There was never enough wood. Despite all the ponderosa pines clogging northern Arizona’s forests with fire hazards, and despite all the cries for the government to remove enough of those trees to restore natural conditions, too few trucks dumped too few logs at a Williams sawmill after it opened in 2014.
“We have lost millions of dollars here in three years,” said Rohit Tripathi, owner of Grand Canyon Forest Products, formerly Newpac Fibre. Twenty employees lacked the promise of steady, year-round work. The mill’s struggles reflect the U.S. Forest Service’s larger, lurching efforts to attract the private industry necessary to affordably thin pines that a century of fire suppression has allowed to grow thicker by the hundreds-per-acre.
But Tripathi isn’t despairing — he’s investing. A new partnership with the nonprofit Nature Conservancy and some promised experiments with federal rules should provide all the trees he needs at reasonable costs for the foreseeable future, he said.
Grand Canyon Forest Products is spending $2 million to add a second mill to handle small trees from the project, which the Nature Conservancy is calling Future Forests. “If it succeeds,” Tripathi said, “generations of Arizonans will have forests.” If it fails, massive wildfires may continue to burn through the region and threaten forested communities.
Such fires could also shift the landscape away from the region’s towering ponderosas toward shrubbier piñon and juniper, scientists say. Since the turn of this century the Rodeo-Chedeski and Wallow fires scorched about a million acres, subjecting the land to dirty water runoff, and to regrowth that is influenced by drought and a warming climate.
From AZCentral.com: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2017/12/10/conservation-loggers-national-forest-thinning-grand-canyon/928837001/