First, a tiny moment of celebration. My father, brother and I won a golf tournament this weekend! It was a benefit tournament for the Bethel Neighborhood Center in Kansas City and we’ve played in it for the last 4 years. This year everything in our round went right – putts fell in, drives landed in the fairway, chips actually landed on the green and close to the pin. We had all the kids and my step mom along too which added to the fun of the day. Even if we hadn’t done well, we had a really good time.
Now back to the rest of our weekend…
We left for Colorado Sunday afternoon with 2 goals. Ott (Jeremy’s grandfather) found a miller in CO who will mill for $.45/board foot which is significantly below the other estimates we’ve gotten. It’s also pretty close to what we’re getting here in Lawrence. So our first goal was to move some logs over to the miller for him to work on. That will let us bring back finished lumber on our next trip which will ride easier and get us closer to ready for doing the joinery. The second goal was to bring another load of logs back home to work on here. Why the rush, you ask? Because it will start snowing there in October and won’t stop until May. That means if we want to have the timbers here to work on through the winter, we need to get them here before the snow really starts.
We arrived in Colorado at about 10:00 their time. The trip was completely uneventful. The kids and I worked on cutting up old jeans into strips and rolling the strips in to little rolls for most of the trip. While we were in CO, Phyllis (Jeremy’s grandmother) taught me how to braid a rag rug without sewing, so on the return trip I worked on this:
Rug in process and the bag of denim strips
The next morning, we were up and at it about 7:00AM. The logs we most needed milled were 16’ long so we loaded several of those onto the 12’ trailer. We then topped it off with a couple of 12 foot logs. I should say here that several of the 16’ logs were both large and green, so we had quite a load on the trailer.
Jeremy lining up the first (huge) log
The first load before we strapped it down
We pulled out of Tanglewood about 8:00AM on our way to the miller. The road out of Tanglewood begins with a long stretch of dirt road going downhill and ending with a 90 degree right turn. We reached the turn going about 15 miles/hr after gearing down and putting it in 4 wheel drive. The truck made the turn, but the trailer didn’t. It gently eased the back of the truck off into the ditch as it slowly jackknifed itself into a 90 degree angle with the truck. In the process it gouged a 1.5 inch hole in the passenger rear tire and put a nice dent in the rear quarter panel. Fortunately, it all happened so slowly that no one was injured or even particularly shaken up and we didn’t go fully off the road. It could have been far worse if we had been going any faster.
The damage after we were pulled up out of the ditch
It took about 3 hours to get back on the road after that. We had to use the skid steer to drag the trailer and truck back straight, get a floor jack to take the tire off, run to town and get a new one and put it back on before we resumed our journey. For those wondering why we didn’t give up and just go home here – you clearly don’t know us. ;-)
The load was so tail heavy because of the 4 feet hanging over the back that we couldn’t go above 35 miles/hr without fishtailing. The miller lives about 25 miles away so it was a nice slow ride through the valley. When we arrived, we met Dave Roscoe (the miller) and we unloaded the logs using his skid steer and our logging chain. That part at least went pretty smoothly.
We chained each log to Dave's skid steer - Ott is giving the thumbs up that this one is ready to go
Then Dave backed up slowly, pulling the log off the trailer and into position with the others
After lunch, we loaded another set of logs for Dave and hauled it out. This time we didn’t slip on the road at all (whew!) and we were able to get up to 45 before the trailer started wandering (we were taking more 16’ logs). Unloading this round went even more smoothly than the first round – probably because we didn’t take as large of logs. We went over the timber schedule with Dave and then we were on our way back to Tanglewood where we loaded our final round of the day. This load was coming home with us, so we made sure it wasn’t overloaded and there was nothing overhanging – we didn’t want to be driving 45 all the way back to Lawrence. We also tossed a few short aspen logs into the back of the truck to give us a bit more weight on the rear tires (traction is a good thing). These will get milled into some thinner furniture type wood to use on something pretty eventually.
The end 3 plus the aspens on top and one more log not pictured came back with us this trip. The 2 shorter ones on the left are from the last trip.
The drive back was very uneventful thank goodness. We arrived at Tim’s at 4:00PM and we were headed home by 5:00PM. It was a wonderful feeling to have accomplished so much in 3 days, but we were also incredibly glad to be home and stationary.
We will have another trip to CO sometime in the next month or two to pick up finished lumber from the miller and to mill out a pair of 22 foot long timbers for the last of the timber schedule. Until then, we’re going to enjoy being back home!
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