Double Load Friday!

[Bill Harsey]

When I was logging with my brothers back in the mid to late seventy's we did all of our own road building. This involved falling the timber in the right of way, logging it out with a cat then pioneering a rough road in and clearing the stumps to build a road up to Forest Service specs. We had some big timber up there and this is important because size does matter. Big trees make big stumps. The goal of loading and shooting stumps is to break the stump enough that the corner bit on the road building blade of the cat can move the stump out of the road bed. The general rule for using stumping powder (40% nitro) was to finish loading with one stick of dynamite per estimated inches diameter across the top of the stump. A 40 inch stump would get 40 sticks of powder, a 60 inch stump would get 60. This was simple enough math that even a future knifemaker might be able to figure it out. The problem with shooting was that we had to hand pack in all the dynamite we used, and hand pack out everything we didn't. Somehow my brother and I came up with the concept of "Double Load Friday!". This meant that on friday afternoon we started loading and shooting every stump with a double load of powder so we didn't have to pack anything out at the end of the day. Sometimes these old stumps sat on deep soft soil and that made the job of loading for a good shot harder. It really sucked when we hollered "fire in the hole", hit the switch, heard the boom and walked up to see that stump was still just fine. CONTINUED...(edited for my spelling...)