Jean Snedegar, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. Timber: Furniture Company Thriving in Berkeley Springs

On the campaign trail and in his first State of the State address in February 2017, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice talked about boosting furniture manufacturing in West Virginia.

One of the most successful furniture manufacturers in the state is in Berkeley Springs.

Gat Creek, which produces handcrafted solid wood furniture, is among the highest-quality furniture made in America. Gat Caperton, 50, is the owner and CEO.

“We bring a truckload of wood in every week. That truckload typically comes from the Frank E. Wilson Lumber Company out of Elkins, West Virginia, and we’ll unload it and literally cut through a truckload of lumber a week,” he said.

Gat Creek specializes in premium Appalachian hardwoods – mostly cherry, maple, ash and walnut – that grow within a 250-mile radius of Berkeley Springs.

Dried lumber arrives at Gat Creek. Workers sort through each board by hand.

“What I often like to tell both our customers and our suppliers is – the best furniture comes from the best wood. And we’ve got fantastic wood all around us,” Caperton said. “We have fantastic suppliers in terms of mills and drying operations that really give us a fantastic product. No one has done a better job that we’ve done here in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York in maintaining a healthy, vibrant, growing, diverse forest. It also happens to be a forest that has the most beautiful woods in the world.”

The people who unload the lumber sort through it, board by board.

‘A Big Check, but a Lot of Work’

“In manufacturing, we’re very conscious of what you automate, and what you don’t automate. When you have variability in the input, like a board of lumber – and I promise you every board here is different, they’re snowflakes – we try to keep wide boards, the randomness and the natural variation that makes wood so beautiful – we try to capture that,” Caperton said. “And so here at the front end where we are making panels and the beginning parts for furniture, it’s all done on a board-by-board basis. So we are manufacturing panels that become furniture, instead of buying engineered panels that we cut up.”

Gat Creek furniture is stained by hand — sometimes each board is stained separately — to bring out the natural grain of the wood.

Next, the boards move to an automated part of the process — a bank of three sophisticated machines that use the latest technology to cut furniture parts, such as a table leg. It’s called CNC technology, or a computer numerically controlled machine. These machines can do the work it used to take 30 machines to do in an assembly-line fashion.

“[The machine] will take a square or rectangular board, and cut it into a three-dimensional shape for a leg. This technology has changed the face of manufacturing in this country – especially with woodworking,” Capeton said. “It is wildly fast and wildly exact in what it does, and it gets better every year. These machines are $350,000 machines – a big, big check – but it does a lot of work.”

A Changing Business

Gat Creek started out in the 1960s as Tom Seeley Furniture, which specialized in antique reproductions. Gat Caperton purchased Tom Seeley Furniture in 1996, and continued that tradition, but also introduced more contemporary lines. Today, the company employs 140 people who work from 6 am to 2.30 pm, five days a week. Outside this facility, they also employ 20 independent Amish and Mennonite workshops that supply furniture to Gat Creek.

After the sophisticated technology area that creates panels and parts, there’s an area of 40 or so individual workstations.

This is not traditional assembly-line manufacturing.

Table builder Paige Wagner sands a table top. Wagner has built 4,800 tables for Gat Creek.

“Each of our folks that are builders here has their own workbench. They specialize in five or 10 pieces, and they’ll build the entire piece of furniture at their bench. When they finish building it, they’ll sign it, date it and then they’ll send it to the Finishing Room to be finished,” Caperton said.

Paige Wagner builds tables, for example.

“It’s very interesting, because each one is different. All the woods are beautiful, and you know that the table you build is going to be in someone’s home for a hundred years. And we sign everything that we build, so they’ll know,” she said.

Wagner said she’s built almost 4,800 table to date.

A table-builder will typically build three or four tables a day, though each one may be different. Not far from Wagner’s workbench is Chuck Hampe, who builds table bases. He happened to on his very last shift at Gat Creek Furniture during our visit. He joined the company a long time ago.

Chuck Hampe and Gat Caperton celebrate Hampe’s accomplishments on his final day of work.

“Thirty-one years, six months and 27 days,” Hampe said, adding that he’s built 64,872 table bases during his time with the company.

