Logging Terms

Like many other occupations, logging has its own colorful vocabulary. Here are some of the terms that would have been familiar to Tony Franklin, which may be of help to non-logger readers:

Block: A pulley.

Bull puncher: A person who leads an oxen team.

Cat: A Caterpillar tractor.

Chaser: The person who removes the chokers from logs at the landing.

Donkey: A machine, originally steam-powered, that pulled the lines used in yarding and loading lumber at the cut site; it was a type of yarder. Depending on its use, it might also be called a skidder, loader, roader, or flyer. Donkeys were used for many tasks, including:

Yarding: Assembling logs

Hauling: Moving logs from the stump to a collection point

Loading: Placing logs onto cars for transport to mills

Guiding: Guiding rafts of logs downriver

Lowering: Lowering logging trains down steep inclines

Donkeys were used extensively in the Pacific Northwest from the late 19th century until the 1940s, when they were replaced by diesel machinery.

Greasing the skids: An old-fashioned logging term that refers to the practice of adding animal fat to wooden slats that made up their skid roads, making it easier to move logs. “Grease monkeys” were employed to walk ahead of loggers to grease the skids.

Gyppo logger: A logger who runs or works for a small-scale logging operation that is independent from an established sawmill or lumber company.

High climber: Member of the logging crew who scales the tree, limbs it, and tops it.

High rigger: A logger who specializes in climbing and trimming a spar-tree and then attaching the cable guys, rigging blocks and lines to it. Also called “head rigger.”

Hooktender: The boss of the rigging crew.

Landing: Location in or near a forest where logs are gathered for transport or further processing.

Linear foot: In logging and lumber, a lineal foot is a unit of measurement that indicates the length of a board, regardless of its width or thickness. It is distinct from “board foot,” which refers to finished lumber with a volume of 12x12x1 inches.

Logger: The preferred term used in the forestry industry today, while “lumberjack” is more historical and colloquial. (Locally it’s been said, “Only Easterners call them lumberjacks.”)

Rigging slinger: A person who ensures the safe rigging and movement of cables, machinery, and blocks used to pull or suspend logs in cable logging operations.

Skidroad: A road, usually made out of small logs placed parallel to each other at intervals (like railroad ties), that larger, marketable logs are dragged (“skidded”) along to the landing.

Spar tree: A tree used as the highest anchor point in a high lead cable logging setup, replaced since the 1970s by portable towers, called yarders, which can be erected on logging sites and moved as needed.

Yard or yard out: A verb that means to drag a log out of the forest to a landing for shipment to a mill.