Off Limits (2011) s01e02 Episode Script
Seattle
What do you want to do? I just want to walk down here.
How far down is this river? 850 feet.
Welcome to Seattle where it's all about living on the edge.
It's a place where an engineering breakthrough became a death trap.
Look how the water is just pouring in here.
And massive concrete Bridges float on water.
I've never seen anything like this.
But taming this emerald wilderness took brains Like an amusement ride from hell.
And brawn.
Talk about working without a net.
And survival was never guaranteed.
My God, it's cold.
This is Seattle, off limits.
=== off limits s01e02 === In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world hiding their amazing stories, behind locked doors, inside barbed wire where they say you cannot go.
I'm Don Wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
going up to the top of the space needle.
And this gets all this is a full-body harness.
All right, cool.
Hell of a way to see the scenery, huh? So I'm going out there? Whoa, man.
All right, here we go.
Holy.
All right.
Seattle, from the top.
Intense.
I mean, 520 feet above it, you can see, you know, what makes this such an amazing town.
Let's try and creep out here a little closer to the edge.
What the heck, man, you only do this once, right? Look at that.
Splat.
Wow, the wind in my face, baby.
Seattle, I'm cold.
I'm wet.
I'm an inch from death.
And now I know what the early pioneers felt like here when they battled relentless weather, icy waters, and towering volcanic peaks to build this city Seattle.
Today, it's one of the most desirable places in the u.
S.
To live, a mecca of cutting-edge tech, music and creativity.
It's one of the youngest cities in America because 100 years ago, it was almost impossible to settle.
All of Seattle around me.
Look, that's downtown, an amazing, amazing geography.
I mean, you have all around you water everywhere, right? Lake union here, lake Washington out there and of course, famous and huge, the puget sound very frigid, very deep waters.
You wonder how all this even happened.
This modern city would never have grown out of the forest if not for one key ingredient power.
Long before today's green movement, turn-of-the-century seattleites found a way to extract electricity from their most abundant resource Water.
So this is the puyallup river, one of dozens of glacially fed rivers that flow off the slopes of mount rainier.
When the early founding fathers of Seattle started dealing with the fact that their population was growing, there was inevitably a demand for more power.
They came out here looking for the energy that could make that stuff.
The problem, though, was designing a system that could turn that energy into electricity.
The puyallup river starts in the cascades 16,000 feet above sea level and flows 45 Miles downhill and northwest towards the city.
It's just one of the dozens of rivers and dams that provide Seattle with 90% of its electricity.
I'm driving up to the foothills of mount rainier to get an insider's look at one of them, the electron project, a 100-year-old hydroelectric engineering marvel that's still providing power for Seattle today.
Gene, how are you doing? Hey, how are you doing? Gene Galloway has been working on the electron project for 38 years.
When did this whole operation start? It started about 1900.
Seattle, tacoma, all these areas are growing in population.
And they're demanding what all those people back east take for granted.
That's correct.
They want the same thing.
They want electricity.
They want electricity.
So how is this water delivered to the point of making this energy? It flows in a 10 1/2-mile flume.
It's an 8x8 wooden box.
Gene explained that instead of trapping the river behind a massive dam to create power, the electron channels it into a 10-mile long flume.
After the water is diverted from the river into the flume line and makes its journey down the Mountain, it collects in a reservoir.
Then rushes down through pipes called penstocks into waterwheel-driven turbines in a powerhouse.
The flume stretches through rugged and treacherous terrain, and the only way for me to see the entire length is by a special rail line open only to puget energy workers.
Here comes the train.
Cool.
The original workers laid these tracks on top of the flume as a way to maintain and inspect the line over 100 years ago.
Look at this.
This board doesn't look so secure.
But we are going on this little rail car on top of this flume full of a torrent of water.
Basically, this whole track runs the distance of this flume 10 Miles down the Mountain.
That's where we're going.
Okay, so we're leaving the station here, huh? We certainly are.
All aboard.
We'll be chugging along at the blistering rate of 7 Miles an hour.
Any faster and we might come off the tracks.
We're traveling here pretty slow, at a pretty flat grade.
That's intentional, yeah? The plan, the design called for an 8-foot drop per mile.
You don't want the water to get going too fast or it'd bore a hole in the ground and you may not be able to stop it.
That is also one of reasons that the curves are in the flume.
There are 275 curves along the track, earning it the nickname "the crookedest railroad in the world.
" This is the original design in terms of the flow.
" Man, they knew what they were doing back then.
They were brilliant engineers.
One of those engineers was Sam shuffleton.
Largely self-taught with only a grade-school education, shuffleton took on the herculean task of supervising the electron project in 1902.
Workers had to fell giant old-growth trees, build on the side of an 800-foot ravine, and deal with Mountain lions, rain and snow.
18 months later, the flume, the track, the power station, all of it was up and running.
They must have had an enormous workforce doing this.
The reports are that there were between 1,500 and 2,500 people working on this project.
Somebody switching on a light switch in Seattle has no idea that out in the middle of nowhere, there's a flume that looks like the 1910s.
All they know is that the light just came on.
Look at it just dropping off here.
Here's a steep shot to the river right here.
This little, tiny train car is, like, vibrating all over and rocking back and forth, and it feels like it's just gonna go right over on one of these curves.
Bam! Right down there.
Like an amusement ride from hell.
How far down is this river? 850 feet.
This is scary.
This is scary.
It's, uh, it's one of those places where you have to really pay attention to what you're doing.
I'm seeing a cross here.
George.
George.
Somebody died here.
One of the constructors in 1984 fell off here and died.
-You're kidding.
-No.
Two men have died over the years to keep this project up and running.
What do you want to do? I just want to walk down here.
I got to get a sense of what that feels like.
Nothing will happen, I promise you.
Nothing bad will happen.
Be careful.
It is so high over all of this incredible terrain.
Just to get a feeling of what these guys did to build this.
Such an intense feeling.
You got the water underneath of you and about 800 feet of space of ravine straight down.
You don't want to fall down.
Very slippery board.
That's scary out there.
So this is the power plant itself? This is the powerhouse.
Look the water's twisting 10-mile journey ends here.
I see the pipes coming right over the hill.
Those are the penstocks.
-Penstocks.
-Yes.
The penstocks channel the water into a tiny but incredibly strong stream, going 500 Miles an hour when it hits the waterwheel turbines plant.
And then is discharged out of the plan that is a vigorous flow.
This is this is a result of the turbine discharge.
This is best place to see the power of water and how it generates 14,000 kilowatts of electricity for Seattle.
So can we get inside here? Yeah, we certainly can.
Look at those things.
Usually, only puget energy employees get to see the heart of the electron project.
Each one of the units has two waterwheels driving the generator.
So under our feet, that water is turning those waterwheels.
That shaft is driving this, and you're making electricity.
A.
C.
Current heading out.
Heading out.
Nice.
This is still the same machine.
The whole thing just works 100 years later.
It's like everything here, they just left it as it is because it worked.
I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The plant produces enough juice to power 17000 households in the Seattle area, and it's all thanks to the snows of mount rainier and 100-year-old engineering know-how.
