Art & Words by
HOWARD B. TAYLOR

The chute was first used by the hand loggers but it died a slow, lingering death. My father surveyed some as late as 1925. It extended the hand logging a long way up the hill. The problem often was not to get the chute to work, but to keep it from working so well that the logs jumped out and split themselves on stumps, drove themselves into the ground, got so hot that they started fires, etc. They usually did a lot of smoking.

When logs could not be jacked into the chutes there were other ways found. The later ones were fed by steam donkeys and also by railroad.

One chute, which my dad surveyed, dove under a country road. They thought this was dangerous, as some logs flew over the road, so they put up a sign.