Story Photos
 Jim Bain of Kalama helps keep the grass green with a little water poured on Delbert Svnsn's VW Beetle during the Go 4th Parade in Longview. Roger Werth / The Daily News
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Thousands went 4th and celebrated
Saturday, July 5, 2008 1:09 AM PDT
By Erik Olson
Printable version
E-mail this articleClouds covered the sky for most of the day, but the Longview-Kelso area shined red, white and blue at its annual Go 4th celebration Friday.
Thousands of people were at Lake Sacajawea from morning until night to celebrate Independence Day. The flea market on Nichols Boulevard was abuzz with shoppers looking for goods and souvenirs, and the food vendors were kept busy supplying hamburgers, hot dogs and elephant ears.
The three-day festival then concluded with a fireworks show over the lake.
One of the largest crowds of the day gathered around the small field set up near the intersection of Louisiana Avenue and Kessler Boulevard. About 1,000 to 1,500 people packed the stands for the annual Timber Carnival, which featured some of world’s best competitive loggers sawing, chopping and climbing their way to prizes.
The competition featured a variety of contests designed to test the skills of loggers of yesteryear out in the woods. There’s the double buck, where a two-man team tries to cut through a log as quickly as they can, and the vertical chop, where a logger stands on a piece of wood and chops until it splits.
Other competitions, however, are just for the fun of it. Log-rolling, for example, pits two people on one log in the water, and the first to get wet loses. In the axe throw, the loggers aim to hit a target about 20 feet away.
Fifty competitors traveled from as far away as Australia and New Zealand or as near as Oregon and Washington.
Most of the loggers compete in a summer circuit, traveling from show to show in North America for three months.
The carnival lasted just under three hours, which was right about the target time, organizer Mike Monroe said.
Many are headed for a competition in British Columbia after the Longview event.
Dale Ryan, a 40-year-old woodsman from Katoomba, Australia, has come to Longview for 11 years and been a competitive logger for 30 years. His dad was a logger, and that’s how Ryan came to the woods of Australia.
Longview is among the small stops on the circuit, but it’s been a good one, Ryan said.
“It’s a good and fine day,” Ryan said. “It’s a good crowd.”
Coming away from a frustrating judge’s decision in the double buck, Dion Lane, 32, of Au ckland, New Zealand, was sweating and heaving his barrel chest.
Besides the recent disappointment in the double buck, Lane said the Timber Carnival is good preparation for some of the bigger events, which are sometimes broadcast on ESPN.
“It’s different,” Lane said of the Timber Carnival.
Monroe, the event organizer, said he thinks the carnival is growing in prominence at the Go 4th festival.
“It just seems like each year we get more and more people,” he said.
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