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Full Circle
Day 237: Vancouver
Man on edge. Squamish Loggers Sports.
The experts make it look like a Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly routine. The high point, in every sense of the word, is a race up to the top of a tree and down again. Denis Butler from Washington state in the USA is the winner, negotiating a 100-foot tree-trunk, ringing a bell at the top and getting down again, in less than thirty seconds.I am persuaded to take part in a chokermans race. Each contestant must run across waterborne logs carrying a choker (not a close-fitting necklace as worn by Jane Austen heroines, but a twenty-five-foot collar weighing seventy-five pounds), which they must attach to a pole. Even without the choker I only managed to get halfway across the log before making the fatal mistake of looking down.
Later, wearing a dry shirt and trousers supplied by the master of ceremonies, I watch the grand finale: Powersaw Tree Felling. The mountains are alive with the sound of twenty-one powersaws grinding into twenty-one tree trunks, as each lumberjack (sorry, logger) fights to drop his or her tree onto a target. Funnily enough, no one asked me to enter this one.
Choose another day from Full Circle
PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Full Circle
- Day: 237
- Country/sea: Canada
- Place: Squamish - BC
- Book page no: 312
Bookmarks will keep your place in one or more series. But you'll need to register and/or log in.
RELATED LINKS
- Miscellaneous
- Day 8
- Around the World in 80 Days
- Day 117
- Pole to Pole
- Day 95: Dibrugah
- Himalaya
- Sport and Leisure
- Day 6
- Around the World in 80 Days
- Day 4
- Pole to Pole
- Day 10: Chitral
- Himalaya
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