LUMBER: Black Bonanza

Like many another farmer in western Washington’s Satsop Valley, Albert Kuhlne pastured his cattle along a grass-grown waste of charred logs and blackberry thickets—the scorched remains of a forest fire in 1902. But this summer, as Northwest plywood and lumber mills went hungry for logs, Kuhlne wondered if the “old burn” might not still have some good timber in it. He sawed into a charred tree. After 42 years its core, sealed in by charcoal, was still sound. He found 5,000,000 feet of burned but merchantable timber lying on 400 acres around it.

Kuhlne and his neighbor, Isaac Ford, scraped together their ready cash, bought an ancient gasoline “logging donkey” and some secondhand cable. They hired a truck and a driver, and started salvaging.

By last week they had grossed $4,000 for their summer’s work, and were planning to buy a tractor. Plywood and lumber mills at Shelton, 18 miles away, had bought every stick they could deliver, at OPA prices: $23 a thousand for mill logs, $35 for top-grade plywood “peelers.”* They brought in one scorched, dead Douglas fir which measured 9½ feet at the butt, was 210 feet long, sold it for $400.

The Northwest, once prodigal of its vast forests, learned that dead timber was useful when smart operators began logging the scene of the tremendous Tillamook fire in 1933, almost as soon as the ashes were cold. But wartime demand has produced scores of smaller woods-salvage operations. The best plywood logs are from virgin-growth trees, but chunks need be no longer than 8½feet. As a result farmers are logging lo-foot stumps left by pioneer woods crews near Grays Harbor, and selling them for prices ranging from $20 to $40. And the rush to harvest long-dead timber is eliminating many an ancient and dangerous fire hazard.

*Any log bound for a plywood mill. Logs are rotated against a huge blade which peels them into long, thin sheets of wood.