Timber from the Tongass and state lands now supports just a handful of large sawmills, such as this one in Wrangell. Photo © Amy Gulick
From the rubble of the Ward Cove pulp mill complex near Ketchikan, a vision of a different kind of timber industry for Alaska is taking shape.
In the cavernous building that once housed a pipe welding shop, researchers are discovering and documenting the remarkable strength of Alaska wood, hoping that this feature will make it a marketable product worldwide. Across a potholed parking lot, a one-man milling shop is turning out tongue-and-groove siding and hemlock flooring, much of which finds its way into local houses, decks and saunas.
For nearly a half-century, the vast majority of timber in the Alaska Panhandle was chipped for pulp or exported in the round. But in the 1990s, when the two big pulp mills that had enjoyed a near-monopoly on Tongass National Forest timber closed for good, the market for the region’s old-growth hemlock and spruce evaporated virtually overnight.
Kevin Curtis, the director of the Ketchikan Wood Technology Center operating out of the old pipe welding shop, believes that Alaska lumber will prove its worth in markets where slow-growing timber is an increasingly scarce commodity. Over the past seven years, engineers at the Technology Center have put Alaska yellow cedar—once considered so useless that it was left on the beach for firewood—Sitka spruce and western hemlock through rigorous strength tests. Based on their superior strength and stiffness, the American Lumber Standard Committee has designated all three species as unique products with their own grades.
The reason for the strength of this wood lies in the slow growth rate of Alaska trees. Alaska yellow cedars average forty growth rings per inch. In contrast, their plantation-grown kin in the Pacific Northwest average only three growth rings per inch.
Curtis is convinced that the future of the timber industry in southeastern Alaska lies in marketing the unique properties of Alaska wood worldwide, not in competing with the rest of the country to produce two-by-fours.
“What we have is a small amount of high-grade material that is wasted in the commodity market,” he says. “Let’s take this tree and harvest the largest recoverable amount of wood we can get. Let’s put the pieces together not as nature makes a wood product but as intelligent engineering makes a wood product.” For example, Alaska wood is an excellent choice for laminated beams, made by gluing together several layers of lumber. Very strong wood is needed for the beams’ outer layers, which bear most of the weight.
Meanwhile, in a corner of the old pulp warehouse at Ward Cove, Larry Jackson has put together a business scrounging logs from closed mills, as well as state and private lands, and milling them into products his customers need. Though surrounded by lush forests, residents of southeastern Alaska have found it next to impossible to buy lumber grown and milled in the state. Jackson is beginning, on a very small scale, to market home-grown wood products close to home.
In 2004, Jackson built a makeshift kiln dryer that could dry western redcedar to a moisture content of 10 percent in three days. He bought a portable mill called a wood miser, which cuts logs into boards with minimal waste. And he invested $80,000 in a fancy molder-planer that makes trim, moldings and flooring.
Four months after he started, Jackson was already recouping his investment. That first summer, he sold thirty cases of cedar planks for grilling salmon. He sold some “music wood,” Sitka spruce billets prized for musical instruments. With his new planer, he began turning out tongue-and-groove siding and hemlock flooring.
“My whole concept here is low volume, high margin,” Jackson says. “Hopefully, when you mill a log, you get money from every part of the tree.”
By the end of 2007, Jackson was selling redcedar siding and decking, spruce paneling, cedar sauna kits, and ready-to-build cabin kits with spruce rafters and hemlock floors. He sells mainly to Ketchikan locals, but he also has customers in Anchorage, Sitka and the lower forty-eight states. “We have grown in sales and production,” he says. “I have one full-time employee plus myself part-time. As for the supply, it is adequate but challenging.” That’s because the Forest Service still doesn’t offer small, custom sales of timber in the dimensions and grades he needs.
Environmentalists have long lobbied the Forest Service to offer more so-called micro-sales. They want the agency to shift away from offering huge sales in roadless areas, like the Gravina Island timber sale, which proposed to sell 38 million board feet of timber by building twenty-one miles of roads and carving fifty-eight clear-cuts into an intact unprotected island wilderness near Ketchikan.
The market for those mega-sales has proved ephemeral. Between 1998 and 2004, half of Tongass timber sales offered received no bids, and 70 percent of sales that were purchased had only one bidder.
The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council is pushing for Tongass supervisors to commit to a smaller, more strategic program that takes timber only from the existing 5,000 miles of logging roads, supports value-added manufacturing, and focuses on meeting local market demand.
In 2007, more than two millions acres of roadless forest in the Tongass were temporarily withdrawn from timber sales in a settlement between the Forest Service and environmental groups. It remains to be seen whether a new Tongass National Forest management plan will refocus the timber sale program on the nation’s largest national forest to do more with less.
In the meantime, making a living from Alaska wood remains a struggle for pioneering entrepreneurs like Jackson.
“We have found that we need to spend a lot of time sawmilling,” he says. “I am constantly challenged by needing to invest in more equipment but not having the money to do so. I have only recently started paying myself.”
Jackson’s business remains the only one of its kind in Ketchikan, though others have sprouted at Thorne Bay on Prince of Wales Island and in Hoonah on the north Tongass.
No one thinks, however, that these small custom-milling operations will fill the employment gap created by the closing of the pulp mills and large sawmills of the past.
“There is still lots of opportunity for more specialized wood manufacturing, but it takes patience and money,” Jackson said. “With my product line I figure it takes about 150,000 board feet of wood to employ one person.”