Tree Ring Pens

When Dave Wager fells a tree, he gets a glimpse into the past. As we trudge through a forest in the mountains of western Montana, the extent of this history becomes apparent. Surrounding us is a tall stand of ponderosa pines, their thick, red bark attesting to their age, which Wager estimates to be 300-years-old. Stopping beneath an old ponderosa, we examine the debris left from Wager’s latest harvest: a young Douglas fir that had taken up residence a few yards from the giant pine. By the time Lewis and Clark passed through the area in 1805, this ponderosa pine was already well established. But the forest that surrounded the tree back then was quite different. Frequent low-intensity fires, both naturally occurring and man-made by Native Americans, maintained a sparse, open understory suitable for hunting and resulted in a forest dominated by large, fire-resistant species such as ponderosa pines and western larch. With fires occurring on average every five to 30 years, the pine-larch forests relied on fire for regeneration. Over the next century, logging removed most of the pine’s brethren, and by the early 20th century a policy of fire suppression came to dominate forest management. What remained of the historic pine-larch forests existed either as an act of preservation or due to a forester’s oversight—or because the terrain was simply too steep for logging. Around this time, Douglas firs, like the one Wager felled, began to engulf the forest. Wager is working to protect what remains of this old-growth pine forest, and he is doing so in an unusual way—by selling pens. His company, Tree Ring Pens, restores small forest stands such as this one by removing dense understory trees and crafting them into high-end pens. Each pen displays the tree’s annual growth rings, which reveal the events that shaped the tree, the surrounding forest, and the American West...more