Timber industry's role uncertain, even with Western bark beetle epidemics

John Blazzard moseyed over to a pile of stacked spruce logs. They still smelled woody and green, with a hint of sharp citrus. They’d all once grown for a hundred years or more near the Bear River in the Uinta Mountains. The logs still had their blue marks, hand-painted by U.S. Forest Service staff indicating they were suitable for harvest. Blazzard pulled back the bark and pointed to several small black dots scurrying around. A close look showed opaque, writhing grubs — the brood of the season’s spruce beetles. “We just brought these trees in last week,” Blazzard said. “You’ve probably got two or three generations of beetles living in that single tree.” Blazzard runs a sawmill with his brother in Kamas, along the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest boundary and at the gateway to the Uinta Mountains. He looks like a logger. He’s tall and brawny, and his skin is dark from many days spent in the sun. He chews a wood sliver as he speaks. His family has been involved in the local timber industry since Kamas was settled. Given the surrounding woodlands, it seems like an ideal location to base a sawing operation. Since the bark beetle epidemic flared up, Blazzard has instead watched mills in his surrounding community shut down their saws and sell their land. Timber harvesting in Utah and throughout the West is a more complicated industry than it might seem, even when surrounded by an expanse of dead wood. “The public, after they’ve seen the trees die, they’re saying, ‘why doesn’t the Forest Service do something about it?’” Blazzard said. “For a lot of years it was, ’we don’t want to cut all these trees, we don’t want to devastate the forest’ … but we’re one of the tools the Forest Service should be using to keep the forests healthy.” The U.S. Forest Service awarded the Blazzards their most recent timber sale on the Heber-Kamas Ranger District, called the “Cold Springs Timber Sale,” an 875-acre site about 23 miles east of Heber City. It’s a salvage sale meant to remove spruce and pine heavily impacted by beetles, before the economic value for the timber is entirely lost. Blazzard figures he’ll get about 5 million board feet out of the sale, or about enough wood to build 167 average, 2,000 square-foot homes. The problem is, lumber mills like the Blazzards’ are having a hard time getting enough timber sales to make ends meet. That’s why they’ve seen so many of the other mills in their area close up shop. “What we’d like to see is a little bit of stability and consistency in what they do, (at the U.S. Forest Service),” Blazzard said. “There are so many rules and regulations, it’s crazy.”...more