This is one of those films that could make you appreciate your job on this Monday. See, unless you are reading this from an arctic outpost of some kind, you don’t have it has hard as the guys working in this film did. They’re loggers in northern Maine cutting so-called “Punkin Pine” trees, 100-million board feet of them. They’re doing all of this work in winter through snow and ice and temperatures that regularly exceeded 30-below zero. They’re also doing it all with Allis-Chalmers tractors (the company that made the film).
So why log in the winter? The winter provided more solid ground to work on for these guys. The spring and summer are mud season in that part of the world and even this awesome Allis-Chalmers HD5 crawlers would have struggled with that, especially pulling the sleds of logs out of the woods. The open cab of the tractor is just another sign of toughness, although the operator at least caught a warm breeze from the engine or exhaust every now and again. The dudes running the axes and saws did not get that.
The funniest part of this video is the tone of the announcer at the start of it, basically admitting that the idea here was to log every inch of the last major stand of Punkin Pine trees in America. The wood was well suited to many jobs but pattern making was specifically one of them.
If an American company made a film today that basically said, “Yep, we’re gonna wipe this forest out and it’ll be a long ass time before anyone on this planet sees another one of these trees again!” Can you imagine the reaction?! Back in the 1950s the whole scene was viewed differently.
This is a cool film of hard men doing hard work with cool machines.
