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Logging with Horses in the Kispiox Valley
by Alex Merrill
Call it quaint. Call it eco-logical. Call it post-modern. It's horse-logging, and here at the end of the millenium, some people are bucking the high-tech, big-machine trend in forestry.

Up at the end of Muldoe Road in the Kispiox Valley, Russ Webb is doing the kind of work our forebearers would have done, with a few modern aids such as a chainsaw and a Caterpillar tractor.

A visit on a balmy late-February afternoon finds men and horses engaged in what must be the quietest industry going.

Percherons Clyde and Zipper have lunch
before work.
First entering the natural cathedral of hemlock, spruce and pine, you can smell them before you see them. Pungent aroma of horse and hay mingles with the scent of newly-cut trees. In the clearing ahead, you see them: four blond belgians and two black percherons on their lunch break.
Belgians Ed and Fred get harnessed up by Jeff Dinkmeier for an afternoon of skidding logs.
The loggers, Russ Webb, Jeff Dinkmeier and Shane Campbell are harnessing them up, ready to skid logs felled that morning. This is the beginning of the horses' workday. They work four to five hours in the afternoon in the winter, and reverse that schedule in the summer.

The silence at noon is broken only by horses breathing, and the occasional swoosh of wet snow falling out of trees.

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