A 73-Year-Old Logger Did What The Army Corps Said Was Impossible — With A 1928 Caterpillar

Mid-November 1962. The eastern slope of the Olympic Mountains, Jefferson County, Washington. A U.S. Forest Service contract crew loses a brand-new $400,000 Caterpillar D9G logging dozer over the edge of a steep wet spur road and watches it tumble eight hundred feet down a near-vertical mountainside into a fog-bound creek gorge, where it wedges against an old-growth Douglas-fir stump — operator badly injured but alive. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is called in. After six days of survey, three officers — a captain, a major, and a lieutenant colonel — formally declare the slide path unreachable by any equipment in the Pacific Northwest Division's inventory. The dozer, they write in their report, is a permanent loss. The road will have to be rerouted. Then a 73-year-old retired Norwegian-American logger named Edvard Halvorsen, who has lived on a small ranch three valleys over for fifty-one years, drives down with a 1928 Holt Caterpillar 75 crawler — a machine the Army Corps openly laughs at when it arrives — and over the course of one long wet November day, using sixty-year-old rigging principles, a great deal of cable, and a man on the platform who has worked mountains like this one since 1907, walks the old grey Holt down a slope no other machine in the United States could have safely descended, recovers the operator's tools, hooks the dozer, and walks it all the way back up. This is a dramatised story. The historical setting — 1960s Pacific Northwest logging, Army Corps of Engineers Pacific operations of the period, and the equipment of the era — is real; the characters, dialogue, and specific events are fictional and created for storytelling. Subscribe — a new story every few days. #OldIron #Caterpillar #LoggingHistory #PacificNorthwest #FarmStories Hashtags: #OldIron #Caterpillar #HoltCaterpillar #LoggingHistory #PacificNorthwest #OlympicMountains #1960s #VintageEquipment #ArmyCorpsOfEngineers #ImpossibleRecovery #ForgottenHistory #VintageMachinery #LumberjackStories #1928Holt #TrueToLifeStory