Each piece here is made-to-order, including pieces for special projects such as bespoke furniture for courtrooms or university offices.

Rick Kidwell lays out and builds the prototype of each new design.

“I’ve worked here 34 years, and I do something different every day, so I’ve got the best job in here,” he said. “And you always get a sense of accomplishment – it’s like mowing the grass – when you get done, you see where you’ve done something. I get that feeling every day.”

CEO Gat Caperton said people often ask how people learn these skills – not many people are natural bed-builders or table-builders.

“We essentially have an informal apprentice system here,” he said. “We’ll bring people in who have the aptitude for building, and we’ll typically start them with another builder and have that person build really simple pieces of furniture. After a few weeks if they’re good at it on one or two different pieces, they’ll get a third or fourth piece. Ultimately, the folks who are the best will have the biggest portfolio pieces they build, and they’ll build the most difficult pieces.”

The finishing process aims to bring out the natural beauty of the wood itself.

Scaling Up

This type of handcrafted furniture doesn’t come cheap. As Caperton likes to say, it’s what people buy the second time they buy furniture, not the first. It’s also the sort of furniture that lasts a lifetime, or possibly two.

But, if given the right capital investment and larger-scale production, Caperton believes West Virginia could become a major manufacturer of mid-priced furniture.

A finished gate-leg cherry table, ready to ship.

“We’re a niche manufacturer, but it doesn’t have to be that way. West Virginia manufacturers will never be the cheapest guys, but we could certainly be at a point where you could manufacture for the masses,” he said. “Every once in a while you get discouraged, because you see someone importing something at a ridiculous price, and I like to remind myself that the best-selling car in America is not the cheapest car in America – by a long shot. And so, we’ll never build the cheapest furniture in West Virginia, but we certainly could be building the best-selling furniture in West Virginia.”

Gender Equity

Caperton said a majority of the people in his operation are women, which you might not expect in a woodworking shop.

“About 53 percent of our workforce is women,” he said. “Until recently, I was the only guy on the management team, so there’s a majority of women in the management team, and a slight majority in terms of production.”

In the Gat Creek finishing room, each piece of furniture will get its final finish lacquer sprayed on by robots in an ultra-clean environment. This ensures consistency and freedom from dust and other contaminants.

Finishing the Pieces

Moving from the builders who build the furniture into where it’s finished, there are pieces of furniture in every direction you look.

“Everything after it’s built comes into our finishing room. It’s a two-step process – the first is putting a finish or a color on it, which could be a stain or distressing or whatever visual effects you would like,” he said. “The second part of the operation is putting a catalyzed lacquer on it. That’s a protective coat that’s clear, that protects the wood from moisture exchange, primarily water.”

A contemporary Gat Creek side board, minus the hardware.

Caperton said it runs very much like the woodshop – he has to decide what to do by hand, and what to automate.

“So the first step – the color work – we do not only by hand, but board by board, so you get a beautiful piece of furniture at the end of the day,” he said. “Once that’s completed, it dries overnight, then move on to our finishing room where we’ve done a lot of automation. There we want consistency and cleanliness, so we’ve got an operation that is much like an operating room. We manage all the air inflow and outflow so that we keep it as a ‘clean room’ environment. And we use a lot of robotics there that allow us to spray surface areas that you can’t do by hand – pretty cool technology.”

Though Gat Creek Furniture had its ups and downs through the housing recession, Caperton said 2017 was the company’s best year ever.

The West Virginia Timber series has been made possible by the Myles Family Foundation.

W.Va. Timber Feeds In-State Flooring Plant

In the next part of our occasional series on the timber and forest products industry – from seedlings to final products, we reach our first final product: hardwood flooring. Independent producer Jean Snedegar visited Armstrong Flooring in Beverly, Randolph County, and spoke with plant manager, Blaine Emery.

“This is the largest pre-finished hardwood flooring plant in the United States,” Emery said. “People don’t understand how big of an investment this is, and how many lives this touches, and the financial impact that this plant has on the state.”

