Alaskan Logging Equipment, Left to Rust

AMAZING!!!! thank you for sharing... absolutely amazing!

Remy
http://lineboring.org

Some history in those pics. If only they could talk. Thanks for posting them.

Will

So CL, anymore pics? This thread has died and it's the one that got me onto this forum, please make it alive again!

I agree .. please keep it going.. I moved to Alaska in the 60's and worked out of Sitka before moving to Haines... I logged.. mainly as a timber faller. in Haines Afognak, POW, Long Island, IcyBay. Hobart Bay and various other camps.. I loved being a timber faller but I also loved the sounds, smells and working of all the equipment... Two big things in life I did wrong was leave Alaska and get old..
Even now I get joy from waking up to he sounds of log trucks going to work at 4 in the morning...

Thank all of you for this thread..

Welcome to the forum wheelie! Thanks for posting, I hope it gets re-started soon!

Loved looking at the old iron. May have operated some of it. Worked in Coffman Cove one summer for Valetine. Most of my logging career was with my dad, Ross & Sons Logging out of Pacific Beach, Wa. Contracted for Aloha Lumber Co. and Evans Products which sold to Mayer Bros. Later in Toutle contracted to Weyerhauser. 2 sides. Lost all our equipment, and 2 men, when the mountain blew. Interesting to see the Pat Raby truck in there, as he contract hauled for us on the Quinault Indian Reservation in the early 70's. We ran a Tillman tower 110 feet, with Skagit drums. Link Belt 108 on Clark undercarriage, TD 24 and TD 20 Dozers, Manitowoc 2300, various trucks and support equipment. I got to run it all. Big Timber. Big Saws. Big Equipment. I saw the end of an era. When I first started helping my Dad, we were still running a sled donkey and wood Spar Tree. Bought the Tillman in 1967. The men who worked for my Dad, said he was the best they ever worked for. He still cuts wood, but only for the stove there in Toutle. 85 y.o.

Contract Logger said:

Welcome Leonard! **** is still in Wrangell living in the A-frame, and Errol Champion is still living in Juneau. Here's a quick shot of a belt buckle **** gave me last time I saw him. Not sure how many of these are around but I had never seen one. Maybe you even have one!

Not sure about those Barko 550's-- ALOT of the gear was sent to Maytown (Olympia) a few years back and sold there at RB Auction. 2-day sale, I think it was 2002.

I was at the old Yakutat camp site in August, minding my own business, and a BIG brown bear and 2 cubs came strolling through....

It's a beautiful spot on the earth, and there's still a bunch of logs decked in the old sort yard.

Click to expand...

It's a bummer the cussword filter is replacing D-i-c-k with astericks.

If I got started telling Silver Bay Lodging stories, they would go on forever, I guess.

I did tell some of those stories on History Channel Ax men blog last year. I think it was a "funny true stories" category.

Oh- and about the belt buckles-

Silver Bay Logging had company items for sale in the offices at the camps. They sold a ton of coats and wind breakers, suspenders, and maybe T-shirts too with the Silver Bay Logging logo on it. For quite a while in the late 1980's you would see people wearing SBL coats all over AK, Washington, and Oregon.

I used to joke that almost everybody had worked for SBL at some time or other.

Hats too. And the belt buckles. I seem to recall the buckles were expensive. Seems like there was more items, but I don't remember what.

First time poster here, just came across this thread when looking to see what happened to my old hometown.
My dad started as a deckhand on the Seahawk in Icy Bay in 1994, then kinda floated around the company from setting chokers to shop boss and camp watchman. I was about three years old when we moved there, and I remember watching Big Red (the red log truck that's pictured in the sort yard) bore down the road that went past camp with a big load. Always put a smile on my face. We lived there until 2005ish, but I remember playing on a lot of the equipment that you have pictures of when I was growing up.

They also used to have a big row of Bucyrus-Erie line shovels down at the sort yard, but they buried them in the metal waste site in 2004 I think.
Thanks for the memories!

"They also used to have a big row of Bucyrus-Erie line shovels down at the sort yard, but they buried them in the metal waste site in 2004 I think.
Thanks for the memories!"

Boy, there's sure alot of equipment buried in Alaskan rock pits isnt there? It all either got left, got buried, or barged out into the deep water and pushed off the barges. I know of barges that left camp with 5 running yarders aboard, headed for deep saltwater, only to arrive back in 3 hours later, completely empty. Hundreds of trucks too.

Do you have any pics to post? Much of the Icy Bay gear still sits there rusting, including the yarders, where they will no doubt still be in 50 years. Too remote to go scrapping out there. Poole was in there getting Wasser & Winters out and grabbed a few pieces but not much. Wayne's 2 009's are sitting way out beyond the Cape, all the bridges on the 40-mile mainline got pulled out so the yarders, cats, and all the gear beyond the Cape is there forever now. I still see them from the air once or twice a year and smile.

There's a complete Skagit 739 and Madill 009 tank mount in Brownings yard still as well, along with a bunch of other gear.

Whatever's out there now will be out there forever. No one's going back into that country with a barge in this day and age.
When I tell people the water on the lost coast is so rough all the fuel was delivered by air tanker they dont even believe me.
I guess you just had to be there and see it with your own eyes.

Are you Stormy's boy?

I have a SBL video of their alaska operations. Kinda cool as there a few guys I cut with that are on it. I wish I could get my hands on that 739...... ;(

There sure is, I know out at the cape there was a bunch of old stuff too, left over from the White Alice operations, as well as some old equipment out at the old oil camp they had.

I might have a few pictures of the camp and what not, but I'll have to scan them in. I remember that fuel tanker too, used to hitch rides with them sometimes into Yakutat. The Salmonella, a C-46. They still run it out of Anchorage or Fairbanks if I'm not mistaken.

And yep, that's my old man.

What would the cost be to get that 739 from AK down to seattle you think...???

What is going on with all the old whitestone stuff since Bryan Brown bought them out and I heard he is going/went under also....????

Ain't Basco's 739 for sale?

Any info on it...???

Hallback said:

Any info on it...???

Click to expand...

Here's some contact info for them. Torkel has been to their place and took pictures, he will probably chime in when it gets to daylight on his side of the world.
Basco Logging Inc
1039 Park Hill Lane, Sutherlin, OR
(541) 459-9318

Thanks Jeremy.
I believe I have seen the machine and if it is the one I am thinking of it is nice.

Anyone have any info on the one D**k Gilkenson had for sale a couple of years ago...????

Hallback said:

Thanks Jeremy.
I believe I have seen the machine and if it is the one I am thinking of it is nice.

Anyone have any info on the one D**k Gilkenson had for sale a couple of years ago...????

Click to expand...

Check out Post 268 in the Skagit forum for more info and pictues on the Basco 739

I guess this is as good a thread as any to make my first post on. My Dad was a logger in NW Oregon and looked at a job in SW Alaska for Ketchikan Pulp, but it was too far out of his experience level, so he moved to the Klamath River country in N. Calif to start logging there. That was in 1954 and he said later that the guy who took the Alaska job became a millionaire, but maybe that was just wishful thinking on his part. One of his friends did go to Alaska and logged with his own small sawmill, name was Earl Brown. Now if I could just remember which island or inlet he was located on?