Logging lightly: Company takes easy-on-the-landscape approach to thinning
By PERRY BACKUS of the Missoulian

Brook Blakely tried working in an office cubicle once.

It didn't stick.

On this early Monday morn, his thigh-high work boots are making tracks up the snow-covered road in Grant Creek toward the distinctive rumble of diesel engines a bit farther up the hillside.

“I'm one of the lucky ones who look forward to coming to work every morning,” he says, his hard hat in hand swinging with every step. “I think we're making a difference.”

Blakely works as a contractor for a small Missoula-based logging operation called Woodland Restoration Inc. On Monday, the crew is working on a project to thin about 50 acres of both private land and property owned by the National Wildlife Federation.

It is jobs like this one that keep Blakely anxious to come to work.

“This isn't old-time traditional logging,” he said. “It's not about getting the cut out. Nearly all the people we work with are conservation-minded. They just want to do what's best for their lands.”

Blakely walks by a towering pile of slash that awaits his chipper.

“I love that smell of pine in the air,” Blakely said.

Matt Arno and his brother, Nathan, started the business years before people started seriously talking about forest restoration.

Today, about 98 percent of the work they do is on private land, said Matt Arno.

“People want to live by a safer forest that looks nice, too,” Arno said. “Most of this forest was overly dense. If we waited another 10 years with the kind of beetle kill that we're seeing here right now, I don't think there would be much to work with.”

The last time the forest in the Grant Creek area burned was about 1916. Since then, the widely spaced ponderosa pine forest has filled in with Douglas fir upstarts. In some places, open grasslands have slowly been overtaken by conifers.

All this additional woody material has created the kind of wildfire hazard that makes any homeowner living in the woods nervous every summer.

Private landowners in the Grant Creek area have been working to thin their forestlands to help prevent uncontrollable wildfire and to increase vigor in the trees that remain.

The cost of thinning forestlands can be very high, Arno said.

In this case, the crews are careful to sort out any material that might have some commercial value.

“We have logs going to as many as five different mills,” Arno said. “Each one of those mills have a little different niche and can give you a little more for your logs.”

Right now, mills are also paying a premium price for chips and hog fuel.

“This is the best market that we've seen for a long time for hog fuel and pulp,” Arno said. “It's really jumped the last three or four months.”

The crews will try to pull most of the slash material close to the road where it can be chipped and hauled away. Whatever is left will be chipped and scattered across the landscape.

The average cost of thinning forestlands around the Missoula area is somewhere between $700 and $800 an acre, Arno said. In some cases - when the job is close to houses or far from mills - the price tag can run as high as $2,000 an acre.

“There are so many variables,” he said. “On a larger-scale ecosystem type of thin, the costs are quite a bit less. It might cost $200 an acre.”

“But one thing is for certain. If we don't keep our milling infrastructure in this state, then all of this work is going to become so expensive that probably hardly any of it will get done,” Arno said. “If we want to do the kind of landscape restoration that almost everyone agrees needs to be accomplished, we need to keep that infrastructure in place.”

Arno and his crews use specialized equipment designed not to rip up the landscape.

“We harvest the tree and make a product right at the stump,” Arno said. “We don't skid anything. Everything is carried to the landing. We keep our landings as small as possible.”

The crew knows that people are watching their every move. On one recent morning, a woman stopped to ask about the dirt access road that veers off from the heavily traveled Grant Creek Road.

With the advent of warmer weather, the lower end of the access road was getting torn up a bit.

“We know we're running on borrowed time here,” said Bert Nilsen, one of the partners in Woodland Restoration Inc. “That little bit of road is easy to restore. This stand of trees is not.”

The crew will quit working on the project once the frost comes out of the ground.

“I personally think it's good being policed by the public,” Nilsen said. “It keeps everything in check.”

Nilsen thinks forest restoration is the wave of the future for Montana's wood products industry.

“Traditional old-school logging is on its way out,” Nilsen said. “Forest health and aesthetics are what people are interested in.”

To accomplish that, the small company does what it can to go easy on the landscape.

“In the end, the job tends to look a lot better to the average person,” Nilsen said. “If it doesn't look better than when we started, then we've done something wrong. When it comes right down to it, forest health and forest aesthetics go hand in hand.”