Select Timbers is a specialty wood and custom cut lumber company.
It’s run by Jeremy Hinke a west coast Handlogger or Gyppo logger and
Beachcomber. Jeremy created Select Timbers to fully utilize those hard won
logs and turn them into the finest forest products in the world, making
a lot out of a little. At Select Timbers adding value to our old growth
timber is of utmost priority.
Select Timbers has evolved from the most honest and basic beginnings
of Handlogging and Beachcombing. Over the course of 17 years, Jeremy and
his brother Joe ‘selectively’ Handlogged the lonely fiords
of the mid coast with nothing more than a tug boat and a rope yarding
line, where upon selecting and falling a tree in the forest , they would
pull a 2 inch thick rope up the mountain to the log , by hand, choke it,
then yard it down the mountain, snaking it between the standing trees
and into the ocean (that is, if all went as planned). When Handlog Timber
sales were scarce they would always scour the wild and wooly west coast
for beachcomb logs. In concert with these operations the Hinke brothers
ran a forestry engineering company too, specializing in identifying and
layout of BC Small Business Forestry Timber Sales .
In the end, these men became “A-Framers” ,
which is just another form of Flintstone logging, where you need lots
of grunt and brains to log the steep side hills of the coastal inlets.
In A-Framing they utilize two 140 foot trees lashed , then stood up on
a huge log float in the shape of an ‘A’ for lift and stability.
Then they yard logs from as far back as 3000 feet in the bush with the
aid of a donkey and a wooden spar tree, getting logs to the water by a
double swing. Today it is one of the last working A-frames on the coast.
Once there was one in every inlet on the coast, now there is only this
one blowing it’s lonely whistle, echoing a rich history on the wild
west coast.
That’s where the logs come from. Then they are towed across the
Queen Charlotte Sound by tug on very particular rigging and only on
nice days. Sometimes a logger can wait weeks for just the right window
in the weather. And that’s in the summer. You can just about forget
it in the winter. Hungry handloggers have lost everything, months of
gut wrenching blood and toil alone or with a pard’ner, in a moment
of ill luck or fortune towing across the sound. Which is why the main
method of log transport is by tug and barge. Once the wood is safely
across the Sound and down to Comox then it is re-scaled at a dry land
sort. Here all logs are graded and bucked, then trucked to the mill…..right
about now your looking under every rock for a nickel. Cause there ain't
been one in some while. The only thing driving him now is the latent
beauty and value of those boards lying hidden within waiting to be hatched
by a talented sawyer to study the grain and hunt down the clear Red
and Yellow Cedar or Spruce, Fir and Hemlock.