It's cold, and it's wet.
Perfect day for a dive.
I'm finding a lost fleet at the bottom of chilly puget sound.
Look at the size of this boiler! And Seattle's first industry looks a lot different from up here.
Don't down.
On a winter's day in Seattle, puget sound is a soothing, peaceful place.
But 100 years ago, there was a demolition derby going on out here.
Imagine hundreds of steamships wildly racing each other for business with no traffic laws.
This was Seattle's first superhighway, and I'm here to see what's left of it.
Just like I-5 that you can see cutting right through town there.
The sound was crammed with traffic, but instead of cars, the water was filled with a veritable fleet of hundreds of steamboats going to and fro, ship to shore, all around the sound.
I mean, today, they're all but gone.
They've been replaced with container ships and tankers.
But if you are willing to dive in these frigid depths, you can visit the watery graves of the mosquito fleet.
At the turn of the last century, there were few roads and almost no Bridges here, just waterways.
So small steamships did the work of taxis and delivery trucks, connecting Seattle with the surrounding area and helping it grow into a major Metropolis.
By 1925,2,500 steamships had served in the sound, competing fiercely for passengers and cargo.
They swarmed over the water, so locals called them the "mosquito fleet.
" Now pretty much all that's left are disintegrating wrecks on the seafloor.
" I'm heading South to point defiance marina to explore some of the best-preserved accessible wreckage, the underwater remains of the "s.
S.
Burton.
" Scott.
Hey.
Hey, how are you? Scott Boyd is one of the very few people who knows the exact location of the "Burton.
" All right.
Off we go.
" There's nobody on the water, which is fantastic.
I love that.
Nice empty day today.
This is a good time to go out 'cause there's it's raining a lot.
You just kind of get used to it up here, just being wet all the time, and it's not that bad.
Bad weather and low visibility have always been a problem out here in the sound.
Hundreds of small boats zipping this way and that.
Many of them ran into each other in these thick fogs that are out here.
Many of them burned, many of them sank.
The biggest killer was competition.
The fastest boat got the business, so crews stoked boiler fires way past the safety point, using oil-soaked wood for fuel, throwing in whiskey or kerosene for an extra kick.
Some ships blew up, others crashed because they were hard to steer, especially when they were going too fast.
We're entering the narrow channel into gig harbor, where the "Burton" went down.
Its wild career and violent end were common in the mosquito fleet.
What happened here in gig harbor that this thing went down? It was 1924,I believe, and it was tied over to the people's dock over here yeah.
Which was where they used to disembark.
And probably the boiler ran out of water and caught the vessel on fire.
Really? And so that was typical for the mosquito fleet.
The "Burton" had a passenger route between nearby vashon island and the mill town of Tacoma.
However, it was the exact same route of another steamship called the "vashon.
" And they used to race every day to see" who could get there first to get the passengers to make the money.
Interesting.
And, uh this was a friendly rivalry or an unfriendly one? A little of both.
They used to ride on each other's bow waves like rail-to-rail, scaring the heck out of the passengers.
And usually, the boat that lost the race would, tie up to the boat that won, jump aboard, and the crew sometimes actually got into fisticuffs over it.
So it was quite the rivalry between the two boats.
The only remains left of the "Burton" sit 40 feet underwater right below us.
There's really none of the hull left.
I have a sense of the keel and where this boat yes.
The stretch of this boat is? It's chilly! It's cold, and it's wet.
Perfect day for a dive.
969 it's just creeping in, and it's really cold.
My God, it's cold.
The ship is disintegrating, but I should still be able to see the giant boiler and firebox.
I can just start to see the ship beneath me.
At first, it just looks like an algae-coated scrap yard, then the "Burton" starts to take shape.
So this is the boiler right here.
You could see from the size of this boiler, how fast they wanted this ship to go.
Hello there.
It speaks to how large the ship really was, 93 feet long.
The "Burton" was bigger than a semi tractor trailer, and the boiler produced the steam that powered it.
It was common to soup up engines by removing the emergency steam-release valves to build up more pressure and more speed.
The heat came from burning wood or anything flammable in a metal firebox insulated with bricks.
These are the firebox bricks.
These are the pieces we're talking about.
This is probably where the fire started the night the "Burton" went down.
On an all-wooden ship, one stray spark spelled disaster.
No lives were lost, but the "Burton" was finished.
This is amazing stuff to see.
The wooden hull has long since rotted away, and all of the metal parts are quickly disappearing into a reef.
All of these are the condenser pipes of this steam engine-driven ship.
Look inside.
Basically, it'll become a reef.
All these little animals.
This is an apartment complex, a condominium for crabs.
In the ten years after the "Burton" sank, the entire mosquito fleet began to vanish, replaced by modern roadways.
While travel and transport got faster and more efficient, the ships that once tied the entire Seattle area together quickly sank into oblivion.
Today, the boaters and pleasure crafts cruising above have no idea the remains of a wild armada are slowly disintegrating beneath the waves.
I'm taking a killer trek to avalanche country whoa, this is thick.
To find the tunnel that built Seattle.
There's a river beneath us here.
today, seattle is the biggest city in the northwest.
But 100 years ago, it wasn't much more than a seedy logging camp with a lot of potential.
Toward the latter part of the 19th century, Seattle's population was still sparse, 3,000 people or so.
But there was still so much untapped wealth here in the form of natural resources Lumber, coal, furs.
It was simply irresistible to America's most ambitious pioneers.
There was only one thing standing in their way, those things there, the incredibly rugged cascade Mountain range.
To build a modern city in the years before planes or long-haul semis, you needed a railroad.
Today, I'm retracing the steps of those brave and foolhardy men who risked their lives building a train tunnel in the wilderness.
I'm starting at the king street train station in downtown Seattle, following a century-old rail route to the foothills of the cascades.
And then fighting my way to a remote Mountain pass where the tunnel pierced the cascades and later became the site of a terrible tragedy.
Awesome.
Look at this, my train's come in.
Here we go.
These are live tracks we're on here, so be careful.
Passengers aren't normally allowed on this freight train, but railman Gus melonas is getting me front-seat access.
Hi, don.
Gus.
Thanks a lot for coming on board today.
I didn't even know you got into it this way.
Look at this.
How cool is this? Who knew that this was the door into a locomotive? I love this.
Right here in the driver's seat.
Okay, don, before we get started, give that whistle two blasts, and we're off.
All right, I push this button right here? Right there.
Two times.
Man, the little boy in me is howling for joy.
Gus' mile-long train has 4 locomotives and 60 cars headed east for Chicago.
And back 100 years ago, great northern steam engines were pulling in and out of this same station.
In the early days of Seattle, I mean, before there was a Seattle, there were obviously no roads here at all.
I mean, the first thing that really makes a difference here is the waterway and the railroad.
That's correct.
While the port connects Seattle to the pacific, one man was determined to overcome the landscape and connect it with the country, railroad tycoon James Jerome hill.
They called him the "empire builder" because he built the great northern railway across the U.
S.
And Seattle was the last unclaimed prize.
This guy's a genius.
He's seeing Seattle and the whole northwest as a potential economic engine of America.
