Skidding Logs Out of the Woods

My son, Darryl, mentioned in a post on his Cedar Ridge Farm blog a few days ago that he had cut more cedars to be used for posts.  Today was a very nice day after a day of wind and rain and Darryl decided it would be a good day to skid those cedar logs out of the woods.  Of course I volunteered to help.  He was able to get his International 424 tractor to the bottom of the ridge the cedars were on.  All we had to do was bring them down the hill.  A few were quite a ways up and we had to use some long ropes as well as nylon straps and chains to bring them down.

Here you can see one of the logs being pulled down the hill.  Since Darryl could only go a short distance with the tractor we had to stop several times so he could back up to the starting point and take up our slack and go again.  Once we got close to the bottom the ropes could be removed and replaced by one or more of the chains.

One of the logs had to be brought down a small gully and then turned at a right angle.  We accomplished this with the use of a snatch block as shown above.  Once the log was down to the block we were able to hook onto it directly and pull it out.

When we had the logs down to the level of the tractor they could be hooked onto the tractor and Darryl could drive out of the woods.

Here he is maneuvering through the trees.

A few more will have to be cut and brought out of the woods but these are ready to be milled into 6” X 6” beams.  That will be the subject of a future post.