Powered by Timber: Part One in a Three Part Series examining timber in Mineral County
For three generations, Mineral County Commissioner Duane Simons’ family has worked in the lumber industry. When he moved to the county in 1972, he said you could walk out of your door on any given day and get work.
“There was lots of work, lots of timber being sold, and lots of jobs,” Commissioner Simons said.
Signs that read, “this home supported by timber dollars” or “this business supported by timber dollars” were prevalent throughout the community.
Even if a high school student didn’t work in the timber industry during summers, Commissioner Simons said a majority of the jobs available for high school graduates were in timber.
“And that’s not there anymore,” Commissioner Simons said.
Looking at the current state of the county he represents, Commissioner Simons sees a completely different landscape. Gone are the majority of the mills throughout the state – including the Diamond Match Mill, which was located in Mineral County. Along with those mills, jobs in the timber industry have become fewer and fewer.
“If we don’t get a shift in the policy of managing our forests for anything but burning them or strictly for recreation there won’t be any timber jobs left,” Commissioner Simons said. “People realize that our forest has to be managed, they’ve watched this over the years.”
The timber industry in Mineral County has become a juggling act of contracts stalled in litigation, building railroad reloads to open up new markets, working with the United States Forest Service, and expanding the mill to utilize as much of the product that comes in as possible.
The lone survivor in the Mineral County lumber industry is Tricon Timber. By utilizing what larger companies deemed to be “junk wood,” Tricon was able to keep going while the same larger corporations fell to the wayside.
However for Tricon Timber Manager Angelo Ververis, there is still one question that keeps us up at night.
“Will we have enough timber to keep us going?”
The First to Step Up
The first of two eight-hour shifts at Tricon Timber in St. Regis is nearly over and Ververis wears a hardhat and safety vest while he moves quickly around the mill. In between fielding questions and directing employees, Ververis guides County Commissioner and former Tricon employee Laurie Johnston through the grounds.
“It’s a lot busier now, isn’t it,” Ververis asked Commissioner Johnston.
“It sure is,” Commissioner Johnston replied while observing.
The mill in St. Regis was built by Tricon in 1991, to utilize the abundance of timber that grew in the aftermath of the 1910 fires.
Where most of the timber industry saw the lodge pole pines regenerated from the big burn as undesirable in both size and species, Tricon saw an opportunity for growth.
Originally built to produce 12 million board feet of timber, Tricon has updated and improved many times over its history – most recent being a $10,000,000 renovation that not only brought production levels to ten times the original production target, but the ability to produce up to 13-foot lengths at the mill.
When most mills were closing or slowing down production, owner Ken Verley committed to upgrading in order to prepare the mill for new markets.
With the ability to produce these lengths Tricon gained access to export markets. The addition of rail reloads throughout the state that focus primarily on bringing dead and dying timber, a direct result of the mountain pine beetle epidemic, to the mill has enabled the company to produce form boards to be sold in the Asian market.
Since the company began focusing heavily on exporting lumber in 2010 over 31,000 cubic meters have been shipped throughout the world.
Complete utilization of the timber Tricon receives is one of two keys to success for Ververis – the other and “most important” key is the 150 county residents Tricon employs as well as the countless subcontractors and loggers Tricon hires, many from the community.
“Anything that doesn’t make a board in the mill that has already gone through the debarking process we chip up and sell as pulp and paper material,” Ververis said.
Some of the material is sold to the Eureka Pellet Mill and the majority goes to Clearwater Paper in Lewiston, Idaho.
“If it comes in on a truck it goes out as a product,” Ververis said.
The mill runs at a frenzied pace, employees control loaders and saws via a control panel and video monitors in air-conditioned towers. With those monitors they are able to see a potential jam in the line, stop the line and clear the way so the timber can keep moving.
Other employee’s sort logs after they’ve been cut to specific sizes and load the finished product on pallets for shipping.
On top of ensuring production at the mill remains steady and safe, Ververis also represents Tricon as an advocate for the company to the county commissioners as well as the forest service. When asked about logging projects going into the litigation phase and being stalled, Ververis pauses before answering.
“These are forest management projects and the whole idea of putting together the project is to help the forest,” Ververis said. “Timber is a byproduct of those projects.”
Ververis continued discussing how litigation not only is bad for business, but bad for the forests as well.”
“We live in the community, we use the forests and if we see something on the ground that is harming the ground we’ll be the first to step up and say something,” Ververis said. “We’re passing this on to our kids.”
“These trees would be standing, if it wasn’t held up”
Mike Lilly drives his rig from the Town Pump in Thompson Falls to the Little Beaver land management project in the Kootenai National Forest. Lilly has served as the forester for Tricon for almost a year and is quick to talk about recent hunting and fishing trips during the drive up dirt roads made specifically for the project – the majority of which will be recontoured to the original slope of the hill once the project is complete.
“It (the Little Beaver Project) got put on hold by the forest service because they had a lawsuit filed against them for two years,” Lilly said. “Because of that, the stands that we have left to cut that we are cutting right now is all lodge pole that is all dead and blown over. If it didn’t get litigated, the lodge pole was all standing at that point, it’s happened in the last two-years and it makes everything a headache.”
As a result of the time the project spent in litigation, 20 percent of the lodge pole is defective because of chips and rot.
The Little Beaver project will yield approximately 10 million board feet for Tricon and was put together by the Forest Service not as a traditional timber sale but as a service contract.
“They used (a forest stewardship contract) on this because the timber we are removing is worth less than what the forest service wants to do with the ground besides just removing the timber,” Lilly said. “It’s a lot of removing that small post and pole sized stuff. The forest service is basically paying us per acre to remove that small stuff.”
Other than the removal of timber, the contract also stipulates that Tricon removes slash and creates a series of fire lines by hand and machinery.
On a project such as the Little Beaver, Lilly is in charge of finding logging crews and overseeing both the logging operation and the land management work the project requires.
“It’s kind of balancing what the forest service wants with what we want,” Lilly said. “That alone is a full-time job. You got to try to kind of be in the middle somewhere.”
Lilly added that working with the Kootenai National Forest is “nice” due to their ability to work with Tricon when it comes to the details.
Gary Bailey Logging, located in Superior, is one of a group of core local contractors Tricon uses for projects such as Little Beaver and the crew has worked the project since it was green-lighted after litigation.
Bailey’s crew is working on steep ground, removing dead lodge pole blown down and preparing them to be sent by truck to the mill in St. Regis.
Land where the lodge pole has not yet been removed is a dramatic contrast to where a similar project was completed last winter. The not cleared land is almost waist deep with dead lodge pole and slash, while land cleared last winter shows growth of grass as well as trees.
“The whole idea of this project is to remove fuel and improve the health of the fisheries,” Ververis said.
The USFS will be examined in part two of this series, specifically the Cedar Thom Project and the impact it could have on the future of forest management in Mineral County.