Exactly right.
All the natural resources.
He noticed wheat, the vast timberland, the Douglas firs, the waterway, of course.
Everything that's here, he's gonna start shipping back right.
And shipping out.
Riding through the countryside, I'm seeing the same wild terrain that made this area a punishing place to lay tracks.
Getting the train here was a matter of going through insane territory.
I mean, huge mountains, glaciers, the whole thing.
The challenge was getting through the mountains, through the cascades.
Engineers and surveyors deemed it impossible to go through really? Because of 9,000-foot peaks with raging waterways and the largest timberland in America's 48.
In 1890,hill had a breakthrough when an engineer discovered a crucial pass where they could tunnel through the Mountain.
His route opened up Seattle to the world, but it was also the site of a disaster even deadlier than mount St.
helens.
On march 1,1910, a passenger train and a mail train were heading from spokane to Seattle when a massive avalanche hit.
A wall of snow 14-feet high slammed into the train, sweeping it a 150 feet down into the gorge, killing 96 people.
To this day, it's the deadliest avalanche in u.
S.
History.
Trains no longer use that route.
So while Gus heads east, I'm heading into the heart of Seattle's avalanche country to find hill's original train tunnel, abandoned for 80 years.
Jay bright is an expert on Seattle's back country.
He's the only guide who's agreed to take us through the treacherous area known as Stevens pass and into the original train tunnel.
Do you see avalanches a lot up here? Avalanches are common because we have steep terrain and heavy snowfall.
Because of these harsh conditions, the original rail line that came through here didn't last long, less than 30 years.
Just long enough to put Seattle on the map.
So we're sitting in the middle of Stevens pass here.
I mean, this is a huge, huge Mountain we're riding along here.
So putting a railroad through here in the early 20th century was insane.
Very ambitious.
Despite avalanches and freezing temperatures, the men of great northern carved a tunnel 2 1/2 Miles through the Mountain.
And it's still standing.
Barely.
I can see the entrance right here.
This is the west portal.
This is thick.
This stuff is deep.
Okay, isn't this something? That is really amazing-looking.
This is the cascade tunnel.
When it was finished in 1900, the tunnel created the fastest rail route to Seattle.
This is so ominous-looking.
There's a river coming through here now.
Is this actually a is this just snowmelt and stuff? This is just all snowmelt and rainwater.
The park service expressly forbids the public from entering or even going near the tunnel because of the danger of falling debris and flash floods.
Look how the water is just pouring in here.
Every 5 feet, there's another major leak pouring in, creating what is basically a river beneath us here.
Up here, actually, is very, very dangerous.
There's a dam up there created by a collapse, and there's apparently a lot of water behind that dam.
And one of this days could happen this moment That thing's gonna break loose and all this stuff is coming out here.
So tell me why they built this tunnel.
A railroad cannot follow a steep grade.
So they're better off going through a Mountain.
The engineer who discovered this pass and designed the tunnel was John Stevens.
He'd go on to design the Panama canal.
But first, he'd find a shortcut here allowing long trains filled with people and raw materials into and out of Seattle.
It's interesting you can see it over here, the method of construction, right? So you can actually see the layers of, uh these are the boards, I suppose, right? Each board is outside providing the mold, and they're pouring that concrete into it.
Man, they did a good job.
Most of it's really still here.
I can't imagine how difficult this would have been.
I mean, they basically dynamited solid rock.
People were harder then than they are now.
I agree with you completely.
The avalanche of 1910 forced great northern to rethink its route.
And in 1929,this original tunnel was abandoned for good, but by then, Seattle's population had quadrupled.
Even as the tunnel crumbles away to nothing, the city it built is still going strong.
That thing is big.
How do you make over 300 million pounds of concrete float on water? You're not really aware of the water on either sides.
Very carefully.
it's 7:00 A.
M.
A lot of seattleites are getting their fix of Grande double-shot coffees and starting their days.
But chances are they're not thinking about the 1,300 Bridges that take them from place to place or the insane engineering behind them.
Every day, thousands of Seattle commuters Look at them going there on the roadway travel to and from work on Bridges that are floating, major roadways floating on the water.
How does that work? I'm here at the department of transportation to find out.
What do I do? Hello! There's somebody named Archie I'm supposed to be meeting here.
Nice.
Don.
Archie? How you doing, man? As the bridge superintendent, Archie Allen is responsible for all three of Seattle's floating Bridges.
Today, he's taking me to the most impressive, the 520.
Is this dangerous environment we're going into? It is a little dangerous.
We'll be going down inside concrete floating pontoons.
We're going inside the bridge? That's correct.
I don't even understand how that happens.
Well, we'll show you.
We'll show you.
We're travelling 3 Miles west to the bridge.
Locals call it the 520 because it carries route 520 out of Seattle and into the suburbs that wouldn't exist without it.
This is the last fixed pier.
And when we come out of the truss, we're actually on, floating.
That is wild.
And each one of those cars, 2,000 pounds at least? That's an enormous amount of weight just pushing down on this thing at any given moment.
Yes.
And it doesn't look like it's moving.
No.
That's pretty remarkable.
115,000 cars and trucks cross this bridge every day, and making sure they get to the other side safely is a big job.
See, this is the power of the highway department, you can just pull right off here.
I love that.
Pulling off is fun.
Pulling back out? Not fun.
Yes, it has its challenges.
There's a lot of traffic on this bridge.
Yeah, there is.
It's relentless.
To get inside, we'll have to hop a boat to the access point.
This is our work boat.
It's dedicated to just maintaining the bridge here.
There's all kinds of costumes in this thing.
Always safety first out here.
Over half of this 2 1/2-mile bridge floats right on top of lake Washington.
And the best place to get inside is beneath the raised section we drove over earlier.
So this is the bridge.
When we were driving on it, I had no sense that I was actually on the water.
I mean, I had a sense we were close, but I didn't this is literally floating.
It's literally floating.
I'm pretty amazed, and I've never seen anything like this.
I mean, this is totally unique to this environment.
Very unique to the environment and somewhat unique to the pacific northwest.
'Cause you got a lot of water.
Seattle's shaped like a 16-mile-long hourglass flanked by water on both sides, and that water is deep.
So deep, in fact, that if this bridge had standard pilings, they'd had to be as tall as the space needle.
Well, let's go in the bridge, don.
Damn that thing is big.
There is a lot of bridge here.
Right now, you're standing under the superstructure, which is approximately 60 feet high.
Okay.
So above my head right there, that's the roadway.
The cars I can hear them.
Yeah, there's four lanes of them.
I can actually feel it moving.
Am I making that up? I think no, you're not.
You would really feel it if we were out here on a nasty day and we had winds 40,45 Miles an hour.
You can actually get your sea legs out here.
It moves up and down, left and right.
It twists.
It moves.
The pontoons that make up this bridge are held in place by giant underwater anchor cables.
I can hear the traffic over my head.
None of those people up there are even thinking about the fact that there's a whole pontoon beneath them holding them up, and we're going down inside.
Does it remind you of the basement in your house? It's a lot cleaner than my basement.
