Timberland owners in California suffer million-dollar losses as drought and fire kill trees

Ryan Hilburn, chief forester for W.M. Beaty & Associates, navigates his vehicle through timberlands obliterated in the more than 725,000-acres Dixie fire. (Joshua Emerson Smith / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Private timberland operators plead with U.S. Forest Service to thin overgrown stands as blazes come roaring off federal lands

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Ryan Hilburn listens to the crackle of a citizen band radio as he drives his gray pickup truck past a smoldering landscape along state Route 36 west of Lake Almanor.

The Dixie fire moved through here days earlier and is still burning a few miles away, spewing a giant plume of smoke that looms over firefighters as they work with logging crews to widen a containment line around the road.

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Hilburn is the chief forester for W.M. Beaty & Associates, which represents the Walker family, a prominent private timberland owner in California. He’s been working closely with Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service to share information about the nearby lands he manages.

Today, Hilburn is checking up on a tree plantation he fears may have been wiped out by the blaze. He turns down a dirt road and soon the worst is confirmed. A roughly 1,800-acre stand of trees, replanted following the Storrie fire two decades prior, has again suffered severe casualties.

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Ryan Hilburn, 45, chief forester for W.M. Beaty & Associates, surveys timberlands
Ryan Hilburn, 45, chief forester for W.M. Beaty & Associates, surveys timberlands obliterated in the more than 725,000-acres Dixie fire. He estimates that members of the Walker family, which own the land, lost several million dollars in planting costs and logging revenue.
(Joshua Emerson Smith / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

“There’s nothing green left,” said Hilburn, 45, walking through a stand of charred trees. “It’s as bad as I thought it would be.”

As devastating wildfires and beetle infestations spread across the landscape, private timber owners stand to lose “hundreds of millions of dollars” this year, said George Gentry, senior vice president of the California Forestry Association, a trade group representing the state’s largest timberland owners.

Some of those are dynastic, family-owned timber companies grappling with millions of dollars in lost logging revenue, companies like Collins Pine and Sierra Pacific Industries. Others are small landholders who’ve seen their children’s college tuition money succumb to the ravages of nature.

“This is very existential for any professional forester,” said Gentry. “This is people seeing their entire life’s work evaporate.”

Behind such despair is a deep frustration with the federal government, which owns about 57 percent of the forest acres in California. Private landowners, who control another roughly 40 percent of these timberlands, blame the U.S. Forest Service for what’s often seen as lazy land-management policies.

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They point to blazes such as the Caldor fire burning in the El Dorado National Forest, the Tamarack fire first discovered in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, and the Dixie fire that blasted through the Lassen and Plumas national forests.

A feller-buncher burns along County Road 324 during the Dixie Fire in Chester, California on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.
A feller-buncher burns along County Road 324 during the Dixie Fire in Chester, California on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.
(Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Sierra National Forest, CA - July 06: At Nelder Grove on Tuesday, July 6, 2021 in Sierra National Forest, CA., Chad Hanson Forest and Fire Ecologist with John Muir Project stands in section that previously burned in a high intensity fire back during the Railroad Fire (which began on Aug. 29, 2017) and points out hundreds of Giant Sequoia regenerations in the area. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Scientists say California’s imperiled forests need more wildfire, not less. Newsom’s $1.5 billion plan for wildfire prevention will fund logging to mimic the effects of naturally occurring blazes.

Aug. 29, 2021

Hilburn stands along the boundary of the Lassen National Forest in mid-August where flames spread from federal land into the Walker property. He said the Forest Service land was for years overgrown with brush and small trees, conditions that invite large blazes.

“It’s known industrywide as the ‘wall of shame,’” he said of the dividing line between the private and public lands. “Even the Forest Service called it that.”

The Walker family, which spent roughly $5 million to replant the area after the Storrie fire, is now questioning the wisdom of that decision, Hilburn said. “I’ve had a couple of them ask, ‘Does it make sense to reforest this again with the Forest Service as our neighbors?’”

The family — descendants of Thomas Barlow Walker, who established the Red River Lumber Company in 1884 — today owns about 300,000 acres of forest land throughout northeastern California. This year, the family has already seen more than a 10th of its land scorched by fire.

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Splitting the sapling

An aerial view of burned sections of the Sierra National Forest that were wiped out in the Creek Fire.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Forest Service officials don’t deny the situation. Federal foresters say they want to manage public lands more proactively but have their hands tied with tight budgets, environmental rules and something of an identity crisis.

On Monday, the federal agency took the dramatic step of closing all national forests in California to protect public safety and limit human ignitions.

The Forest Service had been, up until the last three decades, in lockstep with the timber industry. The agency’s mandate has long been to balance ecosystem health with logging, cattle grazing, mining and other extractive activities.

After World War II, the Forest Service dramatically modernized its firefighting tactics with military surplus equipment, including airplanes, bulldozers and chainsaws. Shortly after, Smokey Bear was born as part of a now-famous public safety campaign.

With a tight grip on wildfire, logging flourished, creating a flood of cheap post-war lumber that boosted housing construction under the G.I. Bill.

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Still, the agency took flak from ecologists and native tribes for its industry-focused fire suppression tactics as far back as the early 20th century, said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College.

“There were people in the teens and 20s who were making very strong arguments against (the approach of) the Forest Service,” Miller said. “If you take the position to suppress all fires, then you’re actually exacerbating the problem you’re trying to address.”

California’s forests are in trouble. Wildfire and drought have raved millions of trees. Scientists say, perhaps surprisingly, the answer is more frequent fire

Then in the 1990s, the Forest Service’s mission became more complicated. Legal and political skirmishes broke out over protecting greatly diminished old-growth forests, spotted owls and other threatened species. At the same time, California saw Canadian timber hit the market after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994.

