I had an interesting learning experience on an extremely steep slope about 3 years ago in the moutains of Julian east of here on a county removal contract.
It was one of those contracts that involved shutting down traffic both ways on a major HWY called Banner Grade. Because of this the work had to be done at night in the wee hours of the morning. It was one of those contracts that had to be completed by a certain date or else get fined heavily for each day over it went.
It was winter and the rains would not let up as the completion date loomed closer and closer, so the owner of the company sat down with me to explain the pickle he was in if the job wasn't completed regardless of the weather. He threw some serious money on the table and let me have my picks of his best men and equipment in his 70+ man company.
So essentially I took on this nasty complicated night time job in the middle of a winter storm. I had two crews, a total of 10 veteran treeworkers, a bucket crew for road clearance, and I ran the removal crew complete with crane and whole tree chippers, the county guys shut down traffic and patrolled the 7 mile stretch we were working.
The problems started as the rain picked up and began washing boulders on the steep mountainside above us down onto the HWY on which we were working. My men started getting real nervous despite being paid triple their normal pay, and looked to me expecting me to shutdown the operation before something bad happened. They were disappointed when I merely assigned 2 men as spotters, one for each crew and kept on going as the rain kept falling in sheets.
The job progressed slowly but surely as we worked into the early morning hours driving around the many boulders and rocks now littering the rain soaked HWY. Only one removal was left to do, a big cedar on a steep down slope in such close proximity to high power lines that the crane could not be used on it. So I put on my gear, had my men tie a rope to me and lower me off the hwy and down to the big cedar, I clipped into the tree and untied the belaying rope, then I limbed the cedar out and dropped the top downhill away from the power lines up hill on the HWY, leaving a nice fat 80 foot pole.
The scary thing about this tree's location was that about 100 feet down the incredibly steep mountainside directly below it was a vertical drop off of many hundreds of feet with a raging river at the bottom that I could hear from the tree but could not see. We short sticked the crane below the power lines and yanked the top of the cedar and brush up onto the HWY and chipped it up.
All that was left now was the 80 foot pole and the job would be finished. I couldn't drop it up hill because of the power lines, and I couldn't piece it down without the logs tumbling down the slope and over the cliff into the river, which any licensed timber operator knows is a big no no. That left me with two choices, rigging and catching the wood in the storm, or dropping the stick downhill and trying to catch it with 3/4 inch steel chokers clevised together, one around the stump, the other about 15 feet up on the stick.
The men were already a little ticked off with me for insisting we finish the job in such foul dangerous conditions and weather, they wanted to get the heck out of there pronto and I didn't blame them for feeling that way.
I decided to drop the stick down hill and try and catch it with the steel chokers, I figured that if I minimized any slack in the chokers, the stick would not build up any momentum capable of snapping 3/4 inch steel chokers, but I was dead wrong, and it was an amazing sight to behold when those chokers failed. Of course I was tied off to the belaying rope when I dropped it downhill with my MS440 Magnum, and that big stick snapped those steel chokers like a piece of thread, but the amazing thing to see was the 3 foot flames lighting up the night at the exact point where the chokers separated. All that was left was a shredded section of steel choker around the stump.
That stick never slowed down even a little bit as it slid down that slope and over the cliff and finally splashed into the river and downstream, I presume.
None of the county guys were around to see my very convenient mistake, the guys were thrilled to see the job over(the cliff), only the crane operator was a little upset with me for destroying two of his long chokers and one of his big clevis'.
We loaded up and headed home and kept our mouths shut about my big rigging mistake in the middle of a storm that day, but I learned a valuable lesson about what a big green cedar stick can do to 3/4 inch steel chokers.
If you've ever seen a high caliber rifle's muzzle flash at night, that's exactly what that choker looked like when it separated that night, and all my worries went over a cliff and floated downstream.
jomoco