So what we're looking at here is a pretty typical interior cell of a pontoon.
96 of these individual cells make up 1 pontoon, and the bridge has 33 pontoons.
That means, these guys keep a daily vigil on over 3,000 cells.
How cold is this.
All right.
And this is another watertight compartment.
Essentially, we're in the hull of a ship, almost.
Like the hull of a barge.
That's a very good way of looking at it, this place is a cross between a spaceship and a submarine.
And just like a sub, it's split into watertight sections.
So if one section Springs a leak, the whole thing doesn't go down.
Is there some sort of communications system in here that you know something's wrong? There are optical water sensors.
So we'll know whenever we get 6 inches or more of water into a watertight compartment.
But with each pontoon weighing 9 1/2 million pounds, how does this bridge even float to begin with? The key is displacement.
The weight of the bridge is less than the weight of the water that it moves out of the way.
A few thousand years ago, persian king xerxes knew that when he built a floating bridge to carry the entire persian army into Europe.
The whole thing that's really intense about this experience I mean, you're hearing the traffic above us, but you're not really aware when you're down here of the water on either sides.
I'm underwater here, right? And these, actually, you can see along the concrete here, are actually repaired cracks.
So this whole place is a dynamic machine, really.
It's a perfect representation of what, you know, kind of engineering has been required to even bring the city of Seattle into existence.
And thanks to the 520 and Bridges like it, Seattle isn't just the biggest city in the northwest.
It's still growing.
I'm up a tree without a net oh, to find Seattle's green gold.
What am I trying to prove here? It was hard to be a lumberjack.
Seattle's skyline is the most recognizable in the northwest, but before there was the space needle, there were natural skyscrapers Giant 1,000-year-old trees.
As home to business giants like boeing and Microsoft, Seattle has become synonymous with aerospace and high-tech industries.
But the industry that first drove people to make the perilous journey from all corners of the continent was this logging.
By 1905,washington was the top lumber-producing state in the U.
S.
Harvesting over a billion board feet a year.
The cash from all that green gold turned Seattle from a grizzly logging town into a modern city.
The only way to know how hard it was for those early loggers is to try it myself.
So I tracked down an arborist named Peter gruenwoldt.
His family's been up in the trees for three generations.
So when your grandfather came here and logged around this area, how big were these trees? They were enormous.
You know, up to 10-, 12-foot diameter.
Just a cathedral of trees everywhere.
And then my father worked with the industry as well as a forester.
How cool that you're still doing this, what your ancestors did before you.
I love what I do.
Because of strict environmental laws, only licensed contractors can go up and cut down trees.
And today, peter's taking me into the canopy with him.
I have worked a chain saw, but not a lot so Have you climbed a tree? Yes, I have done that.
All right.
Well, let's go do it.
We're on our way 10 Miles north to a neighborhood located inside a forest.
In fact, that's where seattleites live, in the largest temperate rain forest region in the world.
When settlers got to Seattle in the 1850s, they saw forests thick with 1,000-year-old trees 12 feet wide, hundreds of feet tall.
It was enough wood to build a whole country right next to a deepwater port perfect for shipping it out.
In fact, even though that grungy logging town looked nothing like today's Seattle, some things never change.
This is the most dangerous job there is.
What? What we're doing today? It's crazy.
So you're gonna throw me up a tree and start chopping with a chain saw.
I don't why, but I'm enthusiastic about this.
The tree in question is a 150-foot-tall Douglas fir located next to a house.
It's dying from root rot, and a strong storm could easily knock it over, causing serious damage.
So this is what we're after.
No kidding? We're taking this thing down? This is our Doug fir.
That's a big tree.
I wasn't feeling any any dread until just now.
I mean, it's awesome to look up at this size tree, and you're sending me all the way up this thing.
All the way.
I don't know if you're making a mistake here.
We're too close to people and structures to start hacking at the base, so the tree must be brought down piece by piece starting at the top.
Here's our gear.
We got to get a harness on you so you can head up the tree.
The first problem with logging is you're going up high.
And you don't want to fall down, these are called tree gaffs, and they allow you to dig into the bark.
I got to get these things really tight, don't I? Pretty snug.
Your life does depend on it.
Nice, thanks.
All right.
I think I'm about as tight in as I can get! That's good.
All right.
What we're about to do is called tree topping because that's the part we're cutting off.
It's one of the most specialized and dangerous jobs in the trade.
And except for the chain saw, we're basically doing it the same way it was done 100 years ago.
Ready? Oh that's it.
Okay, so this is a very slow and methodical process.
How long is it gonna take me to get up there? Going at your rate, it's gonna take a bit of time.
Let me see how you do it.
My God.
My lord, man.
He's just inspired me.
Inspired me to go faster.
He's almost at the top.
I'm starting to move like I think I know what I'm doing.
Whoo nice work, don.
The higher I go, the more I realize how completely insane this job is.
Let's talk about working without a net.
Don't look down.
I'm making my way up into the Seattle rain forest, 70 feet up a dying Douglas fir.
Not even a halfway.
And the way I'm getting up there? With nothing but tree gaffs on my feet and a rope around my waist.
It's basically how loggers have been doing it for centuries.
Don't let me fall.
Arborist Peter gruenwoldt is about to top off this tree, and I'm getting up close and personal inch by terrifying inch.
What am I trying to prove here? Yeah it was hard to be a lumberjack.
That's what we're trying to prove? That's right.
Okay, thanks.
And I'm not even holding a chain saw.
This is harrowing, but it doesn't come close to the brutality of a century ago.
Early lumberjacks took down the country's biggest trees with handsaws, axes and a 2-man saws they called "misery whips.
" Fatalities were a daily reality.
" And even if you were lucky enough to just break a leg or hack off a digit, there were no ambulances, no x-rays.
Just a dirty logging camp filled with the baddest men around.
Life was so seedy in the camps that before long, logging camps were synonymous with all things depraved and degenerate.
In fact, we get the term "skid row" from what loggers called skid road, a place where they slid tree trunks down to the mill sites.
But without the camps and the characters who worked in them, Seattle wouldn't be here.
That's it.
Nice work, don! That's good.
I see ropes.
Tell me the whole operation of what you're gonna do.
Well, what we've got, we've got a 200-foot main line tied off to the top of this tree, and it's putting tension in the direction we want this to fall.
We're gonna put in our face cut, come in from the back.
Okay.
And we're gonna make this top hit the ground.
You're gonna cut this right in front of me? Right in front of you.
Okay, so I'm gonna go into this kind of thing, so this is what's called the undercut.
All right.
And this is effectively the hinge that will steer this top.
You can actually aim this tree by the cut that you make.
All right, here we go.
Go for it.
Timber! That's good, man! That's a rush.
You're telling me.
That was great.
There he is.
Look at that.
High five.
Nice work.
Okay, what are we doing next? We got to go down this thing.
That's what I I didn't want you to say that.
You first or me first? The emerald city was a hard-won jewel for the pioneers who battled nature and the elements to build it.
Seattle promised vast riches.
And it delivered.
I will have two.
Today, its pioneers are of a different breed, musicians, artists, and high-tech superstars, but the pay off is just impressive.
