We buy trucks in Tonasket

One operation is attached to Tonasket in the node list, and for this part of the state it is a big one: a crushed-limestone quarry running 22 employees, 7.03 miles from the centroid. Nothing else in this county comes close to that crew.

Twenty-two people is a fixed plant working steadily rather than an outfit chasing jobs, and limestone is carbonate rather than quartz-bearing rock, so the dust exposure profile that goes with it is the carbonate one rather than a granite pit’s. That is a property of the material and not a measurement anyone took here.

What leaves the gate goes in open-topped tandems and tri-axles over rural roads, and on that run the crossings are unusually kind.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

That is the unusual part, and it is unusual in the good direction. Within ten miles of the gate the federal bridge inventory records 12 structures — the thinnest circle with anything in it in this lane — and just one is coded below legal loads. It is county-maintained and it sits 6.18 miles out.

It rates 31.4 metric tonnes, about 34.6 US tons. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 20.4 tonnes of stone — the most generous allowance at any node in this lane, and close enough to a whole load that on most trips it would not be the thing you plan around.

The thinness cuts the other way, though: twelve structures inside ten miles is a sparse network, and sparse networks give a loaded truck fewer alternatives when one crossing does bite.

Read it as an upper bound. It is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of nodes measured this way something tighter lies between ten miles and twenty.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Washington file, items 41, 64 and 70; docs/nodes/FINDING-radius-sensitivity.md for the radius figure.

That crossing is generous. The statute is the tighter constraint here, and it does not resolve to one number.

Washington’s maximum gross is 105,500 lb. The statute bars more than 20,000 lb on any single axle, and lets two consecutive sets of tandem axles carry 34,000 lb each where the first and last axle sit 36 feet or more apart, with the groups in between governed by the bridge formula.

Then it opens up again. The department of transportation by rule for state highways, and a local authority for a road under its own jurisdiction, may extend that table to 115,000 lb. So the operative figure is an administrative rule or a local ordinance rather than anything printed in the code, and no page can honestly hand you one number. Whether the 105,500 survives on the interstate is not established by the files behind this page, and we are not going to guess at it.

Seasonal limits work the same way, and Washington writes down something most states leave implied. A local authority may restrict a road that rain, snow or thaw would seriously damage — and the ordinance is not effective unless and until the signs are up and being maintained. The sign is the rule. Which roads are posted in a given week is not in any file we hold.

RCW 46.44.041 on axle loads and the extension to 115,000 lb, and RCW 46.44.080 on local seasonal restrictions. Information, not legal advice.

Past the roads and the loads, the paperwork is that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither of those stops a sale.

One Washington duty has a clock on it where most states’ have none, and it is the one to know about if a truck has been written off. Where a vehicle is destroyed or declared a total loss, the owner — or the insurer, once it has settled — has fifteen days to report it to the department and surrender the title. The statute names the fifteen days itself, which is unusual.

RCW 46.12.600. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, service bodies, mixers, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not an Okanogan County thing in particular — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The quarry 7.03 miles out and the rural roads around it are where most of them turn up.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. If it was ever declared a total loss, the fifteen-day reporting duty is the department’s, not a bar on selling it.
• It has run full loads rather than part loads. Does that wear one out faster?It shows in the driveline, and it is a fair thing to tell us rather than something to hide. Give us the hours as well as the miles.
• Do you come out to Okanogan County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the quarry 7.03 miles out included, and the crossing 6.18 miles from its gate. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A season that did not come back. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Okanogan County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, plenty of them having hauled limestone off the gate 7.03 miles out.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.