Cheers to those creative types who who think outside of the proverbial box. In 1925-26, the Great Western Power Company, forerunner to PG&E constructed a reservoir at Butt Valley to the west of Lake Almanor, expanding its hydroelectric system. When Great Western constructed Lake Almanor in 1914, it had entered into a contract with the Red River Lumber Company to log and remove trees from the reservoir site. A similar arrangement was done for Butt Valley.
Red River abandoned its traditional logging methods for this project. By January 1926 Red River had felled 16 million board feet of timber in Butt Valley, and now waited for the spring run off to fill the newly created reservoir. To retrieve the logs, Red River built a huge raft to float a steam donkey engine to do the job. As an observer remarked of the “ocean liner,” that contained 61,000 board feet of logs bound together by cables, that after it served its usefulness, it was dismantled and the logs milled.