Ever blow up a horse?

Cripes I wish I had had Buffybr around!

No TNT, but back in my FS trail crew days we ended up getting hooked into dragging a dead horse off the trail. No G bears down here but someone complained it was spooking other horses.

Myself and a couple other guys had a splendid afternoon of using a come-along and all the chain we could carry up there to drag it a couple hundred yards off the trail. I still remember the stench the first time it moved a foot or so. Way funny naming the horse Wildfire. Come on Wildfire move!!!

It was that experience that taught me the fine art of stuffing foam ear plugs up your nostrils when dealing with highly odoriferous situations. Works like a charm.
 
See the two wooden boxes that my elk is setting on? When I was 10 and my grandpa was retiring from farming we found them in his barn said Trojan dynamite on them. One was completely full and the other had a few sticks still in it. They looked like they were packed in honey....which come to find out was the nitro seeping out of them.
Grandpa over the years had forgotten all about them and acted like it was no big deal. He said he would go to the hardware store in town and buy it all the time. I asked him what he would use it for. He told me for all sorts of things. Back then there were no backhoes and if you need to get rid of stumps to make a field it made quick work of them. He then said it would turn dead live stock into dust so you wouldn't have to spend all day burying them.
My uncle was a deputy sheriff at the time and about crapped himself when we showed him and he disposed of the dynamite. I made sure he kept the boxes because I thought they were cool. 37 year's later I still think they're cool.
 

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Redman said:
See the two wooden boxes that my elk is setting on? When I was 10 and my grandpa was retiring from farming we found them in his barn said Trojan dynamite on them. One was completely full and the other had a few sticks still in it. They looked like they were packed in honey....which come to find out was the nitro seeping out of them.
Grandpa over the years had forgotten all about them and acted like it was no big deal. He said he would go to the hardware store in town and buy it all the time. I asked him what he would use it for. He told me for all sorts of things. Back then there were no backhoes and if you need to get rid of stumps to make a field it made quick work of them. He then said it would turn dead live stock into dust so you wouldn't have to spend all day burying them.
My uncle was a deputy sheriff at the time and about crapped himself when we showed him and he disposed of the dynamite. I made sure he kept the boxes because I thought they were cool. 37 year's later I still think they're cool.
Click to expand...
Yes, those old wooden dynamite boxes were cool, but, like you mentioned, over time the nitroglycerin would leech out of the sticks and either pond, like honey, in the bottom of the container the sticks were in or seep into that container, making that container an explosive.

A few of examples of this:

On the last National Forest that I worked on, several of the Ranger Districts had their own Powder Magazines. Because of the volatility of the nitroglycerin explosives, these magazines were lined with wood so there was nothing inside that could produce a spark. Before I got to that Forest, one of those magazines that had NG dynamite stored in it since the CCC days, was inspected and they discovered that for years, NG had leeched out of the dynamite sticks and went into the wood floor.

The District Ranger contacted one of the dynamite manufacturers to find out what they should do with the NG contaminated magazine. A representive of the manufacturer came out and said that it was too dangerous to try to remove the wood floor, and that the safest thing to do would be to burn the magazine, which they did.


Another time some hikers were exploring an old mining area on the Forest and they found an old chest freezer with old dynamite in it. That District Ranger contacted me and the Ranger District Blaster and I went up there to investagate it. The freezer had 1 1/2 cases of NG dynamite and a bunch of loose blasting caps in it. The date on the dynamite boxes was 1949. The bottom of the freezer was covered with about a 1/4" thick honey like gell...pure nitroglycerin.

I put a 2# Kinepac (a two component ammoniam nitrite explosive) with an extra long fuse on the full box of powder, and blew the whole thing up. The freezer was high on a ridge and when we left, we found parts of that freezer 5 switchbacks down the road.

My last story is some hikers on a trail on the National Forest side of the northern Yellowstone NP boundary found a couple of old badly weather worn cardboard boxes of dynamite just off the trail. Again, the District Ranger called me to take care of it. I found the old boxes that were pretty much disintegrated but were full of the empty wax paper shells that each stick of NG dynamite had been wraped in. All of the nitro had leeched out of the sticks and into the ground under the boxes.

I had figured that I would dispose of that powder by burning it, so had brought a sack of sawdust and a quart of diesal fuel with me. After we cleared a wide fire break around the boxes, I scattered the sawdust over the boxes and made a 3' "fuse" of sawdust leading away from the boxes. I then poured the diesal fuel over the sawdust and lit the "fuse".

That fire burned very hot and with a thick black smoke for 15-20 minutes before it finally went out and cooled.
 
Back in the early 90’s I had my explosive license and a friend asked me to show him how to skin a summer coyote. It had already been a day of it outside so I showed him the fast way. Slit the belly enough to get a stick in and ran my 100y of wire to the truck. The ribs and a chunk of neck separated and flew up in the air and cleared the power lines. I have never heard someone laugh so hard before in my life. Man I miss those days.
 
seeth07 said:
Idk why this came up on my Google feed but I laughed the whole time reading it. Not sure if it's meant to be humerus or is a real article but fun to read regardless!

www.iflscience.com

The US Forest Service Guide To Completely Obliterating A Horse With Explosives

Trust us, this is not something you want to get wrong.
www.iflscience.com www.iflscience.com
Click to expand...
You know damn well why this came up in your Google feed and no judgment here on HT! They added removal of horseshoes 😅. I know someone had to learn that the hard way like “we’re 500yd away, truck is safe…”
 
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