How far down is this river? 850 feet.
Welcome to Seattle where it's all about living on the edge.
It's a place where an engineering breakthrough became a death trap.
Look how the water is just pouring in here.
And massive concrete Bridges float on water.
I've never seen anything like this.
But taming this emerald wilderness took brains Like an amusement ride from hell.
And brawn.
Talk about working without a net.
And survival was never guaranteed.
My God, it's cold.
This is Seattle, off limits.
=== off limits s01e02 === In every city, every town are places sealed off from the rest of the world hiding their amazing stories, behind locked doors, inside barbed wire where they say you cannot go.
I'm Don Wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
going up to the top of the space needle.
And this gets all this is a full-body harness.
All right, cool.
Hell of a way to see the scenery, huh? So I'm going out there? Whoa, man.
All right, here we go.
Holy.
All right.
Seattle, from the top.
Intense.
I mean, 520 feet above it, you can see, you know, what makes this such an amazing town.
Let's try and creep out here a little closer to the edge.
What the heck, man, you only do this once, right? Look at that.
Splat.
Wow, the wind in my face, baby.
Seattle, I'm cold.
I'm wet.
I'm an inch from death.
And now I know what the early pioneers felt like here when they battled relentless weather, icy waters, and towering volcanic peaks to build this city Seattle.
Today, it's one of the most desirable places in the u.
S.
To live, a mecca of cutting-edge tech, music and creativity.
It's one of the youngest cities in America because 100 years ago, it was almost impossible to settle.
All of Seattle around me.
Look, that's downtown, an amazing, amazing geography.
I mean, you have all around you water everywhere, right? Lake union here, lake Washington out there and of course, famous and huge, the puget sound very frigid, very deep waters.
You wonder how all this even happened.
This modern city would never have grown out of the forest if not for one key ingredient power.
Long before today's green movement, turn-of-the-century seattleites found a way to extract electricity from their most abundant resource Water.
So this is the puyallup river, one of dozens of glacially fed rivers that flow off the slopes of mount rainier.
When the early founding fathers of Seattle started dealing with the fact that their population was growing, there was inevitably a demand for more power.
They came out here looking for the energy that could make that stuff.
The problem, though, was designing a system that could turn that energy into electricity.
The puyallup river starts in the cascades 16,000 feet above sea level and flows 45 Miles downhill and northwest towards the city.
It's just one of the dozens of rivers and dams that provide Seattle with 90% of its electricity.
I'm driving up to the foothills of mount rainier to get an insider's look at one of them, the electron project, a 100-year-old hydroelectric engineering marvel that's still providing power for Seattle today.
Gene, how are you doing? Hey, how are you doing? Gene Galloway has been working on the electron project for 38 years.
When did this whole operation start? It started about 1900.
Seattle, tacoma, all these areas are growing in population.
And they're demanding what all those people back east take for granted.
That's correct.
They want the same thing.
They want electricity.
They want electricity.
So how is this water delivered to the point of making this energy? It flows in a 10 1/2-mile flume.
It's an 8x8 wooden box.
Gene explained that instead of trapping the river behind a massive dam to create power, the electron channels it into a 10-mile long flume.
After the water is diverted from the river into the flume line and makes its journey down the Mountain, it collects in a reservoir.
Then rushes down through pipes called penstocks into waterwheel-driven turbines in a powerhouse.
The flume stretches through rugged and treacherous terrain, and the only way for me to see the entire length is by a special rail line open only to puget energy workers.
Here comes the train.
Cool.
The original workers laid these tracks on top of the flume as a way to maintain and inspect the line over 100 years ago.
Look at this.
This board doesn't look so secure.
But we are going on this little rail car on top of this flume full of a torrent of water.
Basically, this whole track runs the distance of this flume 10 Miles down the Mountain.
That's where we're going.
Okay, so we're leaving the station here, huh? We certainly are.
All aboard.
We'll be chugging along at the blistering rate of 7 Miles an hour.
Any faster and we might come off the tracks.
We're traveling here pretty slow, at a pretty flat grade.
That's intentional, yeah? The plan, the design called for an 8-foot drop per mile.
You don't want the water to get going too fast or it'd bore a hole in the ground and you may not be able to stop it.
That is also one of reasons that the curves are in the flume.
There are 275 curves along the track, earning it the nickname "the crookedest railroad in the world.
" This is the original design in terms of the flow.
" Man, they knew what they were doing back then.
They were brilliant engineers.
One of those engineers was Sam shuffleton.
Largely self-taught with only a grade-school education, shuffleton took on the herculean task of supervising the electron project in 1902.
Workers had to fell giant old-growth trees, build on the side of an 800-foot ravine, and deal with Mountain lions, rain and snow.
18 months later, the flume, the track, the power station, all of it was up and running.
They must have had an enormous workforce doing this.
The reports are that there were between 1,500 and 2,500 people working on this project.
Somebody switching on a light switch in Seattle has no idea that out in the middle of nowhere, there's a flume that looks like the 1910s.
All they know is that the light just came on.
Look at it just dropping off here.
Here's a steep shot to the river right here.
This little, tiny train car is, like, vibrating all over and rocking back and forth, and it feels like it's just gonna go right over on one of these curves.
Bam! Right down there.
Like an amusement ride from hell.
How far down is this river? 850 feet.
This is scary.
This is scary.
It's, uh, it's one of those places where you have to really pay attention to what you're doing.
I'm seeing a cross here.
George.
George.
Somebody died here.
One of the constructors in 1984 fell off here and died.
-You're kidding.
-No.
Two men have died over the years to keep this project up and running.
What do you want to do? I just want to walk down here.
I got to get a sense of what that feels like.
Nothing will happen, I promise you.
Nothing bad will happen.
Be careful.
It is so high over all of this incredible terrain.
Just to get a feeling of what these guys did to build this.
Such an intense feeling.
You got the water underneath of you and about 800 feet of space of ravine straight down.
You don't want to fall down.
Very slippery board.
That's scary out there.
So this is the power plant itself? This is the powerhouse.
Look the water's twisting 10-mile journey ends here.
I see the pipes coming right over the hill.
Those are the penstocks.
-Penstocks.
-Yes.
The penstocks channel the water into a tiny but incredibly strong stream, going 500 Miles an hour when it hits the waterwheel turbines plant.
And then is discharged out of the plan that is a vigorous flow.
This is this is a result of the turbine discharge.
This is best place to see the power of water and how it generates 14,000 kilowatts of electricity for Seattle.
So can we get inside here? Yeah, we certainly can.
Look at those things.
Usually, only puget energy employees get to see the heart of the electron project.
Each one of the units has two waterwheels driving the generator.
So under our feet, that water is turning those waterwheels.
That shaft is driving this, and you're making electricity.
A.
C.
Current heading out.
Heading out.
Nice.
This is still the same machine.
The whole thing just works 100 years later.
It's like everything here, they just left it as it is because it worked.
I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The plant produces enough juice to power 17000 households in the Seattle area, and it's all thanks to the snows of mount rainier and 100-year-old engineering know-how.
It's cold, and it's wet.