Armstrong’s Beverly facility is 17 acres under roof. Roughly 650 employees from seven counties work here. About 40 truckloads of raw lumber arrive at the plant every day. It comes from eight Appalachian states, and about half – worth $25 million a year – comes from West Virginia sawmills. The new lumber is still 70-80 percent water by weight, just like it was out in the woods, so it has to go through a lengthy drying process.

“We allow Mother Nature to help us. We take that wood and we put sticks between each layer,” Emery said. “We then put it out in our air yard behind the plant, which is what everybody sees when they drive by, because there’s so much wood out there, and we let that sit out there for 100 to 120 days. What Mother Nature is doing for us is it’s taking the moisture out of the wood.”

In the air yard are acres of lumber drying “on stick” as they say, with Rich Mountain rising high above them.

“This is one of my favorite views – this is the prettiest plant I’ve ever worked in. You’re looking at about 23 million feet of lumber here – this is where the process starts,” Emery said.

During its three-month drying period outside, the moisture in the wood will drop from 70-80 percent, down to about 38 percent. Next, it goes to the dry kilns – the largest kilns system east of the Mississippi River.

Armstrong Flooring plant manager Blaine Emery.

“So here you get to see what the inside of a dry kiln looks like – that one alone can hold 100,000 feet of lumber,” Emery said. “How they load the kiln is very important, because you want to get good air flow equally through all of the lumber. The lumber packs are actually staggered in there to force the air to go between the wood, instead of going through the packs of lumber.”

During two weeks in the dry kiln – using steam and fans – the moisture content in the lumber will drop from 38 percent down to 7.5 percent.

“So that lifecycle for us of a board that’s coming from a sawmill is almost 3.5 months before it’s ever made into a piece of flooring,” Emery said.

Once the lumber is dried it goes into a large storage area, and from there, into the mill itself.

About 2.5 million feet of finished flooring ready to be shipped across the United States and Canada.

“This is where the process of turning the lumber into flooring actually begins. The first thing we have to do is get those sticks back out, to go back to the yard,” Emery said. “Then, the next machine is going look at how wide a board is, and it’s going to say, ‘How can I get the most flooring out of that board?’ ”

The board then goes through a ripsaw and out the other end are pieces of different widths from 2 to 5 inches. We then come to a team of people who cut out the defects – knots and other imperfections.

“So now it’s starting to look like a piece of hardwood flooring,” Emery said. “That’s a piece of 5-inch maple. At this point it’s got the tongue and the groove down the sides, after it’s gone through the ‘side-matcher’. From there it’s going to get the tongue-and-groove put on the ends, and then it’s ready to go down the finish line.”

At this facility, they manufacture flooring in four widths – 2 inch, 3 inch, 4 inch and 5 inch and in four species – red oak, white oak, hickory and maple. Currently, red oak is the most popular species, but tastes in widths and species aren’t the only choices consumers have. Flooring has different “looks” – like a refined, elegant look, or a rustic, rough look. To get that style, the flooring goes through a process in the center of the mill – “the feature cell”.

“This is where we’ll give wood a hand-scraped look, or a wire-brush look – we’re adding defect to the wood here,” Emery said. “They like that distressed look. It can be anywhere from a pristine floor, with no defects in it whatsoever, to looking like it came off the side of a barn, or somewhere in between.”

Also in the center of the mill is an enclosed room with a huge sample of finished flooring. Armstrong’s vision is to be the world’s best and most trusted flooring company.

“We have what we call our Diamond Standard of Quality. We’ve turned this into a program which includes everyone who works here. Over the course of the year all 650 of us will come through here at least three times a year,” Emery said. “We change this floor out every week, so they come in and do a checklist – ‘What do you see?’ ‘What do you like?’ ‘What do you not like?’ ‘Is this a floor you would have in your home?’ And so we take that then, and we learn from it.”

Only a little over half of each board that comes into the mill becomes a piece of flooring. The saws and planes turn a lot of the lumber into sawdust, but nothing is wasted.

