What a Mine Tunnel in Idaho Taught Us About Building Tools
Last week I rode my bike out to the Pulaski Tunnel Trailhead outside Wallace, Idaho. I didn't go looking for a marketing idea. I went because it was a good ride and the history is worth seeing in person. But once you stand at that overlook and read the markers, it's hard not to think about why we build tools the way we do.
Here's the story, as close to straight as I can tell it.
On August 20, 1910, a series of small fires burning across northern Idaho, Montana, and Washington blew up into one massive firestorm. Hurricane-force winds turned smoldering ground fires into what survivors called a wall of flame. It's still known as the Big Blowup, and it burned more than three million acres in about 36 hours.
A Forest Service ranger named Ed Pulaski was supervising a crew of around 45 men on the West Fork of Placer Creek, a few miles south of Wallace. When the fire turned on them, Pulaski knew the terrain well enough to find a way out that wasn't out at all. He led his crew to an old prospector's mine, the Nicholson Mine, and got them into the tunnel.
That's when it got worse. Smoke and heat filled the tunnel as the fire passed overhead. Some of the men panicked and tried to run back out into the flames. Pulaski held them there anyway. He hung wet blankets over the entrance, kept dousing them with water from a nearby creek, and by most accounts drew his revolver and told his crew the next man who tried to leave, he'd shoot. He passed out from smoke inhalation himself before it was over. A few of his men didn't survive. The rest did, because he didn't let them run.
The next year, Pulaski was credited with designing a tool that combined an axe and an adze into one head. It's called, plainly enough, a Pulaski. It's still standard issue for wildland fire crews more than a century later, because it does exactly what a firefighter needs in exactly the moment they need it, and it doesn't fail on them when it counts.
We don't make a Pulaski. We want to be clear about that. What we build is a different shape, for different work. But the reason that tool has lasted 115 years isn't the shape. It's that it was built by someone who understood, in the most direct way a person can, what happens when your gear lets you down at the wrong moment. Pulaski wasn't a toolmaker. He was a ranger who'd just watched fire take a landscape apart and decided the standard tools weren't good enough for the job anymore. That's not a design philosophy. That's a guy solving a problem he'd nearly died because of. The tool got adopted because it worked, not because it was marketed. That's worth remembering in an industry where most gear gets sold on story instead of substance.
That's the standard we're trying to hold ourselves to, even if the tools look nothing alike. Steel that doesn't crack or fold under real load. A handle you can replace yourself in the field in about five minutes, without shipping the whole tool back to us or waiting on a warranty claim. We built that into every head we make.
Nothing on a BST tool is there because it looks good in a photo. It's there because somebody, somewhere, is depending on it holding up. A trail crew ten miles from the trailhead. A wildland crew who doesn't get to call it a day because a handle snapped. A gardener who's used the same Rex for six seasons and doesn't want a seventh purchase, just a fix. Different jobs than Pulaski's. Same idea: build the thing so it works when the person holding it can't afford for it not to.
If you're ever in North Idaho, the trail out to the tunnel is about four miles round trip, moderate grade, and worth the drive off I-90. There are twelve interpretive signs along the way, so give yourself more time than the mileage suggests. Bring water, read the markers, and take your time at the overlook. It's a quiet place for a story that big.
Assembled in Colorado.
Team Backslope Tools
Learn More
US Forest Service — Pulaski Tunnel Trail (official)
Visit North Idaho — Pulaski Tunnel Trail (directions, trail details)