Perfect day for a dive.
I'm finding a lost fleet at the bottom of chilly puget sound.
Look at the size of this boiler! And Seattle's first industry looks a lot different from up here.
Don't down.
On a winter's day in Seattle, puget sound is a soothing, peaceful place.
But 100 years ago, there was a demolition derby going on out here.
Imagine hundreds of steamships wildly racing each other for business with no traffic laws.
This was Seattle's first superhighway, and I'm here to see what's left of it.
Just like I-5 that you can see cutting right through town there.
The sound was crammed with traffic, but instead of cars, the water was filled with a veritable fleet of hundreds of steamboats going to and fro, ship to shore, all around the sound.
I mean, today, they're all but gone.
They've been replaced with container ships and tankers.
But if you are willing to dive in these frigid depths, you can visit the watery graves of the mosquito fleet.
At the turn of the last century, there were few roads and almost no Bridges here, just waterways.
So small steamships did the work of taxis and delivery trucks, connecting Seattle with the surrounding area and helping it grow into a major Metropolis.
By 1925,2,500 steamships had served in the sound, competing fiercely for passengers and cargo.
They swarmed over the water, so locals called them the "mosquito fleet.
" Now pretty much all that's left are disintegrating wrecks on the seafloor.
" I'm heading South to point defiance marina to explore some of the best-preserved accessible wreckage, the underwater remains of the "s.
S.
Burton.
" Scott.
Hey.
Hey, how are you? Scott Boyd is one of the very few people who knows the exact location of the "Burton.
" All right.
Off we go.
" There's nobody on the water, which is fantastic.
I love that.
Nice empty day today.
This is a good time to go out 'cause there's it's raining a lot.
You just kind of get used to it up here, just being wet all the time, and it's not that bad.
Bad weather and low visibility have always been a problem out here in the sound.
Hundreds of small boats zipping this way and that.
Many of them ran into each other in these thick fogs that are out here.
Many of them burned, many of them sank.
The biggest killer was competition.
The fastest boat got the business, so crews stoked boiler fires way past the safety point, using oil-soaked wood for fuel, throwing in whiskey or kerosene for an extra kick.
Some ships blew up, others crashed because they were hard to steer, especially when they were going too fast.
We're entering the narrow channel into gig harbor, where the "Burton" went down.
Its wild career and violent end were common in the mosquito fleet.
What happened here in gig harbor that this thing went down? It was 1924,I believe, and it was tied over to the people's dock over here yeah.
Which was where they used to disembark.
And probably the boiler ran out of water and caught the vessel on fire.
Really? And so that was typical for the mosquito fleet.
The "Burton" had a passenger route between nearby vashon island and the mill town of Tacoma.
However, it was the exact same route of another steamship called the "vashon.
" And they used to race every day to see" who could get there first to get the passengers to make the money.
Interesting.
And, uh this was a friendly rivalry or an unfriendly one? A little of both.
They used to ride on each other's bow waves like rail-to-rail, scaring the heck out of the passengers.
And usually, the boat that lost the race would, tie up to the boat that won, jump aboard, and the crew sometimes actually got into fisticuffs over it.
So it was quite the rivalry between the two boats.
The only remains left of the "Burton" sit 40 feet underwater right below us.
There's really none of the hull left.
I have a sense of the keel and where this boat yes.
The stretch of this boat is? It's chilly! It's cold, and it's wet.
Perfect day for a dive.
969 it's just creeping in, and it's really cold.
My God, it's cold.
The ship is disintegrating, but I should still be able to see the giant boiler and firebox.
I can just start to see the ship beneath me.
At first, it just looks like an algae-coated scrap yard, then the "Burton" starts to take shape.
So this is the boiler right here.
You could see from the size of this boiler, how fast they wanted this ship to go.
Hello there.
It speaks to how large the ship really was, 93 feet long.
The "Burton" was bigger than a semi tractor trailer, and the boiler produced the steam that powered it.
It was common to soup up engines by removing the emergency steam-release valves to build up more pressure and more speed.
The heat came from burning wood or anything flammable in a metal firebox insulated with bricks.
These are the firebox bricks.
These are the pieces we're talking about.
This is probably where the fire started the night the "Burton" went down.
On an all-wooden ship, one stray spark spelled disaster.
No lives were lost, but the "Burton" was finished.
This is amazing stuff to see.
The wooden hull has long since rotted away, and all of the metal parts are quickly disappearing into a reef.
All of these are the condenser pipes of this steam engine-driven ship.
Look inside.
Basically, it'll become a reef.
All these little animals.
This is an apartment complex, a condominium for crabs.
In the ten years after the "Burton" sank, the entire mosquito fleet began to vanish, replaced by modern roadways.
While travel and transport got faster and more efficient, the ships that once tied the entire Seattle area together quickly sank into oblivion.
Today, the boaters and pleasure crafts cruising above have no idea the remains of a wild armada are slowly disintegrating beneath the waves.
I'm taking a killer trek to avalanche country whoa, this is thick.
To find the tunnel that built Seattle.
There's a river beneath us here.
today, seattle is the biggest city in the northwest.
But 100 years ago, it wasn't much more than a seedy logging camp with a lot of potential.
Toward the latter part of the 19th century, Seattle's population was still sparse, 3,000 people or so.
But there was still so much untapped wealth here in the form of natural resources Lumber, coal, furs.
It was simply irresistible to America's most ambitious pioneers.
There was only one thing standing in their way, those things there, the incredibly rugged cascade Mountain range.
To build a modern city in the years before planes or long-haul semis, you needed a railroad.
Today, I'm retracing the steps of those brave and foolhardy men who risked their lives building a train tunnel in the wilderness.
I'm starting at the king street train station in downtown Seattle, following a century-old rail route to the foothills of the cascades.
And then fighting my way to a remote Mountain pass where the tunnel pierced the cascades and later became the site of a terrible tragedy.
Awesome.
Look at this, my train's come in.
Here we go.
These are live tracks we're on here, so be careful.
Passengers aren't normally allowed on this freight train, but railman Gus melonas is getting me front-seat access.
Hi, don.
Gus.
Thanks a lot for coming on board today.
I didn't even know you got into it this way.
Look at this.
How cool is this? Who knew that this was the door into a locomotive? I love this.
Right here in the driver's seat.
Okay, don, before we get started, give that whistle two blasts, and we're off.
All right, I push this button right here? Right there.
Two times.
Man, the little boy in me is howling for joy.
Gus' mile-long train has 4 locomotives and 60 cars headed east for Chicago.
And back 100 years ago, great northern steam engines were pulling in and out of this same station.
In the early days of Seattle, I mean, before there was a Seattle, there were obviously no roads here at all.
I mean, the first thing that really makes a difference here is the waterway and the railroad.
That's correct.
While the port connects Seattle to the pacific, one man was determined to overcome the landscape and connect it with the country, railroad tycoon James Jerome hill.
They called him the "empire builder" because he built the great northern railway across the U.
S.
And Seattle was the last unclaimed prize.
This guy's a genius.
He's seeing Seattle and the whole northwest as a potential economic engine of America.
