Ways to get logs out of the woods

I use tractor with a forklift attachment and sometimes nylon straps. Logs are way too heavy, let my machine work for me.

I use tractor with a forklift attachment and sometimes nylon straps. Logs are way too heavy, let my machine work for me.

Thanks, I've added it to the wiki!

Fellow permies, feel free to add to the list above!  Thanks!

I bought a log grabber thingy from a local farm store.  It had a heavy duty hook on the end.  I hooked the grabber onto a box blade, backed up to the log, dropped the blade, attached the grabber, raised the BB and drove off.

Eric

I guess what I had are called logging tongs.

I hadn't seen the pairing ladder before, that's nifty!  Added the two winch entries...

I just edited it to fix some weird youtube links.

My only original thought was floating it in water... but I see that it wasn't original at all! I was impressed the first time I saw a bunch of logs floating up above a dam and learned about the technique.

Tractor w/ forklift, nylon straps (h/t C.C)
Winch attached to a vehicle or tractor

The way we move logs is with our tractor with a front-end loader which doesn't fit those descriptions.

We fill the bucket with the logs.  This is a picture I found on Pinterest that looks like our tractors.


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For trees, before cutting into logs we use a snatch-em strap:


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Here is something interesting that I found while looking for pictures.

It is a homemade skidder cone:


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Eric Hanson wrote:I guess what I had are called logging tongs.

Like this? I bought a couple of these for making firewood and its one of the best wood related buys i have made. One for each hand! Can pick logs up without bending as far, can lift 2 large pieces of firewood at a time and can use them to drag logs out by hand depending on log size. Still a lot of work dragging logs out by hand with these but much easier and more efficient than without them!

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.rpQ4Mar7uuPm2IdNHSrQiQHaHa%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=c80115fe07bccaa045aefe9b83737b894e4ecdf067adb4c8405c3f7fde05486d&ipo=images

We have a small wooded valley behind our house and if I decide not to manually drag logs uphill with my log tongs, we will also use a sled and my Subaru. I found a nice sled for firewood. Its about 18” wide, 6’ long, has a lightweight metal frame and sheet metal bottom. I put a pulley in a tree on top of the hill, hook one end of a rope to the sled on the bottom of the hill and put the other end on my car hitch. My wife drives the car forward as I watch the sled and direct her over the phone or walkie talkies.

I don't really have woods to deal with per se, so grain of salt should be applied.  When I want to move a log / downed tree, I just put a chain around it and pull it with the compact tractor.  The other alternative I've done is to cut it in place then use the front end loader or wagon to move them.

A standard poodle doesn't have sufficient pulling power for this purpose, so I don't consider animal power, although some days I think I was born out of time and would love to log with a heavy horse.

We have a three-point implement for our tractor that my Grandpa calls a "stinger." It is a long bar, reinforced with a simple king post truss, that attaches to the upper attachment on the tractor. It is attached via a hinge to arms that go down to the lower three point arms. So it extends about 7 feet behind the tractor, and can be raised or lowered by the tractor's lift. At the far end of the stinger there is a cable, with some log tongs at the further end of the cable. Hook the log tongs into the front end of the log, lift the stinger with the hydraulic lift to get the front end of the log into the air, and then drive to pull the log. It is somewhat useful.

I can't find the stinger right now, but when I do I intend to post a picture.

EDIT: I found the boom pole! Here it is attached to the tractor and ready to pull some logs.

I used to have a neighbor who occasionally (he was retired) worked as a professional logger and would use his pair of Belgian draft horses to skid them out of the woods.  At the same time he was training his horses for the competition draft pulls he did for fun.

I have a two man log carrier I got from the estate sale of afore mentioned neighbor.  My problem is I don't tend to have a second person around to use it.  So on my own small bit of property I tend to haul the logs out of the wooded area by hand.  Key to that for me is first cutting them up into sections I can manage!

I also get a fair amount of firewood from logs I haul home from a local trail.  When trees fall across it they get cut up and tossed to the side.  I'll strap one or two onto my bike and pedal them home.  I don't know if this would work well in an actual forest though.

I bought a bar that connects to the 3 point hitch on my tractor, and had a heavy hook welded to it. Wrap a chain around the log, back the tractor up and hook the chain on the device. It can drag some pretty beefy logs if needed.

We also have a log arch, which is worth every penny it cost. With the log arch and a caboose, an ATV can bring most anything out of the woods.

Jeremy VanGelder wrote:We have a three-point implement for our tractor that my Grandpa calls a "stinger." It is a long bar, reinforced with a simple king post truss, that attaches to the upper attachment on the tractor. It is attached via a hinge to arms that go down to the lower three point arms. So it extends about 7 feet behind the tractor, and can be raised or lowered by the tractor's lift.

Is it a boom pole?

Jordan Holland wrote:Is it a boom pole?

Yes, that's it! Thanks, that helps me learn more about the implement. Turns out that you can do more than haul logs with it, which makes sense.

For ours, you remove the adjustable top link and attach the straight boom in it's place. Then the hinged triangle attaches to the bottom links. This means that it can fold flat for storage. Which is convenient, but I think that is contributing to the difficulty in finding the dern thing.

I cut/split them into firewood…

Our site is twenty woodland acres and between clearing space for our house and organizing the logs for our timber frame, I move a lot of logs. Some do just get thrown on a shoulder. :)
Recently acquired a tractor and we have a log arch I can hook up to it. I got pallet forks for it, which can be used to manage some logs. I want to get a grapple, which could also be used for some log handling, as well as brush and slash management.
Portable winch, manual come along, electric winch on my truck. Skidding cone and log arch are game changers. The portable winch is genuinely portable and good value. I use it for felling as well as with the log arch for moving logs.

