Behind the
100 Mile House Visitor Centre and beside the
100 Mile House Marsh, a protected waterfowl habitat developed by
Ducks Unlimited, is a small area housing five individual pieces of machinery once used in the labour intensive process of turning trees into lumber, the primary industry in the 100 Mile House region.
The purpose of the logging arch was to aid in hauling logs out of the bush to a road or a railway siding. The idea was that the arch would support the weight of the log, making conveyance easier than simply skidding the log(s). This unit is equipped with tracks instead of wheels, meaning that it would have been used in low lying areas with soft ground, such as muskeg. It would have been pulled by a Caterpillar tractor, the log being lifted from the ground by a cable from the Cat's winch. These units came into use in the 1930s, following then outmoded horse drawn logging arches of earlier years.
No longer used to any extent, the logging arch has been supplanted by the "Integral Arch", with the arch as part of the tractor, and the log skidder. Some interesting Arch Logging can be seen
here.