Exactly right.
All the natural resources.
He noticed wheat, the vast timberland, the Douglas firs, the waterway, of course.
Everything that's here, he's gonna start shipping back right.
And shipping out.
Riding through the countryside, I'm seeing the same wild terrain that made this area a punishing place to lay tracks.
Getting the train here was a matter of going through insane territory.
I mean, huge mountains, glaciers, the whole thing.
The challenge was getting through the mountains, through the cascades.
Engineers and surveyors deemed it impossible to go through really? Because of 9,000-foot peaks with raging waterways and the largest timberland in America's 48.
In 1890,hill had a breakthrough when an engineer discovered a crucial pass where they could tunnel through the Mountain.
His route opened up Seattle to the world, but it was also the site of a disaster even deadlier than mount St.
helens.
On march 1,1910, a passenger train and a mail train were heading from spokane to Seattle when a massive avalanche hit.
A wall of snow 14-feet high slammed into the train, sweeping it a 150 feet down into the gorge, killing 96 people.
To this day, it's the deadliest avalanche in u.
S.
History.
Trains no longer use that route.
So while Gus heads east, I'm heading into the heart of Seattle's avalanche country to find hill's original train tunnel, abandoned for 80 years.
Jay bright is an expert on Seattle's back country.
He's the only guide who's agreed to take us through the treacherous area known as Stevens pass and into the original train tunnel.
Do you see avalanches a lot up here? Avalanches are common because we have steep terrain and heavy snowfall.
Because of these harsh conditions, the original rail line that came through here didn't last long, less than 30 years.
Just long enough to put Seattle on the map.
So we're sitting in the middle of Stevens pass here.
I mean, this is a huge, huge Mountain we're riding along here.
So putting a railroad through here in the early 20th century was insane.
Very ambitious.
Despite avalanches and freezing temperatures, the men of great northern carved a tunnel 2 1/2 Miles through the Mountain.
And it's still standing.
Barely.
I can see the entrance right here.
This is the west portal.
This is thick.
This stuff is deep.
Okay, isn't this something? That is really amazing-looking.
This is the cascade tunnel.
When it was finished in 1900, the tunnel created the fastest rail route to Seattle.
This is so ominous-looking.
There's a river coming through here now.
Is this actually a is this just snowmelt and stuff? This is just all snowmelt and rainwater.
The park service expressly forbids the public from entering or even going near the tunnel because of the danger of falling debris and flash floods.
Look how the water is just pouring in here.
Every 5 feet, there's another major leak pouring in, creating what is basically a river beneath us here.
Up here, actually, is very, very dangerous.
There's a dam up there created by a collapse, and there's apparently a lot of water behind that dam.
And one of this days could happen this moment That thing's gonna break loose and all this stuff is coming out here.
So tell me why they built this tunnel.
A railroad cannot follow a steep grade.
So they're better off going through a Mountain.
The engineer who discovered this pass and designed the tunnel was John Stevens.
He'd go on to design the Panama canal.
But first, he'd find a shortcut here allowing long trains filled with people and raw materials into and out of Seattle.
It's interesting you can see it over here, the method of construction, right? So you can actually see the layers of, uh these are the boards, I suppose, right? Each board is outside providing the mold, and they're pouring that concrete into it.
Man, they did a good job.
Most of it's really still here.
I can't imagine how difficult this would have been.
I mean, they basically dynamited solid rock.
People were harder then than they are now.
I agree with you completely.
The avalanche of 1910 forced great northern to rethink its route.
And in 1929,this original tunnel was abandoned for good, but by then, Seattle's population had quadrupled.
Even as the tunnel crumbles away to nothing, the city it built is still going strong.
That thing is big.
How do you make over 300 million pounds of concrete float on water? You're not really aware of the water on either sides.
Very carefully.
it's 7:00 A.
M.
A lot of seattleites are getting their fix of Grande double-shot coffees and starting their days.
But chances are they're not thinking about the 1,300 Bridges that take them from place to place or the insane engineering behind them.
Every day, thousands of Seattle commuters Look at them going there on the roadway travel to and from work on Bridges that are floating, major roadways floating on the water.
How does that work? I'm here at the department of transportation to find out.
What do I do? Hello! There's somebody named Archie I'm supposed to be meeting here.
Nice.
Don.
Archie? How you doing, man? As the bridge superintendent, Archie Allen is responsible for all three of Seattle's floating Bridges.
Today, he's taking me to the most impressive, the 520.
Is this dangerous environment we're going into? It is a little dangerous.
We'll be going down inside concrete floating pontoons.
We're going inside the bridge? That's correct.
I don't even understand how that happens.
Well, we'll show you.
We'll show you.
We're travelling 3 Miles west to the bridge.
Locals call it the 520 because it carries route 520 out of Seattle and into the suburbs that wouldn't exist without it.
This is the last fixed pier.
And when we come out of the truss, we're actually on, floating.
That is wild.
And each one of those cars, 2,000 pounds at least? That's an enormous amount of weight just pushing down on this thing at any given moment.
Yes.
And it doesn't look like it's moving.
No.
That's pretty remarkable.
115,000 cars and trucks cross this bridge every day, and making sure they get to the other side safely is a big job.
See, this is the power of the highway department, you can just pull right off here.
I love that.
Pulling off is fun.
Pulling back out? Not fun.
Yes, it has its challenges.
There's a lot of traffic on this bridge.
Yeah, there is.
It's relentless.
To get inside, we'll have to hop a boat to the access point.
This is our work boat.
It's dedicated to just maintaining the bridge here.
There's all kinds of costumes in this thing.
Always safety first out here.
Over half of this 2 1/2-mile bridge floats right on top of lake Washington.
And the best place to get inside is beneath the raised section we drove over earlier.
So this is the bridge.
When we were driving on it, I had no sense that I was actually on the water.
I mean, I had a sense we were close, but I didn't this is literally floating.
It's literally floating.
I'm pretty amazed, and I've never seen anything like this.
I mean, this is totally unique to this environment.
Very unique to the environment and somewhat unique to the pacific northwest.
'Cause you got a lot of water.
Seattle's shaped like a 16-mile-long hourglass flanked by water on both sides, and that water is deep.
So deep, in fact, that if this bridge had standard pilings, they'd had to be as tall as the space needle.
Well, let's go in the bridge, don.
Damn that thing is big.
There is a lot of bridge here.
Right now, you're standing under the superstructure, which is approximately 60 feet high.
Okay.
So above my head right there, that's the roadway.
The cars I can hear them.
Yeah, there's four lanes of them.
I can actually feel it moving.
Am I making that up? I think no, you're not.
You would really feel it if we were out here on a nasty day and we had winds 40,45 Miles an hour.
You can actually get your sea legs out here.
It moves up and down, left and right.
It twists.
It moves.
The pontoons that make up this bridge are held in place by giant underwater anchor cables.
I can hear the traffic over my head.
None of those people up there are even thinking about the fact that there's a whole pontoon beneath them holding them up, and we're going down inside.
Does it remind you of the basement in your house? It's a lot cleaner than my basement.
So what we're looking at here is a pretty typical interior cell of a pontoon.
