Peak performance

Welcome to Zeballos, B.C., population around 300. Time was, men mined gold around here, but now Zeballos, nestled in the northwest part of Vancouver Island, is a logging town. The stands of trees reaching 150 feet into the air are staggering in scope and it only makes sense that harvesting this timber calls for rugged machinery operated by equally tough people.

One of these brave operators is Ian Humphrey.

Humphrey owns and operates a “fat truck,” a 1977 Kenworth 850 powered by a five-and-a-quarter Cummins N14. An Allison 60-61 automatic provides the twist to the 91,000-pound Clark planetary-drive rear axles. Humphrey isn’t sure of the exact figure, but with 300 gallons of diesel and 600 gallons of brake-cooling water on board, plus an immense tandem-axle pole trailer sitting in a cradle on back, she weighs a whopping 50 tons. And that’s before they load 250,000 pounds of logs out back, stacked 14 feet wide and 20 feet high.

The frame is a pair of steel girders, and the springs are foot-and-a-half-high stacks of steel plates. I suppose “leaf-spring” is the term to use, but that would imply some give. Any bounce at all comes from the 18 granite-hard tires that squish down like radials under a full load.

The 1970s-style standard KW dashboard is the only reminder that this truck spent 26 seasons in traditional service. Otherwise, every piece on this rig and others like it gets replaced on a regular basis. As a matter of fact, when a “fat truck” owner-operator finds anything at all not quite right, he fixes it immediately. And every three months, Humphrey takes the truck in for a complete mechanical. Safety is a concern because the truck is designed for one task only: climbing 30-plus-per-cent grades on trails not much wider than its 11-foot stance. With a flat-out speed of 35 mph, fat trucks climb like goats and then hold those huge loads at a crawl speed on the way down. With the engine brake a-barkin’, the locked-up back-pressure-induced transmission brake whining, and clouds of steam billowing from the water-cooled oversized brake drums, the fat truck at work is a mechanized marvel.

Each trip up and down the mountain takes about four hours, so a 12- to 14-hour workday is the rule around here, not counting the continuous roadside maintenance these drivers do. “I start it up at about 6:15 a.m and then wait 20 minutes for the water to heat up to 104 degrees,” Humphrey says. “That also lets the transmission warm up.”

When Humphrey comes thundering out of the trees onto the main road, where we’d agreed to meet, I find myself getting a bit nervous. With the log load twice the height of the steel-protected cab-and hanging partly over-and with all the wheels hidden in a cloud of steam and flying bark, I really wonder what I’m in for.

But the grin between Humphrey’s hardhat and his 300-pound frame is reassuring. I expected a nervous wreck or a huge lumberjack type of guy, but here’s a soft-spoken gentleman about my own height. I climb the ladder, settle into the cab, and find myself in a different world.

The controls for this truck are just a few switches mounted on a pedestal where the gearshift should be. Other than the brake and fuel pedals on the floor, Humphrey runs this monster with one hand. Engine brake, converter lock, range settings, and brake-water controls are all at his right fingertips. He uses two fingers of his left hand to steer. “Two power rams,” he points out. “Steers like a sports car.”

With seemingly no effort at all, the 350,000-pound rig starts rolling, and for driving over a road that was just washboard and potholes, it’s surprisingly smooth.

Ian Humphrey is 39 and he’s owned and operated this truck for 10 years. He purchased it from Stan McLean, the original owner. The McLean name is still on the door and the company Humphrey bought-McLean Trucking-still holds a contract with Western Forest Products, the logging contractor. Western has about six fat trucks running at any one time, but this past season has been slow, Humphrey says. His N14 only shows about 1,100 hours. A better year would show twice that. “There’s been a lot of downtime because of the American tariffs,” he says.

Humphrey lives in and works out of Zeballos but grew up the youngest of nine children in Campbell River. His dad was a construction contractor who introduced young Ian to trucks early. He bought his first truck when still a teenager and hauled explosives around the Island. Then he tried his hand at logging, making it to foreman status before the fat truck craving set in.

Humphrey and his wife Leanne make a good living with the rig. They do 90 per cent of their own maintenance; Humphrey has a mountain of spare parts for this workhorse and can repair or replace everything on her except the engine. Cummins looks after that. “You have to be ready for anything,” he says. “Out here, it’s not as if you can hop into your vehicle and drive 15 minutes to the next town to get something.” Humphrey’s family doctor is in Nanaimo, a six-hour car ride south. (“Five if Momma drives,” he jokes. “Leanne’s a faster driver ‘n me.”)

The rig burns about 44 gallons of diesel a day, half of what the truck’s previous engine, a V12 Detroit, went through. Brake drums are never turned-he replaces them with new ones, along with new linings, every six months. He replaces hoses and such regularly, needed or not, and three times a day, Humphrey uses his “Big Eight” rule. Before he starts down the mountain with a full load, he checks the rig over from bumper to bumper-connections, pin locations, items he has numbered one through eight. Forgetting any one thing could cause the dreaded runaway. If it ever got away on him, there’d be no way of stopping it.

Even loading the logs is a skill. As each lift is placed on the rig, Humphrey watches his trailer tires. “When the duals squish down and touch each other at the bottom, she’s pretty well loaded,” he says. He then cinches a few skinny-looking cables called “wraps” around the logs, and after the first 10 minutes of pounding and shaking down the mountain, the wraps dangle like wet laundry on Aunt Nellie’s clothes line. The only thing holding those huge peelers in place is gravity. There are odd seconds-long periods of silence on the way down-during which Humphrey says he’s skidding. We reach the bottom of one grade and the rig’s suddenly roaring and rocking up another at crawl speed.

“Anything about this scare you?” I ask. A one-word answer: “Ice!”

After a timed pause and the flip of a switch, Humphrey elaborates: “Rain and runoff pour down these trails steady, not to mention that each rig (there were four of them using the same road) dumps 600 gallons of water on it every trip.”

Some wood producers are turning away from these fat trucks to smaller tri-axles that can run highways. But Humphrey says there will always be a future for the fats: “I can carry about 100 cubic metres of logs. Those smaller ones only do about 45.” A cubic metre of wood. About three feet by three feet by three feet times 100. Imagine it all piled up behind you while you’re coming down a 30-per-cent grade, and the brakes that you’re relying on were relined by the man at the wheel. Now that’s trucking.