66 March 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
Dog “Laundry” Is a
Money-Making Venture
NOVEMBER 1935Above: A lumber crew rolls logs into a wooden flume in which they will float down to the river. Some of these flumes are five
miles long. Below: There are 12 million board-feet of lumber piled up in this giant log jam at Big Riffle on the Clearwater River.Working with pike, peavey, brawn, and sure-footed skill, the river-
jacks follow the tree trunks downstream like cowboys driving a herd of
cat tle over the old Chisholm Trail. Most logs float dow nstream w ithout
any trouble; it’s a small 10 to 15 percent that makes riverjacks neces-
sary. Logs get stuck in the mud or entangled in low-hanging branches,
jam on submerged rocks, against islands, or in the elbows of curves.
Annoying pileups that latch on one bank or another are wing
jams. Logs jammed against a sand bar in the middle of a river are
center jams. They’re the trickiest and most dangerous.
Center jams are unraveled from the downriver end of the
pileup. There are two very good reasons for this point of attack:
(1) The key log, the one that holds up all the others, is probably at
the lower end of the jam and when it is freed the others can move;
(2) should a riverjack lose his footing and fall into the water, he can
be rescued at the downriver end.
One of the biggest jams on the Clearwater occurs each year at Big
Riffle, about halfway down, where the river narrows between rocky
NAVY DOLPHINS
ON LEAVE
APRIL 1995NOVEMBER
1957