SULTAN – Billy Mercer and Tony Beedle took their spots in front of waist-high tree stumps.
“On your mark. Get set. Go!”
The crowd roared.
Mercer and Beedle moved their hands deftly, twisting and twirling steel cables with the help of a spike.
“This thing is about as unruly as my moustache,” Mercer growled.
“And about as pretty, too,” Beedle shot back.
For 3 minutes and 52 seconds, Beedle’s hands didn’t stop.
Then, victory.
Donning suspenders embroidered with “Loggers Kingdom,” Beedle won the cable splicing competition at the Sultan Shindig on Sunday.
Like many of the events at the 24th annual Shindig, cable splicing was once a survival skill for loggers. With the advent of technology and the downturn in logging, it’s now an “old art” relegated mostly to logging competitions, said Debbie Copple, one of the event’s organizers.
“It’s basically knitting with steel,” she explained.
Other events at the weekend competition included the axe throw, firewood chopping and an obstacle course over and under logs. More than a dozen men and a few women fought for the title of “Bull of the Woods.”
Smokey Point resident Adam Dempsey won the title and the cash and ceremonial axe that come with it.
Valerie Powell-Barbour, a 43-year-old truck driver from Sultan, said she competes in part because she likes practicing logging “like they did in the old days.”
“People say, ‘So you throw an ax?’ ” she said, after catapulting an axe at a bull’s-eye target. “I go, ‘Yeah, just for fun.’ They say, ‘Oh I don’t want to piss you off.’ Because I can throw a hatchet and a knife too.”
The second-place overall finisher, Duey Rasmussen, competed while wearing a walking cast because of torn ligaments. He drilled screws into the bottom of the cast to give him extra traction while he shimmied up a 90-foot tree without a safety harness in the “speed climbing” event.
Skykomish resident Emma Lierley, 22, says she was drawn to the show, her first, to watch men use chain saws and practice old logging techniques.
“It’s a dying industry,” she said, sitting in the bleachers with friends. “It’s a dying sport. There’s still definitely a romanticism around the hardworking logger-man. Through the cable splicing and some of the other events, they keep some of the older skills alive – and they’re real cute. We’re here to stare at their butts.”
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.
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