Timber Relic Finds Home -- Steam Donkey Stands As Legacy Of Northwest's Logging History

ISSAQUAH

It loomed out of the dark forest.

Awestruck, Greg Spranger felt rooted to the damp, leaf-covered ground high in the Tacoma watershed, staring at the old donkey.

Not a real donkey, but a ghost from the Pacific Northwest's past.

Spranger was on what he called a wild donkey hunt in search of

a puffing, chugging metal giant that once inched itself up mountains, making back-breaking work a little easier for loggers who harvested the timber-rich mountains from the late 1800s into the 1900s.

Called steam donkeys, the massive contraptions were topped with a huge steam boiler that provided the power to pull logs, via a series of steel cables, up hillsides to loading sites.

The thick steel cables, wound around pulleys, were attached to trees in the forest, and the donkeys wound up the cables, sliding slowly up mountainsides.

Although thousands of steam donkeys were built, few remain today. Many were abandoned at old logging sites in the Cascade and Olympic mountains.

Spranger and the others finally bagged a steam donkey, although a different one, from the Tacoma watershed. Weyerhaeuser offered it to the Issaquah Historical Society about 10 years ago.

The donkey now sits on Rainier Boulevard at Southeast Bush Street, dedicated to someone who helped make it part of the city's historical park along the old railroad line through town.

The plaque reads, "In memory of Ted Cook Jr. A man who fully recognized the need to preserve this part of Issaquah's history."

While Spranger and others associated with the Issaquah Historical Society championed the acquisition of the donkey, it was Cook who persuaded city officials, after much arm-twisting, to place it in a prominent place downtown.

Cook, who died in a boating accident in Eastern Washington last year, had the same strength of resolve as those venerable steam donkeys, his friends say.

To get the old relic to Issaquah, tons of steel had to be removed from a remote mountain, Spranger said. He and other volunteers spent many weekends, traveling to the site, taking apart the bigger pieces and hauling them back to Issaquah. Finally what remained of the lumbering giant was loaded on a flat-bed truck.

Still covered with rust, it was reassembled on a small triangle of land adjacent to the Issaquah Community Center. Spranger and others wanted it to remain there, but some City Hall folks thought it was out of place.

Cook, a longtime community activist, joined the Historical Society in 1993 and eventually became a vice president. He organized the effort to keep the steam donkey in the park.

"The city wanted the pile of rust moved, but Ted convinced them it would enhance the small park and provide another example of the city's past. He was diligent in making it happen," Spranger said.

Cook's tugging and pulling of strings were an echo of the work done by the steam donkeys.

There's another testament to those metal contraptions near Issaquah today. The popular Poo Poo Point, where paragliders jump off the side of Tiger Mountain to catch updrafts and soar through the air, was named after the sound made by steam donkeys when the area was logged decades ago.

Louis T. Corsaletti's phone message number is 206-515-5626. His e-mail: lcorsaletti@seattletimes.com