“We burn that sawdust in our biomass boilers to make the steam to dry the wood in our kilns. We actually have more sawdust than we need for those boilers, so then that sawdust gets sold to pellet mills, to be turned into wood pellets for heating homes,” Emery said. “And then there are some pieces in the middle that don’t get made into sawdust, but they are too small for a piece of flooring, so that’s what we use to make our ‘sticks’ for putting the lumber ‘on stick’ in the yard.”

Finally, the cut flooring moves on to two extremely long conveyor belts called the “Finish Line”. The line is nearly 200 yards long, you can barely see the end of it. Here the flooring will get its final sanding, stain and finish coats.

“So here you see we’ve applied a stain,” Emery said. “And now it’s going into an oven. And that stain will be dry when it comes out on the other end.”

Next, the flooring goes through a roll applicator to give it its first finish coat. Then it passes under ultraviolet lights to dry that coating, before going through the same process a few more times. While it takes days to produce a finish like this at home, here it takes about 8 to 12 minutes.

“So, this flooring is finished. Feel it – it’s still warm. It’s ready to go in your house. If you look on down the line, you’ll see the final graders,” Emery Said. “They’ve got markers in their hands. They are staring at that wood. Anything they see that doesn’t fit the quality that this is supposed to be, they’re taking that board out. It may get recycled completely, or it may just need to go through the line again to get something cut out of it.”

From the final graders, packers put the wood into boxes.

“They know exactly how to pack that box. There is what they call ‘box fill.’ We say there’s so many feet in a carton. There is also a length distribution in each carton – so many long pieces, medium pieces, short pieces,” Emery said. “What you’re looking at here is about 2.5 million feet of finished flooring that’s ready to be loaded on trucks and shipped out of here. You’ve seen it all, from the trucks rolling in, through the kilns, through the mill, through the finish line…pretty amazing process.”

The Armstrong Flooring plant in Beverly, W.Va.

Every month, Armstrong Flooring’s Beverly facility ships out 500 truckloads of hardwood flooring, which is sold in Lowe’s, Home Depot, Lumber Liquidators and independent retailers from coast to coast across the United States and Canada.

The company announced that it plans to build a distribution center next to the mill in October. It’s a public-private partnership that, by 2019, will add 85,000 square feet to the Beverly plant and 50 jobs during the next decade.

The West Virginia Timber Series is made possible with support from the Myles Family Foundation.

W.Va. Timber: From Tree To Boards, in Less Than an Hour

In the next part of our occasional series on the timber and forest products industry – from seedlings to final products, we follow cut logs to one of West Virginia’s most sophisticated sawmills. Independent producer Jean Snedegar spent some time at Allegheny Wood Products’ Kingwood Sawmill and Pellet Mill, with plant manager, Mark Wilson.

“It takes about 35 log truckloads of logs per day just to sustain our inventory. Everything in each log is utilized – either here at Kingwood or at another facility. All of our bark, which comes off at the debarker, is reground and used as the fuel for the dryer system for the pellet mill operation next door,” Wilson said. “The chips and dust are used as the primary material for the pellet mill operation. So our goal here at Kingwood is for nothing to leave here that’s not had some kind of added value.”

A log truck drives into the lumber yard at Allegheny Wood Products’ Kingwood facility.

After the logs come off the trucks, a log-scaler grades them and sorts them according to species. To make sure this sawmill gets the most lumber out of each log, computer technology and sophisticated machinery helps the 135 employees extract every millimeter of useable wood. It’s called “optimization”, and it starts at the ring debarker.

“[The] ring debarker is very good at taking just the bark off and leaving a smooth surface. So the debarker is an integral part of our optimizing system,” Wilson said. “We want a true reading of what that log is – we don’t want to waste any wood.”

Only one species of wood goes through the mill each day. From the debarker, the logs go to the bandmills – the first saws that cut through the log. Inside an enclosed cab, the operator uses computer technology to show him exactly where to cut the log.

Mark Wilson, Allegheny Wood Products’ Kingwood plant manager.

“All the information the computer generates appears on a screen in front of the operator. It shows where his cut is going to be, what slab, and a projection of what that log will make as it goes downstream to other machines here at the mill,” Wilson said. “It’s basically taking laser scans along that log, so when he starts cutting, the saw will get the optimal amount of material and the least amount of waste.”