Yard glider (by any name ;) ) is another option for moving lots of firewood at once. Not so sure about moving real logs with one.

Can't forget rube Goldberg machines & the normal way of just dropping logs into the river for downstream transport.

An ancient low tech way of moving heavy & bulky loads is the travois.

Mike Barkley wrote:An ancient low-tech way of moving heavy & bulky loads is the travois.

I had to give this one a google.

A Travois is two sticks in a V shape with a net in between to drag things where a wheel might get stuck.

I'll have to try this one out, apparently, a person can carry more weight than in a backpack with it. A travois can also be pulled by dogs... might have to find a picture of that, not sure how it would be attached high enough to be useful.

Edit: ok I was thinking of a pack of dogs with a horse-sized one, I guess you can just make a travois dog-sized.

I don't have a convenient picture to show here, but I will try to describe a contraption that I built.

So I have previously described my log trailer--a little 2'x2' trailer with 4 wheel barrel wheels that I built out of a spare 4x4 x8.  It is designed so that it cradles a log along its direction of travel.

But how to get a log onto this in the first place?  That took some thinking.  It started with a fold-up ladder, the type that has 4 distinct folding sections and can fold away into a very compact area.  I folded it into a position that looked like a typical step ladder.  This gets placed over the log and log trailer.

The next part required some thinking:  how do I raise the log up?  I devised a little machine made again out of 4x4's that held a manual marine winch with a ratchet.  I doubled the strap up to make the lifting even easier.  I would lower the strap with a hook down to the log.  At that point I would drill a single hole in the log and screw in a long eye-bolt.  I would attach the hook on the strap the the eye-bolt, crank away to raise the log end up and when it was high enough, I would roll the log trailer into position.  Then I simply let the log back down and the log was ready to go!

I will see if I can drag up a picture for you.

Eric

I mostly use the front end loader on my tractor, but in tight spots in winter, I sometimes use a sled to get wood over to the loader tractor. I have a log arch, pulley, and boom pole but have not had a case where I needed to use them yet. I mostly just head out for a nearby woods with a small trailer attached to a ball hitch mounted on the cross-bar of my 3 point hitch, with chainsaws and stuff in the front end loader and a wire rope or two to pull logs out to an open area for cutting and loading into trailer that I've unhooked in a clearing.

I think if the woods were at my house and it wouldn't take multiple trips to get other equipment out there (boom pole, log arch, log splitter), I would probably attach use the boom pole and log splitter, leaving the trailer out of the picture.

Eric Hanson wrote:At that point I would drill a single hole in the log and screw in a long eye-bolt.  I would attach the hook on the strap the the eye-bolt, crank away to raise the log end up and when it was high enough, I would roll the log trailer into position.  Then I simply let the log back down and the log was ready to go!

That is an intriguing idea. I suppose you leave the eye bolt in the log until you are pretty sure that you are done moving it?

Why not get crazy and do some high lead logging?

https://www.backwoodshome.com/the-mini-skyline/

I really am going to do this, not just for getting logs out but putting them back to reinforce a hillside that is too steep for machinery and definitely too steep for man-dragging. And not just logs but all kinds of stuff, wood chips, manure etc... I have it all drawn up and have a lot of the rigging I need, I just ran out of time before winter.

One of these days y'all gonna be impressed, hahaha.

All sorts of good ideas in this thread!

I do have one area of steep slopes that goes down into a creek, but its been neglected as there is so much to do elsewhere on the farm. So I did not feel that a fetching arch would be money well spent. It was tempting just as another 'toy', but a bit more expensive than should be spent without having a burning need for one.  

https://logrite.com/Item/fetching-arch

We have a lot of woodland to maintain, and need logs to keep warm in the winter, so some years ago we did splash out on an ATV log arch and a junior arch from Logrite. This company makes fantastic kit. Sturdy and well made. We use the junior arch as a caboose behind the ATV arch. These tools just make life so much easier.

Jeremy VanGelder wrote:

Eric Hanson wrote:At that point I would drill a single hole in the log and screw in a long eye-bolt.  I would attach the hook on the strap the the eye-bolt, crank away to raise the log end up and when it was high enough, I would roll the log trailer into position.  Then I simply let the log back down and the log was ready to go!

That is an intriguing idea. I suppose you leave the eye bolt in the log until you are pretty sure that you are done moving it?

Jeremy,

That is about right.  Using the eye-bolt was an easy way to move the log and didn't take too long to attach.  Now if I were moving high volumes of logs, this would be tedious and time consuming.  But as most of this was being done by hand--at least to the point where I could get it to the tractor--one more step wasn't all that much.

Eric

Mary,

I have almost purchased a logrite log arch a couple of times.  It would have to be one of the smaller ones--perhaps the Logrite Junior of the ATV arch to use with my tractor.  But they look really nice and it is good to hear about their use.

Eric

Eric Hanson wrote:Mary,

I have almost purchased a logrite log arch a couple of times.  It would have to be one of the smaller ones--perhaps the Logrite Junior of the ATV arch to use with my tractor.  But they look really nice and it is good to hear about their use.

Eric

The Logrite arches are really heavy duty and have a very impressive paint job as well. A junior might be smaller than you'd like. If you have an ATV to pull one, the ATV log arch is about as perfect for the job as I can imagine.