As a result, logging on public lands took a nosedive.

The Forest Service contracted with private loggers to harvest just 316 million board feet in 2018, down from 2.2 billion board feet in 1988.

Private landholders in California, however, maintained much of their logging efforts, chopping up 1.4 billion board feet in 2018, down from 2.6 billion board feet in 1988.

The combination of fire suppression and clear-cutting, followed by an abrupt reduction in timber harvesting on federal lands, has left landscapes packed with younger, overgrown stands primed for massive conflagrations.

These unkempt landscapes are also particularly vulnerable to beetle attacks, which over the last decade have killed more than 160 million trees, largely concentrated on federal lands.

Now environmental groups and a growing number of researchers have called on the Forest Service to model itself more closely after its sister agency, the National Park Service. For example, Yosemite National Park, which is managed by the Park Service, is protected from logging and allows wildfire to burn more frequently.

Scientists say that allowing lightning strikes to burn clears out smaller trees and brush, which can carry flames into treetops, creating catastrophic crown fires, as most recently demonstrated in the massive Caldor fire.

Meanwhile, the timber industry has argued that the best way to prevent massive blazes is to continue aggressive firefighting while cutting down more trees and other vegetation on federal lands to reduce fuels.

Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford, said that while such an approach may create jobs for loggers, any impacts to the timber industry must be measured against the larger economic devastation of severe wildfires.

Wara pointed out that the state’s 2018 wildfire season caused more than $148 billion in damages, according to a UC Irvine study from December published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

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“They’re one of the loudest voices, but they’re the wrong voice to listen to,” he said of the logging industry. “The things you’re going to do to maximize timber harvest are not the things you need to do to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.”

So far, national forests haven’t been able fully to embrace either vision, said Malcolm North, a top forest ecologist at UC Davis. “The Forest Service has been caught halfway between, trying to do what the logging industry does on one hand and the national parks do on the other hand.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom has championed something of a compromise approach. He wants to ramp up logging in national forests and other lands, clearing vegetation on a million acres a year by 2025. This year, he strongly condemned the Forest Service for not fighting fire more aggressively, particularly the Tamarack fire, which burned over the California-Nevada border.

Scientists contend that hot, dry, windy conditions fuel the state’s most deadly and destructive blazes — not overgrown forests

April 30, 2021

Newsom’s administration has said efforts to thin the forest wouldn’t target larger, more valuable lumber. Rather, the state Legislature has approved hundreds of million of dollars to subsidize the removal of smaller trees and vegetation with little commercial value that are choking drought-stricken landscapes.

While the logging industry strongly backs that vision, conservation groups have warned that plans to aggressively “thin” the forest may also create opportunities for private companies to cut larger trees. The Forest Service has a history of allowing loggers to remove bigger trees as a way to pay for such treatments, which can otherwise cost taxpayers thousands of dollars per acre.

Beetles ate the college tuition

Brian Mattos, forester for CalFire, surveys the area for pine and other cones in the Sierra National Forest.
Brian Mattos, forester for CalFire, surveys the area for pine and other cones in the Sierra National Forest. The agency’s plan is to record various locations for cones so that they can be harvested to grow seedlings.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
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Brian Mattos was the forester for Yosemite National Park for more than two decades. Today, he works with Cal Fire overseeing, among other things, small logging operations and efforts to replant stands killed by fire and beetles.

“This was ground zero for tree mortality, lots of areas where 90 percent of the pines died,” Mattos, 60, explained.

Several years ago, he lost tens of thousands of dollars in timber after beetles ravaged his 22-acre property in Mariposa County. He had planed for decades to use the harvest to help pay for his daughters’ college education. Instead, he lost every mature incense cedar and two thirds of his pine trees, a fate that also befell many of his neighbors.

“My jaw was just dragging on the ground,” he said.

He said he tried to “salvage log” the dead trees, which can fetch roughly 60 percent of the price of healthy timber. However, sawmills were inundated with such material, and he couldn’t get any loggers interested in his relatively small plot.

Dead trees still make paper

Nick Scuba, a timber faller, works in the Sierra National Forest to remove trees that have been marked as dead or a hazard.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
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A few miles up the road from Mattos, Nick Scuba’s chainsaw buzzed loudly as he cut into a beetle-killed tree, sawdust spraying around him like confetti. Within minutes, it started to creak, then violently crashed to the forest floor.

This salvage logging is paid for by the Sierra National Forest to prevent dead trees from falling on everything from people to power lines. On private lands, it’s done to recoup losses from fire and pestilence.

“Most of what’s being milled in the last couple of years are trees that have been damaged or burned in recent fires,” said Gentry of the California Forestry Association. “It’s very difficult to keep up. Nobody could really foresee the magnitude of timberland burning we’re now seeing.”

But while salvage logging makes sense from an economic and, in some cases, safety perspective, ample research has shown it can harm forest health. The practice removes habitat, increases soil erosion and, when coupled with replanting of trees, can actually increase wildfire severity, said Jonathan Thompson, senior ecologist at Harvard University’s Harvard Forest, who published one of the earlier studies linking the logging practice to larger blazes.

“Salvage logging removes the big bowls that have economic value but really pose no fire danger, and it moves a lot of the more flammable material to the ground, where it’s more accessible to fire,” Thompson said.

Still, private foresters argue that their heavily managed properties are significantly less prone to wildfire than national forests in their current state.

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“If they were ever in a fire,” Jeff Pudlicki, president and general manager of W.M. Beaty & Associates, said of the industry’s critics, “I bet they’d stand in the middle of one of our plantations rather than a Forest Service brush field.”