These laser-guided bandsaws turn a log into either “flitches” — that is, un-edged boards, or “cants” – a bigger chunk of wood 7 inches high.

Boards come out of multi-bladed saw at the plant.

The cant goes through a gang-saw, which uses several thin, lubricated blades to cut it into eight or nine boards during one pass.

Housing Downturn Hit Timber Hard

Since the computer optimization equipment was installed in this mill, the yield of each log has increased by 20 percent, according to Wilson. Yet even all this sophisticated equipment didn’t shield the sawmill from the housing downturn in 2007 and 2008.

Workers check and sort boards coming out of the mill.

“It had a dramatic effect on us. We went from running two shifts. We also had six dry kilns at this operation, and we basically said our dry kilns are inefficient, so our dry kilns were shut down first. It was more economical to send that material to one of our more efficient locations,” Wilson said. “Then it progressed and we dropped back to one shift. That was probably a little more than half of our workforce that we had to cut back. And that’s the first time in our company’s history that there’s ever been an actual lay-off like that. It was very difficult.”

Boards make their way into the mills sorting area.

Even at this stage, the thousands of boards moving along the conveyor belts look more like slices of a tree than lumber. Later, they’ll get square edges. Next, workers sort through the rough boards to remove any considered unusable. They drop them down a shoot to a chipper. The wood chips will go across the lumber yard to the pellet mill.

The remaining boards pass by a timber grader. Using a fluorescent crayon, he or she marks the timber for whichever grade it is – a system set up by the National Hardwood Lumber Association. Then, inside a computer room, a “grade-mark-reader” reads the grade and the computer optimizes how to best trim the board for the grade.

A grader marks boards near the end of the board-production process.

“There’s a screen showing the grade-mark-reader what it’s reading. As it goes through the system, the next computer is showing where it’s going to trim it. And the third computer is where all that information comes together, and it’s going to our sorter system,” Wilson said. “There are 55 bays – it’s called a sling-sorter, so the lumber can go into 55 bays according to the grade, thickness, and length of that board.”

Outside the computer room, the boards move along the conveyor belt to the optimizing edgers – the machines that cut the boards square and turn them into lumber.

The cut lumber moves along a 220-foot long sorting system conveyor belt that drops the lumber into 55 different bays.

“After the lumber is dropped in the sorter system, it’s conveyed down to this automatic stacker. The operator runs the stacker and puts a layer of lumber out at a time, makes a standard width and height according to what we set,” Wilson said. “When the stacking is completed, it then goes on a conveyor system to a machine that puts side and top compression on it, and bands it. The operator then puts a tag on it that came from the computer room that corresponds to the bay and bundle number, and then from that point it’s ready to go out to our shipping area.”

The log’s journey through the sawmill has taken less than an hour.

“This is the final part of our lumber operation,” Wilson said, standing in the lumber yard. “The people who work in our lumber yard are going to take that lumber, put it in loads to go on tractor-trailers to go out. We’ll run 200,000 board feet of lumber, which is approximately 20 truckloads of lumber per day.”

Allegheny Wood Products’ Kingwood facility lumber yard.

Wilson said in addition to the lumber, 10 loads of chips, dust and bark can go out. There is also a pellet mill beside the lumber mill. They can ship 35-40 loads of wood pellets to consumers every day.

Allegheny Wood Products Kingwood Sawmill returned to two shifts a day in 2015. Today, it is the largest of the company’s eight sawmills and produces 42 million board feet of lumber per year – the most ever – 6 percent of the entire state’s production of 700 million board feet per year.

About half the company’s kiln-dried lumber is exported. Domestically, it may end up as wood pallets, or railroad ties, or furniture or hardwood flooring. That process we’ll see next, at the largest pre-finished hardwood flooring facility in North America.

This series is made possible by support from the Myles Family Foundation. Jean Snedegar is an independent producer.

W.Va. Timber: Mechanization Driving Change in Logging Practices

Most of the state’s trees are harvested by small-scale logging operations, using chainsaws, but a growing number of logging companies use large, mechanized logging machines that can do much more, faster.