96 of these individual cells make up 1 pontoon, and the bridge has 33 pontoons.
That means, these guys keep a daily vigil on over 3,000 cells.
How cold is this.
All right.
And this is another watertight compartment.
Essentially, we're in the hull of a ship, almost.
Like the hull of a barge.
That's a very good way of looking at it, this place is a cross between a spaceship and a submarine.
And just like a sub, it's split into watertight sections.
So if one section Springs a leak, the whole thing doesn't go down.
Is there some sort of communications system in here that you know something's wrong? There are optical water sensors.
So we'll know whenever we get 6 inches or more of water into a watertight compartment.
But with each pontoon weighing 9 1/2 million pounds, how does this bridge even float to begin with? The key is displacement.
The weight of the bridge is less than the weight of the water that it moves out of the way.
A few thousand years ago, persian king xerxes knew that when he built a floating bridge to carry the entire persian army into Europe.
The whole thing that's really intense about this experience I mean, you're hearing the traffic above us, but you're not really aware when you're down here of the water on either sides.
I'm underwater here, right? And these, actually, you can see along the concrete here, are actually repaired cracks.
So this whole place is a dynamic machine, really.
It's a perfect representation of what, you know, kind of engineering has been required to even bring the city of Seattle into existence.
And thanks to the 520 and Bridges like it, Seattle isn't just the biggest city in the northwest.
It's still growing.
I'm up a tree without a net oh, to find Seattle's green gold.
What am I trying to prove here? It was hard to be a lumberjack.
Seattle's skyline is the most recognizable in the northwest, but before there was the space needle, there were natural skyscrapers Giant 1,000-year-old trees.
As home to business giants like boeing and Microsoft, Seattle has become synonymous with aerospace and high-tech industries.
But the industry that first drove people to make the perilous journey from all corners of the continent was this logging.
By 1905,washington was the top lumber-producing state in the U.
S.
Harvesting over a billion board feet a year.
The cash from all that green gold turned Seattle from a grizzly logging town into a modern city.
The only way to know how hard it was for those early loggers is to try it myself.
So I tracked down an arborist named Peter gruenwoldt.
His family's been up in the trees for three generations.
So when your grandfather came here and logged around this area, how big were these trees? They were enormous.
You know, up to 10-, 12-foot diameter.
Just a cathedral of trees everywhere.
And then my father worked with the industry as well as a forester.
How cool that you're still doing this, what your ancestors did before you.
I love what I do.
Because of strict environmental laws, only licensed contractors can go up and cut down trees.
And today, peter's taking me into the canopy with him.
I have worked a chain saw, but not a lot so Have you climbed a tree? Yes, I have done that.
All right.
Well, let's go do it.
We're on our way 10 Miles north to a neighborhood located inside a forest.
In fact, that's where seattleites live, in the largest temperate rain forest region in the world.
When settlers got to Seattle in the 1850s, they saw forests thick with 1,000-year-old trees 12 feet wide, hundreds of feet tall.
It was enough wood to build a whole country right next to a deepwater port perfect for shipping it out.
In fact, even though that grungy logging town looked nothing like today's Seattle, some things never change.
This is the most dangerous job there is.
What? What we're doing today? It's crazy.
So you're gonna throw me up a tree and start chopping with a chain saw.
I don't why, but I'm enthusiastic about this.
The tree in question is a 150-foot-tall Douglas fir located next to a house.
It's dying from root rot, and a strong storm could easily knock it over, causing serious damage.
So this is what we're after.
No kidding? We're taking this thing down? This is our Doug fir.
That's a big tree.
I wasn't feeling any any dread until just now.
I mean, it's awesome to look up at this size tree, and you're sending me all the way up this thing.
All the way.
I don't know if you're making a mistake here.
We're too close to people and structures to start hacking at the base, so the tree must be brought down piece by piece starting at the top.
Here's our gear.
We got to get a harness on you so you can head up the tree.
The first problem with logging is you're going up high.
And you don't want to fall down, these are called tree gaffs, and they allow you to dig into the bark.
I got to get these things really tight, don't I? Pretty snug.
Your life does depend on it.
Nice, thanks.
All right.
I think I'm about as tight in as I can get! That's good.
All right.
What we're about to do is called tree topping because that's the part we're cutting off.
It's one of the most specialized and dangerous jobs in the trade.
And except for the chain saw, we're basically doing it the same way it was done 100 years ago.
Ready? Oh that's it.
Okay, so this is a very slow and methodical process.
How long is it gonna take me to get up there? Going at your rate, it's gonna take a bit of time.
Let me see how you do it.
My God.
My lord, man.
He's just inspired me.
Inspired me to go faster.
He's almost at the top.
I'm starting to move like I think I know what I'm doing.
Whoo nice work, don.
The higher I go, the more I realize how completely insane this job is.
Let's talk about working without a net.
Don't look down.
I'm making my way up into the Seattle rain forest, 70 feet up a dying Douglas fir.
Not even a halfway.
And the way I'm getting up there? With nothing but tree gaffs on my feet and a rope around my waist.
It's basically how loggers have been doing it for centuries.
Don't let me fall.
Arborist Peter gruenwoldt is about to top off this tree, and I'm getting up close and personal inch by terrifying inch.
What am I trying to prove here? Yeah it was hard to be a lumberjack.
That's what we're trying to prove? That's right.
Okay, thanks.
And I'm not even holding a chain saw.
This is harrowing, but it doesn't come close to the brutality of a century ago.
Early lumberjacks took down the country's biggest trees with handsaws, axes and a 2-man saws they called "misery whips.
" Fatalities were a daily reality.
" And even if you were lucky enough to just break a leg or hack off a digit, there were no ambulances, no x-rays.
Just a dirty logging camp filled with the baddest men around.
Life was so seedy in the camps that before long, logging camps were synonymous with all things depraved and degenerate.
In fact, we get the term "skid row" from what loggers called skid road, a place where they slid tree trunks down to the mill sites.
But without the camps and the characters who worked in them, Seattle wouldn't be here.
That's it.
Nice work, don! That's good.
I see ropes.
Tell me the whole operation of what you're gonna do.
Well, what we've got, we've got a 200-foot main line tied off to the top of this tree, and it's putting tension in the direction we want this to fall.
We're gonna put in our face cut, come in from the back.
Okay.
And we're gonna make this top hit the ground.
You're gonna cut this right in front of me? Right in front of you.
Okay, so I'm gonna go into this kind of thing, so this is what's called the undercut.
All right.
And this is effectively the hinge that will steer this top.
You can actually aim this tree by the cut that you make.
All right, here we go.
Go for it.
Timber! That's good, man! That's a rush.
You're telling me.
That was great.
There he is.
Look at that.
High five.
Nice work.
Okay, what are we doing next? We got to go down this thing.
That's what I I didn't want you to say that.
You first or me first? The emerald city was a hard-won jewel for the pioneers who battled nature and the elements to build it.
Seattle promised vast riches.
And it delivered.
I will have two.
Today, its pioneers are of a different breed, musicians, artists, and high-tech superstars, but the pay off is just impressive.