Trucks gathering logs for the Boise Cascade sawmill in Oregon roll out at 2 a.m. to begin their daylong, 480-mile round trips to the Mount Hood National Forest, Washington’s Okanogan National Forest and other federal woodlands in Idaho.
“It is crazy to have to go that far for logs, totally,” said Jim Princehouse of La Grande, who owns a fleet of 11 log trucks. “This is a hard life. It really is.”
A staggering 800 million board feet of wood fiber annually reaches maturity in the nearby Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur national forests. Only 11 percent gets to sawmills, while 400 million board feet succumb to insects, disease, fire and age, said industry spokesman Tom Partin. He likened the mills’ situation to “starving to death when you are standing beside the refrigerator.”
That may soon change.
The top U.S. Forest Service official for Oregon and Washington, Kent Connaughton , has asked his foresters to plot out an ambitious, multiyear program of tree thinning and forest restoration in the Blue Mountains. Dubbed “accelerated restoration,” the goal is to free more timber for mills while stiffening the woodlands’ resistance to tree-killing insects, disease and wildfires.
From Oregon Live: https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2013/03/blue_mountain_timber_top_fores.html