Taken with permission from Continued From the Woods: True Tales of Timberworkers
In 1977 Kevin at the age of 26 tightening down his load while working near Drum Forebay.
He told me a story about his Uncle Bob, and how he and his brother used to go up in the summer time and spend all summer with Uncle Bob while he was falling timber for Pino Grande Mill at Michigan California Lumber Company.
He told me about flying across the canyon on the rail car. What they would do is load the rail cars right on this gondola that would fly across the canyon and it was about 1200 feet down to the river. They had a camp in Pino Grande and that is how they used to get to town. They wouldn’t get in a car and drive clear around, they would just get on the cable tramway and fly across the canyon. George told me how it was so nerve-racking because the flat cars weren’t much bigger than the units of lumber. They would rough saw the lumber at Pino Grande Mill and fly it over to Camino to get kiln dried and planed.
George said his brother got on one end and he got on the other and what you did was you only had room for your toes underneath the unit of lumber. You would hold onto the unit of lumber while you fly across this canyon with the river 1200 feet down. You could tell by how he told the story how nerve racking it was and he was just a kid maybe 10 or 11 years old and his brother about 12. I said, “Gee whiz, George weren’t you nervous or scared?” He looked at me, half smile and half serious and he said, “You bet I was!”
It was the neatest thing to sit down and talk with him, and then two weeks later he died. To picture him and their love of the woods. Spending all summer long up there in Pino Grande where it must have been just a slice of heaven for a kid to go up there and watch the trees go down. Just to hear these guys talk, it’s a whole dying breed. The Grass Valley old timers when they are gone, there is nothing to replace them. The new timber fallers they work hard, but it is just not quite the same. Dick West used to say they worked from “can’t see to can’t see” and he used his cigarette lighter to check my tape to see what length I was cutting.
Some of the guys that I worked with that were really top of the heap guys were Jerry Jenson and of course Jack Bishop, Dennis Elliott. Jay Wilcox used to have a cat skinner known as Bear Bob, and I used to see him at the Rough and Ready Post Office. I have no idea where he lived, but I recognized the pickup he was driving. He was still driving the same pickup into the Grass Valley Post Office about five or so years ago. The only place that I have seen arches used were down in the El Dorado. Jay had two of them, one on tracks and one on tires. Bear Bob was the arch man. He was funny because he smoked, like a lot of them did. Logging a burn and here is this guy sitting on a Cat, cigarette sticking out of his mouth, his face just absolutely black from the dust from working in a burn.