Lumberjacks, Lumberjills, and the Highest Straight-Axis Dam in North America

Still in Orofino, ID -- Two things happened that led me to spend the last two days in Orofino, and it's turned out to be an excellent stop on my trip.

For starters, Orofino is having Lumberjack Days, which is the county fair for Clearwater County and an occasion for a lumberjack competition. That's the first thing, and it led me to ask at the fire station where I might camp in town for the night so that I could see the fair. There, I met the county's wonderful emergency manager. That's the second thing. I've been camping in his yard and hanging out with his family, and they're all a whole bunch of fun.

The Dworshak Dam



One of my host heads-of-house works at the Dworshak Dam, a 717 footer across the North Fork of the Clearwater River a little ways out of town. She took me in on an after-hours tour of the Visitor's Center, the North Tower, level 1603 (1603 ft above sea level), and then down into the Power House where the plant's operator showed us his control room and the switches, pistons, rotors, breakers and other things that make electricity out of water.

The operator can run everything from the control room. There were probably 9 or 10 computer monitors in it, in addition to all the LED displays and lit-up dials. We saw the old, manual controls on one of the generators, breakers for the electricity that gets generated, and we got to listen to one of the generators whir around as the water passed through it.

The dam, which does have the distinction of being the highest stright-axis gravity dam in North America (for you damophiles out there), has three generators, but only one was running because it's late in the season and water levels are pretty low. The dam is owned and operated by the Army Corps of Engineers, but it sells its power to the local electric company and sends it to the town of Ororfino as well as to places further afield in the Northwest.

The Dworshak is one of eight in the way of Salmon and Steelhead trout that come this way from the Pacific to spawn. Their stop up in these parts is the Dworshak Fishery, just downshtream from the Dam, and they make quite a journey to get here. Some of the dams have fish ladders and various other contraptions to help fish around them, but in some places the Federal Fish & Wildlife administration actually scoops the fish up on one side of the dam, puts them in water-filled trucks, and brings them to the other side.

At the Dworshak Fishery the eggs are collected from adult fish, the fish spawn, and some orther fish things happen. I don't understand all the details of that after talking to one former and one current employee of the fishery, but I do understand that it's massively expensive. The dams seem to work more or less like this: the government builds these dams and sells the power. It has to pay out the nose, though, to mitigate the disasterous effects the dams would otherwise have on the fish. So there's cheap, clean electricity in the Northwest, but the government subsidizes it both by running the dams and taking care of the fish. Why bother, having dams at all, then? Well, conveniently, they're a power subsidy that doubles as a farm subsidy. The downstreams dams all have locks and they make it possible for grain to go downstream to Portland and overseas from there.

So the dams allow power and grain to travel around the Northwest, but they impede the progress of fish on the river, and they also impede the path of logs. When the Dworshak Dam was completed in 1971 it was the end of log drives down the North Fork of the Clearwater, and timber has been trucked rather than floated to market ever since. Timber is still big business around here, though not as big as it once was, and culturally important. Hence...

Lumberjack Days

Friday and Saturday were the usual county fair stuff -- food, rides, prize-winning vegetables and a 4-H auction -- and Sunday was a lumberjack competition. Both days of the fair were a lot of fun. There was an exhibit hall that had prize winning fruits, art projects, and baked goods, as well as booths put up by a variety of organizations. Basically, it was one of my dreams come true -- a whole bunch of knowledgeable, friendly people lined up and waiting for me to ask them questions.

I talked to people from the Forest Service, Fish and Game, various political candidates (There's a particularly heated race for Clearwater County Coroner this year.), and a man who makes and engraves knives. I also went to the 4-H auction for a while to see the animals and listen to the auctioneer. A good day at the fair.

Today was the log show -- pretty much a timber industry version of the rodeo. People compete in skills that used to be what loggers did at their jobs. I talked to a team memeber from Washington State University and she explained to me that it's actually quite widespread and well organized under the American Lumberjack Association. There's also a good deal of international competition, she said. Australia and New Zealand have some great loggers, apparently.

There were a bunch of events in the Orofino show. Competitors chopped wood in various ways, threw axes at a target, climbed sixty foot poles, sawwed logs (by hand and with chainsaws, alone and in pairs) and performed various agility events. My favorite was birling , which tests skills that a lumberjack or lumberjill would have used in the days of the log drives when they were floating logs down the river. Two people stand on a log floating in a pool of water and each tries to spin and stop the log with their feet so that they knock the other person off. One Lumberjill (I may have had a crush on her. Okay, I had a crush on her.) who had competed internationally did an especially good job at the birling. She made it look easy, but it ws pretty clear from a lot of the other Jacks' and Jills' performances that it isn't.



My stay in Orofino has been a lot of fun, but onwards I go. Portland seems almost in sight -- I'll be in Washington state by the end of tomorrow. I've already succeeded in one of the goals of my trip, though -- I made it out of the mountains before the snow. It snowed on Lolo pass yesterday, where I camped two nights ago.

Oh, and one more thing. I was interviewed by a reporter from a local online news service. I don't know when the story will go up, but you can check for it and learn more about the fair and everything else going on in Clearwater County at Window on the Clearwater.