Jean Snedegar joined veteran logger Jerry Huffman on Knobley Mountain, in Grant County.

“We’re about 5 or 6 miles from Maysville, about 15 miles from Petersburg,” Huffman said.

Huffman owns three businesses related to logging – based just outside Petersburg – which employ more than 40 people. He’s been in the business more than 60 years.

“This timber was probably cut over about 25 years ago. This is not a clear-cut – it’s a select cut,” he said in a timber stand about 6 miles outside Maysville. “The timber was marked by a professional forester. You can see there are a lot of trees left. Probably in 20 or 25 years they can cut it again.”

Huffman sends out four or five teams of loggers every work day – some conventional crews using chainsaws and others using huge logging machines.

The Tigercat

“This machine cost about $500,000,” Huffman said, pointing to a yellow and black machine with a combination claw and saw on an articulated arm.

He said that while he has to cut a lot of timber for the machine to pay for itself, there is another consideration.

“It’s the safety factor with these machines.”

The stand is on the eastern side of the Allegheny Front and it’s a lot drier over there than the other side. Huffman said that means that the trees are different as well.

“In this area, the timber grows more slowly than West of the Alleghenies, where they get more rainfall. Most of what we’re cutting here is oak – chestnut oak and red oak. Whenever you get over the Alleghenies you get more cherry, hard maple and soft maple. And the further west you go you get into more poplar. Out towards Clarksburg and Fairmont area there’s more poplar.”

Jerry Huffman is a third-generation logger. His son – and two grandsons – are also in the business with him. The machine operators are highly skilled.

Making the Cut

The big machine approached a marked tree. It picked up the tree, and it guided it as it fell.

Using a giant arm, the machine operator cut the individual branches off, topped the tree, picked it up as if it were a toothpick, swung it around and then cut it into lengths suitable for transport.

It all happens so fast you can easily miss it. Meanwhile, two skidders went back and forth, up and down the mountain, dragging the cut logs to the log landing – a level area at the bottom of the mountain.

One Tigercat machine can cut enough trees to fill four log trucks a day.

Tigercat operator Charlie Bow said he spends about 7-7.5 hours a day in the air-conditioned cab.

“I have to say, this seat is very comfortable.”

Rolling with the Terrain

Huffman said the terrain determines whether he can use a Tigercat or a conventional crew.

“If it’s too steep, then they can’t cut with the mechanized equipment,” he said. “Right now, I’m about 90 percent select cutting. Clear-cutting is a good tool to use in places it can be used. We do some clearings. In fact we’re doing a clearing job for a farmer who wants more pasture. A lot of farmers in our area have to haul their cattle somewhere for pasture, and if they’ve got an area they can clear and keep them close to their farm, that’s what they like to do.”

In his more than 60 years of logging, Huffman said he has seen dramatic changes in how things are done.

“My early days of my logging I worked with my dad, and we started out with horses. I was not very old then – just a teenager, 12 or 13 years old – worked with him up through the woods. And then we went to a small dozer where we skidded with them, and then we’d dig out a hole and push the logs on the truck – we had skids and stuff – which made it a little easier than rolling them all by hand. And then probably in the mid-60s is when the skidders first came into this country. And we were able to get one back then,” he said. “As equipment got better, we got log loaders and finally got to these cutting machines. I’ve lived in a time – and anyone from my generation — when we’ve seen more change in this business than it was way before that – because everything stayed about the same up until then.”

Huffman said he would advise youngsters growing up in West Virginia today to go into the timber, logging or wood products business.

“because I don’t think there are going to be too many people who do it. And if you want to work, you can make it at it.”

Correction: This story has been changed to accurately reflect the Tigercat brand name.

This series is made possible by support from the Myles Family Foundation.

Logging in W.Va.: Finding A Balance Between Preservation and Profits

Halfway between Mill Creek and Helvetia, West Virginia, four miles or so off the main road, Scotty Cook, the owner of a small-scale logging operation in Elkins, trudges along a muddy, deep gullied logging road.

Cook has been working in the industry for about 20 years and got started because of his family.

“My dad and them, they [were] in it all their lives,” he said. “Tradition I suppose.”

