My brother, Jim was always doing crazy things.
THE SALKUM ZIP LINE OR THE DAY JIM ALMOST IMPALED HIMSELF ON A MAPLE
During the last few years there has been a boom in the zip line industry. I first went on one in Puerto Vallarta in 2005 and had never seen anything like it. By 2015 there were zip lines everywhere. I went on the world’s longest continuous zip line, almost 7,000 feet (I’m sure it has been beaten by now) in the Copper Canyon in 2019. The zip line industry is huge and growing.
However, it must be noted that my brother Jim, and his friend, Jim Hupy (we called him Hoop or Hupe) erected and actually rode on a zip line in Salkum around 1956. Jim was the first and only rider and he lived to tell about it…barely.
All around our house were woods and fields. There were also some fairly sizable hills. One in particular, we called Ivy’s Hill. This is because a lady named Ivy lived at the top and owned much of the land. She was kind of a recluse and we didn’t know much about her. All this land is now owned by the McDaniel family who made ton of money selling off their telephone franchise in the early 2000’s. Good for them too because the two brothers, Bill and Van, worked their tails off in the 1950’s and 60’s starting and expanding the first telephone system in Salkum and Mossyrock and surrounding areas. That is a fun story for another time.
In a logging community there was an abundance of cable, rope, pulleys (loggers called them blocks) and other junk lying around in barns and woodsheds. Maybe Jim saw something on television or in a comic book that made him think he could use some of that junk to make a zip line. Of course, we did not call it a zip line. I think we called it a cable something.
Jim was the idea kid, while Hoop was a kid who was constantly tinkering and building things. He could take apart his Mom’s washing machine and put it back together just to see if he could do it. He once made a gas powered go cart out of a lawn mower engine and an old baby buggy. That venture about got Jim run over by a logging truck. It seems like Jim would have learned.
Jim took the zip line idea to Hoop and they began gathering items needed for their project. They wanted to use the braided steel logging cable used for hauling in trees, but it would have required a CAT and those were a little hard to come by for a couple of 12 year olds. They found a length of ½ inch rope that was 150 or see feet long. That was perfect. Next on the list was a logging block. A block was a very large pulley that would be used to haul cut trees out of the woods. Jim found one in our garage that was about a foot in diameter and was just the right size for the ½ inch rope to be threaded through it. They took the wheels off the old black baby buggy used for the go cart project and cut two holes in the bottom so Jim’s legs could stick through as he sat in the carriage. From the pulley they used more rope to hang the carriage.
Now, the task was to find a place that could use gravity to propel the carriage, hanging from the pulley, down a steep slope. On Ivy’s hill, there were a few spots that had about a 45 degree slope. This was pretty steep and required some effort to walk it. They found two large maple trees, one about 120 feet above the other on the hill with nothing but a few briar bushes in between. Jim would sail over those sharp-thorned bushes on his decent down the hill from one tree to the other. This was perfect.
The two would be zip liners hooked the pulley and carriage onto the rope and then tied one end of the rope to the bottom tree about four feet up the trunk. They pulled as hard as they could to get the rope nice and tight as they tied the other end to the top tree. Dad had a cool piece of equipment called a “come-a-long” that was kind of a hand wench truck drivers used to tighten the chains around the logs on their trucks. Jim borrowed the cum-a-long and it was used to get the zip line rope so tight that it barely sagged as it stretched the 120 feet from the upper to lower tree.
They had attached a ten foot long pulling rope to the carriage in order to pull the carriage up to the top tree. Jim had to climb up the tree to get into the carriage, which was about eight feet off the ground. Jim had decided to wear Dad’s welding goggles and a red baseball plastic helmet. He also wore a black sweat shirt and, with his long skinny legs encased in blue jeans sticking out of the bottom of the black baby carriage, looked like a pre-teen praying mantis.
It was time. Hoop untied the pulling rope from the tree and let go. The carriage with the arthropodic looking pilot, sat still for a moment, but with a lurch, took off down the hill.
It was a success! Jim was actually going pretty fast. However, about three seconds into Jim’s journey, both he and Hoop realized what they had overlooked. They had tied both ends of the rope to the trunks of the trees! Jim was going to crash straight into the trunk of the bottom tree. Jim trying to stay calm as any good test pilot would do, started reporting his condition back to Hoop. His report was something along the lines of “GOD DAMMIT IT HOOP, STOP THE F&$%#&ING THING!” Hoop started running down the hill to catch Jim as he approached the tree trunk at a speed fast enough to cause some serious damage to the carriage and its passenger when it hit the tree trunk. Jim had stuck out his legs, hoping to lessen the impact at the risk of breaking a leg or two. As he approached the tree, he gave out another cool and calm test pilot report, “SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII…..
The trail rope saved the day. Hoop grabbed the trail rope and was knocked to his stomach, being dragged through the dirt and briars as he hung on for Jim’s dear life. Hoop was dragged for about 20 feet before Jim, now slowing, used his legs and feet to stop the carriage just before hitting the trunk. Jim, Realizing he was not dead, but had only a sprained ankle, which did hurt like Hell, delivered his last test pilot report: WHY IN THE HELL DID YOU NOT THINK ABOUT TIEING THE BOTTOM ROPE TO A BRANCH?” Hoop, bloodied, bruised and scratched from his own trip through the brush and briars, was in no mood to be yelled at by his test pilot. His reply was very to the point and cannot be printed.
Both were soured on the venture and they took the whole thing down without even trying find another tree. By the next day they had made up and were on to their next adventure or misadventure.
Whenever I see a new zip line going up somewhere, the latest cool one for me was between the two towers of the Rio in Las Vegas, I think of the Salkum zip line pioneers – Praying Mantis Haslett and his pal, Hoop.