One day my father came to me and said “Slate, I need your help in the woods today. I know you have never run a skidder before, but today is the day to learn.” With him having men out he was in real need of help. You will be able to learn from some of the older guys who have been doing this their entire lives, and I hope you will too. So, do you think that you would like to run a skidder today? I being my courageous self gladly said yes. Thinking oh this can't be that hard. Boy was I wrong. The first thing my father showed me was how to turn the power on to the machine. I opened up the panel where the power switch was and turned it on. The light lit up, so I knew I had power. The next thing was to fire the machine up and let it run for a while. …show more content…
I think I'm all good, but then I look down at my fuel gauge and realize that it's almost empty. I told Dad and he said, "Go fill it up." You will have to crank the fuel truck and turn the pump on. I picked up the blade and the bucket and started on my way to the fuel truck. I got there, turned on the fuel truck after stalling it a few times and turned the pump on. After a while, my skidder was full and ready to get to work. I start making my way into the woods. I go to the back of the row and start riding over the piles of trees the cutter had laid down. The ride was way rougher than I expected and it started to hurt my body from all the bouncing around. Finally, after what felt like ages, I got a drag of wood. I start to head back to the deck to give my drag of wood to Dad, who is in the loader. On my way out, the ground starts to get wet. When I got to the end of the row, I felt the skidder sink into the mud and I think I am stuck. I decided to use my bucket and attempt to push myself out. I slowly moved forward with every push and finally, after ten minutes, I got to the skid trail. As I am going down the skid trail I turn to look behind me to make sure I haven’t lost any trees in my …show more content…
I look back in front of me and I am running over a whole row of standing trees. I knocked over about ten trees before I realized what was happening. Luckily I got the skidder back on the skid trail and continued pulling the wood to the deck. On the deck I am waiting for Dad to clean up another drag of wood, while I wait I think to myself, well I’ll just watch my phone for a minute. While I was looking at my phone, he had finished a drag of wood. He had to get my attention somehow, so he decided to radio over the CB so that everyone could hear me getting off my phone. It was super embarrassing because everyone was laughing and I felt silly. When I put my phone away and started across the deck again, I had to put the blade down to clean off all the limbs. As I was pushing it off, I hit the blade button again and the skidder sunk into the ground and got stuck again. This time though, it was in front of the entire crew and everyone was laughing at me. I had to get unstuck by booming myself out, but it made it really hard to get the drag where it needed to be. When I finally got that drag set down, I started back to get another