Lots of logs, not enough loggers
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Cliff
Thompson
February 1, 2005
EAGLE COUNTY - When the U.S. Forest Service received no
bids on two small timber sales in Eagle County earlier this year, the agency's
local rangers encountered what is becoming a problem throughout the
intermountain West.
The federal agency got a lesson in market economics and the three-way tug of war
over lumber in national forests. There were no bidders for the timber
"salvage" sales designed to remove trees killed by infesting pine
beetles. The Forest Service also wants to sell the dead trees so they won't add
extra fuel to wildfires.
"We think the market is just flooded with all the beetle-killed
trees," said Cal Wettstein, district ranger of the forest lands surrounding
Eagle County. "The long-term concern for us is every (dead) tree that
doesn't come out of the woods eventually is going to burn."
The glut of dead trees is occurring at a time when economics, the few Forest
Service timber sales and natural trends have left few loggers and lumber mills.
The amount of dead trees available for loggers and mills is at an all-time high
and growing as the pine beetle epidemic spreads. The ability to extract them
remains a bottleneck.
But in the three-part dance of the Forest Service, loggers and lumber mills, not
everyone sees eye-to eye. It's a complex, awkward cycle of either too much wood,
not enough loggers, too few mills or a mixture of all three combined with
environmental constraints that seems to beg the question: What came first - the
forest or the pine beetle?
88 truckloads
Chris Meyers' Intermountain Resources in Montrose is one of the few mills left
in the state, and his mill is dieting in the midst of a potential smorgasbord,
he said. The problem his business encounters is not enough loggers to provide
the raw material for the mill, Meyers said.
Part of the problem is the Forest Service hasn't sold enough logs in recent
years to support the timber industry, he said. Now, it needs trees removed from
the forest and doesn't have an industry large enough to do that, he said.
"We struggle all the time for enough raw material," said Meyers.
"The (Forest Service) doesn't put up enough wood to supply our facility on
a year-round basis. They're under-budgeted in what they're trying to
achieve."
That bottleneck has trimmed the ranks of businesses that cut
wood.
"It's has caused a shrinking of the industry," he said. "We are
capable of running 140 million board-feet a year but we're running 40 million at
four days a week and one shift. We need two shifts five days a week to be
competitive."
That's 88 truckloads of logs a day, he said.
Loggers, like Tom Olden of Eagle, say the price of logs offered by mills isn't
enough to bid on sales while environmental and other constraints imposed on
bidders further wring the profit out of the business.
And the Forest Service said it could offer more timber sales if it had more
money from Congress.
Missing mills
One salvage timber sale in Summit County's Williams Fork Mountains, northeast of
Silverthorne, contains more than 40 million board-feet, or enough wood to build
more than 1,000 homes.
A huge pine beetle infestation there killed more than 100,000 acres of lodgepole
pines. A board foot - one of the standard measures of timber - is a board one
inch by 12 inches by 12 inches.
That project alone has helped create the glut of beetle-killed logs on the
market here, Wettstein said, adding that part of the problem is the lack of
ability to process the logs.
The closest lumber mill is the one in Montrose, more than 150 miles away and the
next nearest is in Price, Utah, approximately 300 miles distant.
"Over the last two decades local mills have been
eliminated," he said.
The glut of beetle-killed timber is exacerbated by lack of milling facilities
said
"In Colorado there's only one big mill," said timber specialist Bob
Garcia, part of the Forest Service Regional Office that oversees national lands
in Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and parts of Nebraska and Kansas.
"The (cost of) the haul there makes some sales uneconomical," Garcia
said.
But the situation is not isolated to Eagle County or even just to Colorado,
Wettstein added.
"The entire Rocky Mountain region is seeing huge pine beetle outbreaks from
Canada to Mexico," he said. "There are hundreds of thousands of dead
trees in the White River alone."
Fire or bugs?
Loggers and lumber mill operators are often critical of environmentalists for
opposing timber sales. They said it makes it more difficult to operate. Even the
Forest Service acknowledges environmental appeals have slowed its processes.
"In the late 1990s it got harder and harder to make timber sale,"
Wettstein said. "We just sold less and it was harder for loggers to make a
living. We still get appeals on every timber sale. We're talking about dead
trees. It's frustrating."
Part of the reason may be a change in how the public believes forests should be
used, forest officials said. Conservation and recreation are now driving
decisions, they said.
One such environmentalist, Rocky Smith of Colorado Wild,
criticized the Forest Service's plan to reinvigorate forests by cutting and
thinning and selling lumber in salvage sales. Those sales often require new
roads to be built to reach the timber.
"We're not unalterably opposed to all salvage sales," he said.
"In trying to reduce the impacts of insects you can do more damage than the
bugs by building roads."
While thinning live trees does slow the rate of infestation, it doesn't slow the
overall epidemic.
"It's still a problem because the bugs fly somewhere else. Once they get
going, you can't thin fast enough to keep up with the bugs," he said.
"There has to be a balance between reducing fuels and maintaining nature
versus maintaining the forest values we all love. Cutting deep into the
backcountry doesn't work."
He called the thinning a "short circuit" of natural processes. A
better way is to create fire protection zones around homes, Smith said, reducing
the size of the "home ignition zone."
Logging on burned-over areas that still contain timber also isn't a good idea,
Smith said, because it can create soil erosion.
"Fires, whether we like it or not, are part of the natural process,"
he said. "Once they get going, you just have to get out of the way."
Staff Writer Cliff Thompson can be reached at 949-0555, ext. 450, or cthompson@vaildaily.com