in Washington State's Cascade Mountains
the Hartness logging families battling
40 mile an hour winds and three feet of
new snow oh this is nasty really fog he
can't see very far definitely not the
best day for logging in one of the
world's deadliest jobs Frank Harkness
and his sons jr. and Brandon are taking
on a near-vertical mountainside covered
in ice we're different we try stuff that
other people don't
today the crews racing to finish an area
known as a setting so they can move on
to the most valuable part of the job
another setting stacked with five
thousand-pound Douglas firs worth nearly
a thousand bucks each when you're
working against the mother nature you
you don't know what's gonna happen the
job we're doing right now it's a
challenge because nobody goes on that
steep of ground we can overcome that you
know we have a lot of toys at the top of
the job site half of the Harkness crew
pulls in stacks logs while a thousand
feet down the mountainside Frank's son
43 year old jr. is slicing through a
hundred and thirty foot trees with his
29 ton behemoth the tiger cat
our ground is pretty slippery and that's
kind of conditions machines trained to
slide on me a little bit nothing rattles
Junior the IceMen Harkness even though
he's hanging off the mountain on a
one-inch stranded steel cable he's known
for being cool under pressure putting
quite a bit of trust in the tether here
I'm reluctant to let any of my kids do
certain things but I don't worry as much
about they are because he keeps calm and
stays cool hanging off a mountainside on
a tether is as dangerous as it gets
add snow and ice and juniors got little
room for error taking this deep plunge
here Bailey this is the tether machine
basically because we tether another
machine off of it and it's basically a
cable assisted logging so we have this
big cable running down to our feller
buncher when the ground gets too steep
where he can't maneuver on his own this
will help him this represents how many
feet he's out 902 feet this machine's
capable of holding about 250,000 pounds
snow that's a whole different game the
computers in the giant machines are
connected as jr. drives down the
mountain the tether unspools lowering
his tiger cat as he drives up the
mountain the drum pulls in the tether
helping Junior climb its technology like
this that keeps Harkness in business we
kind of have an edge on the competition
the people I don't have tethering
equipment
got to have the guts to do it kind of
crazy in a way if you don't pay
attention what you're doing well it cost
us the price of losing some family
members and early on I've been upside
down before with 25 days left on the
permit the Harkness team must clear an
acre a day to remain profitable but
after weeks of weather setbacks Frank's
pushing a clear these final two acres by
nightfall and move on to the next
setting this little corner that he's in
right now is the worst one there's
always one bad one but we got to get it
done the icy near vertical mountainside
is pushing the cable system to its limit
this is the number that we don't gotta
go over or what the one wrong move and
jr. is tumbling down the mountain like a
rag doll and a yellow steel coffin a
hidden ditch swallowed the front tracks
launching the back of the tiger cat into
the air it's gonna be only been a jockey
and I think
Wow
that was different Junior's precision
gets the cat out of the ditch
saving the machine I like to think that
you have to have a whole bunch of
different fish and words in the tackle
box to catch a fish
same thing with tree you know I mean you
just can't do this without it
there's no two trees that are the same
so your problem solving all the time so
it keeps you going
gotta love it
you