This article was originally published in the Denver Post on May 23, 2007.
Dillon – The raw supply for Gene Dayton’s fancy wood lathe, which transforms dying trees into perfectly cut Lincoln Logs, has been reduced to a mere dozen thick pines, piled next to the industrial machine.
“I hate to think how many good trees are in that,” Dayton says, pointing to a nearby heap of wood chips 20 feet high and as long as a football field. “Every day, I see truck after truck bringing more.”
In Summit County and throughout Colorado, tens of thousands of beetle-infested pine trees are being shredded rather than used for lumber because there is little timber industry remaining in the state.
Despite pioneering efforts at burning the wood as fuel for biomass- heating systems or turning it into beautiful products through boutique log-furniture and log-home companies such as Dayton’s, the pine-beetle epidemic is so widespread and the costs of limbing, shipping and sawing the trees in far-flung mills are so high that most high-country logging companies are opting for the quick-and-cheap approach of chipping.
“The timber industry has really been hammered over the last 30 years because there’s no market for the wood,” said McRae Huszagh, head of Enso Energy, which is seeking to establish a combination lumber mill, wood-pellet manufacturing operation and heat-and-power facility somewhere in the western United States.
Currently, the economics of transportation require logging companies to haul only the biggest, most valuable trees to a mill in Montrose or out of state, leaving the rest for chips.
But because a century of fire suppression has left many lodgepole-pine stands unnaturally dense, typically more than half of the “red and dead” trees targeted by the projects are too thin for productive use, said Rick Newton, the Dillon district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service.
Another problem, Huszagh said, is that the long-term supply of trees is limited, and opening a viable mill requires a substantial investment that must be paid off over years of operation.
“The timber inventory is high on the front end, … but then it diminishes substantially, and there’s not a lot there after the first few years,” Huszagh said. “You need long-term sustainability.”
His proposed facility would require between 15,000 and 20,000 board-feet of timber each day, or the equivalent of as much as 45,000 acres of trees each year, and it would need an additional 300 tons of branches and other fiber each day to produce enough power for 6,000 homes.
That would require lots and lots of logging trucks, which tend to raise venom in communities unaccustomed to industrial logging, Huszagh said.
Joe Duda, the forest-management supervisor for the Colorado State Forest Service, noted that finding sites for the facilities also is difficult.
Recently a company wanted to build a chipping mill east of Kremmling, but its effort to win an exception to Grand County height restrictions for its silos was rejected after an outcry from a small number of nearby property owners, he recounted.
In Summit County, as much as 120,000 acres of forest are susceptible to the current pine-beetle outbreak – generally speaking, stands of 60- to 100-year-old lodgepole pine – and the Forest Service this summer plans to start cutting the first of as much as 12,000 acres of infested trees.
“It’s very strategic, to protect high-value areas and places important to recreation,” said Newton. “We’re focused on areas that are most important to our community.”
Officials intend to let nature run its course in other areas deeper in the backcountry and in wilderness areas, he said, which could include blow- downs and wildfires.
Under the contracts signed with logging companies, the timber thinning costs the agency between $300 and $2,000 per acre, depending on the value of the trees.
At the Summit County landfill, where Dayton has set up his lathe, logging companies are charged $1.50 a ton for wood chips, but 10 times that amount for intact timber.
Carly Wier, director of the High Country Conservation Center, the county’s recycling agency, said officials are gearing up to turn the existing piles of chips into compost and hope to divert logs to more productive uses, perhaps by changing the fee structure.
“It’s cheaper for companies to chip logs on the scene instead of bringing them to us or limbing them and letting us pick them up,” said Gene Dayton’s son, Matt.
Their lathe cuts a groove on one side of the log, allowing them to stack on each other, and creates notches in the ends so they interlock.
“There’s an urgency to get these things destroyed, basically,” Matt Dayton said, “which leaves us with chips instead of logs that are usable.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
