There's a tangible link to the Sunshine Coast's industrial logging history to be found amongst a patch of coastal western hemlock and Douglas fir on the east side of Caren Range - and with vertical boiler and smokestack jutting close to eight metres high atop a tangle of iron drums, axles and levers, it's a hard sight to miss.
Go back 60 years and place yourself in this dense stand of timber on a steep hillside plunging towards Doriston on Sechelt Inlet, and you'd see what was once a revolutionary and cutting-edge piece of logging equipment - the "steam donkey."
"From the turn of the century onwards, steam donkeys really took over," said Howard White, owner of Harbour Publishing and a local history buff. "They were common - everyone had to have one. It was the only way you could log."
The steam donkey is a steam-powered hoist engine named for the animal it replaced in logging operations throughout western Canada and the United States. It was fueled by wood burning in a firebox below the vertical boiler and consisted of at least one powered winch.
This fall, Coast Reporter visited the intact steam donkey, a family heirloom of sorts to Ray Stockwell, a 69-year-old Sechelt resident. The two-cylinder steam engine was produced in 1920 by Vancouver's Empire Manufacturing Company and was originally put to use near Furry Creek on the east side of Howe Sound.
It's arguably the best-preserved of the few machines that remain on the Coast, and Stockwell said he'd like to see the machine preserved at Mission Point Park near Davis Bay.
It was in use from the '20s through the '40s, before Stockwell's uncle Bill Scott acquired the machine in the early '50s and brought it by barge to the west side of Sechelt Inlet. Scott and his partner had scarcely begun logging there when their luck ran out.
"They got everything ready to go, and then the timber market went bust," recalled Stockwell. "They got it up there before a road was actually built. They had a fire too; that didn't help."
At the peak of the industry, White estimates there were 50 to 100 donkeys on the Coast. The machines were needed to haul logs through thick woods and areas where stumps made pulling logs along the ground too difficult. Stockwell's donkey was used on a skyline system, which had logs carried through the air on a zipline.
"Skyline systems became extremely sophisticated," said White. "The industry was growing, and trees were getting further away from the landings."
The donkeys were mobile and sat on sleds made from logs to assist them in moving to various settings. The front of the logs were often shaped into skis so they wouldn't dig into the ground, and the heavy machines winched themselves into position.
"You'd be amazed at how far they could run uphill," said White. "They would travel for miles, sometimes right through standing timber. You heard of the odd one that broke loose and went screaming down the hill, but not many."
The machines were noisy and dangerous and would kill anybody standing nearby if the boiler exploded. But it was an appealing type of work to many men, since it was a job that "pretty well anybody could learn," White said. "They could work during the summer and make a pretty good stake. A lot of people were just attracted to it for the lifestyle. They were very resourceful people, and not much daunted them - they had all kinds of ways of getting logs down."
After World War II, high scrap iron prices led scavengers to pull the defunct donkeys out of the woods using bulldozers. Some brass fittings were pilfered from Stockwell's donkey after the war, and the entire thing was nearly lost in recent years, Stockwell said.
"A guy was ready to load it out but couldn't because of the park," he said, referring to Spipiyus Provincial Park, which was established in 1999 and is situated west of the steam donkey. "He bulldozed his way in there without any kind of permission."
Five decades after it was last used, the machine is now pitched at an angle and stands ready to tumble down an embankment if not for a guy wire secured to its smokestack by an unknown person sometime in the last decade. While some relics can be found in the Egmont Heritage Centre, most traces of the donkeys have vanished from the Coast. But they're worth preserving, says B.C. Parks area supervisor Dylan Eyers.
"That particular piece of machinery certainly has had an impact on the development of the Coast," he said. "The industrial history of this area is something we haven't put a lot of stock in before."
White said it's a case of people beginning to realize the historic value of the machines, "as the last examples are disappearing."
"When steam donkeys were a dime a dozen, people cut them up for scrap without a second thought. You don't like to see the book completely closed on an era that's been your life. We never really place any historic value on the era we're passing through," White said.
"There are others around, but this one's in the best condition," he said. "It's maybe a good place for it to stay."
