the ground and guy lines attached to stumps. It had a block and tackle at the top and one at the bottom, and the cable with a set of tongs on it hung down from this top block. Off to the side would be either a winch or a team of horses. They'd go ahead and pull the log up in the air and drop it on the load. The knack was to balance the log properly with the tongs.

Then they developed what they called pups. This would be a crotch line that hung from this cable, and the cable, suspended from the top block, had a ring in it and two short lines. On the ends were the hooks from a peavey and they'd just hook them on the end. Of course we're talking about short logs from fourteen to twenty feet long. As the team pulled, the hooks would dig in.

Sometimes they would dig in to the point where they'd split the log and come out at the worst time, so they put a big flat surface on them so they could only go in so far. Then they began to shape them so they'd go into the ends of the logs better. They were well thought out and you could put a load of logs on with those things so fast. A rope extended from each hook and a man was on each end. These were called "bull ropes".

On the sidehill, the log decks would be below the road with one of these devices and you could pick those logs up and boy you scrambled up that bank, but it was kind of pulling me but you put a load of logs on in fifteen or twenty minutes, like nobody's business.

Then the jammer came along. That was a big sturdy truck and what we called an A-frame. It was similar to a gin-pole, except instead of one pole, it had two and that was sitting on a big timber sixteen or eighteen inches square across the frame of this truck. Mounted on the back was an engine-driven winch and this winch usually had what we call a free rolling drum. You pulled the handle and engaged the drum to the shaft and make it turn. As soon as you let go of the handle there was brake you could put on and if you let the brake off that drum would go freely, so these two men on the ends of the bull ropes could run with that thing down the bank, hook another log and then the engine would pull them back up and right up onto the truck and the minute you slacked the load, you just pulled on the rope and could steer that log right into place. Oh, it worked slick.

I think everybody had a hand in refining the basic idea. After we got through using skidways, which were dangerous and hard work, when we got to using gin-poles, then the jammers, I think the most of these ideas came up from Idaho.

Sometimes huge old chain-driven trucks were put to use for this purpose. Some of them even had solid tires. They didn't move much and if the engine that propelled them was beyond repair, they'd just tow it with a Cat or crawler tractor to its next location. But normally the engine worked well enough that they could move from site to site.

My first experience with one of these old trucks was when I worked in the Rogers Pass for the Rogers Lumber Company. They bought one of these jammers to load logs. It was on an ancient Mack truck chassis that had chain drive, and this big roller chain ran from the differential back to a big sprocket on the inside of the back wheels where normally the brake drums were. Well, the brake drums were there, but they had long since worn out, so they attached the foot brake rods to the parking brake mechanism which was up on the differential. Well, then your braking effort depended on these chains. If they broke, you had no brakes.

I was a young guy then and just married a couple of years, and in the spring they said, "Bob, you go down to Cranbrook on the train" -- there was no road into Rogers Pass in those days, 1944, and this jammer had been driven up from Priest River to Cranbrook -- "and you pick it up there and bring it to Golden and load it up on a flat car and ship it into Rogers." So I left Cranbrook early on a Sunday morning and it was about maybe five or ten degrees above zero. There had been a good heavy frost that night. I had a Mackinaw.

There was no cab or anything, just this huge old vertical steering column, this engine, and this chain drive apparatus. The brakes had been disconnected from the drive wheels to the differential brake. Really haywire. The release springs for the brake had even disappeared; they'd used springs from a gopher trap in there! You talk about a piece of machinery that shouldn't been allowed on the road.

I got away up in the Columbia River valley near Windrmere and the day was wearing on. Twenty, twenty-five miles per hour was absolute maximum speed and I had a long ways to go. There was a deep coulee and it was an eighth of a mile down in there and out the other side.

"Well," I thought, "I've got to make some time," so I put her in neutral. I had all the rigging. The mast and the boom and everything was hinged and let down and lashed to a big frame on the front bumper, and everything was dangling: cables, block and tackle, the whole works. I start down this hill and began to gain speed. I was really going and this thing was just shakin' and there's no way in God's green earth that I could stop it.

Going down in the bottom I didn't dare reduce speed or I'd never make it up the other side. Well sir, when I was going full bore coming down into the bottom, one of these chains broke. It just went whirring through the air. It was about eight feet long and about two inches wide so there was quite a weight of single roller chain. Now I had no power, neither brakes nor engine power.

Well, I coasted up the other side but there was no way I was going to make it over the top, so I ran it into the ditch on the right hand side of the road. There was a huge boulder, oh the size of that hassock there at least, and I got out of that truck and around back and grabbed this boulder and threw it behind one of the wheels, and it rolled back onto this and rocked there a couple of times and there it sat.

I went back down and gathered up that chain and hauled it up the hill. I put an old gunny sack over my shoulder because the chain was covered with black grease and I had a good Mackinaw on. Two kids were playing in a farmer's field and I could hear swearing and I thought, "That can't be those kids." The alfalfa stubble hadn't started to grow yet in the spring and they had a pet crow with his wings clipped so he couldn't fly, and he was hobbling though this stubble cursing and these kids were saying, "Shut up Blackie, shut up."

They came over to the fence to see what was going on and I asked them if there was anybody around that had a blacksmith shop and they said, "Yeah, that man down there." I went down and the man said, "Go ahead, help yourself." He was busy doing something else. I found the forge and anvil and drill press and the whole works. I reshaped a couple of sections of this chain using spare sections I had found laying on the deck to make a master link so I could reconnect the chain. I fixed it up and got going again and got as far as Parson that night. But they were pretty haywire devices.

From the Rogers Pass logging operation, which I left in May the following year, I came back to this area and went back to work for some of the people like Cady Lumber and Pole or Bums Lumber Company, and then I got working for Kootenay Forest Products with one of my own trucks.