Zip Lining Logs

We did some firewood cutting rigging in the snow this past weekend. This fall I came across a 250’ rope for a Grip Hoist so it became feasible. We had a little bit of slope to work with at our camp in VT. 2 tons of pulling power made it quite easy to pull two sugar maples over in the proper direction. One had quite a bit of lean the wrong way. The other I went to the next trees in the woods and strung the cable up 16’ and the zip line was born. It was a tremendous amount of effort to set up but super easy to move the wood, especially in the snow. If there were more than 2 of us we could have cut and moved exponentially more wood. On the other hand, cost wise it’s super far from practical, I had more than $7,000 in gear with me although 1/3 of it was not put to use. Mighty expensive toy.

I neglected to take a photo of the Grip Hoist operator raising and lowering the rope. You obviously could use a block and tackle arrangement to lift the log, but raising and lowering the cable has a bit of safety factor to it. It keeps you from overloading the rope.

All in all it was fun.











Obligatory dog photo, the line came in handy for tiring up the dogs while running a saw.









Before

 

In the woods up here, that would be called a skyline. On a much bigger scale of course.

 

That reminds me of this publication (scroll down past the appeal for funding to get to the document): an analysis of a small scale cable yarder in Vermont

Vermont Cable Yarder Project : Gerry Hawkes : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

 

Good work and great helpers

 

That is awesome!!

 

I'd want to ride in place of the logs. Neat way to exercise some gear and do something different.

 

That’s a really setup! Thanks for sharing.

Quite a bit of snow too! Based on our cameras, we probably have about 2” of snow on the ground at our place.

 

That was a fun one to watch. Looks like a good day of hoarding.