A lorry carrying logs drove over the car and then we hit a tree and a log came through the windscreen and stopped right close to my face.
Some 32 yards (30 m) behind these was a continuous line of logs driven into the sand pointing seaward, every third one capped with an anti-tank mine.
A few miles across the Idaho line, we turned north onto a logging road, drove up to a Forest Service trailhead, then hiked the remaining mile or so to the ridge-top route of the corps.
Continued deforestation and illegal logging are driven in many places by poverty and few alternatives, the end result of global market demand and little attention to sustainable development for the communities that bear the costs.
Logging boomed during the 1920s, when logs were driven down the Pasvik River to Elvenes and Jakobsnes in Norway.
They have disappeared as irrevocably as the small family farms and the log drives and the big woods.
This is a region that found its year in history and seems content to stay there, that year being 1915, when the last of the epic long-log drives roared down the Connecticut toward the mills of Massachusetts.
Even during log drives down Maine's rivers, the cooks would head down the river early and dig a bean hole so the beans would be ready by the time the loggers arrived.
Read up on the history (Robert E. Pike's "Tall Trees, Tough Men" is the classic account), and it can seem that the log drive left just a few moments before you got there -- and this explains the quiet sense of anticlimax this land lies under, which was the same kind of peacefulness that came every summer when the drive and its excitement moved on.
Its origin can be traced to the spring log drives of eastern Canada and the New England states, particularly the state of Maine, during the early lumbering era in the 19th century, from which it moved westward to the Great Lakes region and then to the Pacific Northwest.