Logging in West Virginia

Most of the state’s trees are harvested by small-scale logging operations like Cook’s.

He is logging for Northwest Hardwoods, a company based in Washington state which has four sawmills in West Virginia – two of them in Randolph County. The land is owned by Coastal Timberlands, which owns property in 11 states.

He and his crew of about 7 are logging 100 acres of trees, working on the job for months at a time.

Cook watches as in the distance a chainsaw operator begins cutting an 80-foot tree. It falls to the ground and then he begins to explain what happens next in the logging process.

“He’s cutting all the limbs off of it, up to where he’ll cut the whole tree top out of it,” Cook said. “He’s getting it ready for a skidder to come back and hook to it, to take it to the landing to get cut up into log lengths to go to the mill.

A large bulldozer-like machine called a skidder – operated by Cook’s nephew – backs up toward the downed tree.

“He’ll turn around and back right up to it. He’ll hook up a chain-choker around to it, and pull it in with his wench,” he said.

A skidder drags a freshly harvested tree down the mountain side.

Cook helps his nephew hook up the huge log to the skidder. While the chainsaw operator continues to cut down trees and remove their branches, the skidder goes back and forth, up and down the mountain, hauling the long, uncut logs to the landing.

Cook said on this job, his crew has mostly been logging poplar, beech, birch and hard sugar maples, maybe a few oaks here and there, but very few.

He followed the skidder down the mountain, through the deep mud and back onto the logging road.

The Viability of the Industry

Cook said the industry– a muddy one– could pay a lot more, especially when you calculate the cost of taxes and fuel. He is no longer sure it’s a good industry for young people in West Virginia to get into.

“All your timber, it’s being cut out,” he said. “You take a lot of people – they’re doing all kind of clear cuts. I suppose they just want the money and need the money so they just cut it.”

Editor's Note: This story is part of an occasional series from independent producer Jean Snedegar about the timber and forest products industry here in the Mountain State — from seedlings to final products.

“I’ll never see a lot of places cut again,” he added. “We’re just select-cutting. We don’t clear cut.”

In a clear cut, most or all of the trees are cut down. In a select cut, foresters decide which trees to take and which to leave behind for a future harvest.

“In a couple years a man could come back and work again – take some more timber out,” Cook said. “If you take everything now, you ain’t gonna have nothin’.”

Marking the Trees

Cook points to blue spray paint on certain trees in the area where his crew is working.

“Them’s the only trees we’re allowed to cut,” he said.

Cook explained Coastal Timberlands has its own foresters who, once or twice a week, walk through the forest and mark the trees and their stumps that are allowed to be forested.

“And if they find stumps that don’t have any paint, they’ll stop you right there,” Cook said.

“At times there may be a big tree behind and a small one in front, and you may have to cut it out of the way for safety,” Cook said. “We always have to look at the safety first, because we don’t want anybody hurt or killed, [but] if you cut it out of the way, they say ‘just cut it and leave it on the ground.'”

A stationary log loader stacks cut trees according to lengths, to prepare them for loading on a logging truck.

The Landing

Down the mountain on a big level area called a log landing, Cook’s father, Gene Cook, operates a huge machine called a stationary log loader.

Gene Cook has been working in the logging industry for 60 years, back when horses were used instead of massive machines. Still, Gene said the machines make the work easier and at 85 allow him to continue working full time.

“I can do the same now as I could 20 years ago,” he said.

Gene measures and then cuts the logs into lengths suitable for the sawmill.

In the final operation, a man sitting on top of the logging truck — using a giant mechanical arm – picks up each log that Gene has put down and places it very neatly on the logging truck.

Once the truck is full, he will head down the mountain to the Northwest Hardwoods sawmill in Mill Creek.

Timber Management: Which Trees To Cut and Why

In the next part of our occasional series on the timber and forest products industry, we find out how timber cruisers — or procurement foresters — help landowners decide when to harvest trees in a timber stand, which trees to take and which ones to leave behind.

Independent producer Jean Snedegar joined Kelly Riddle, of Allegheny Wood Products, in early June at a privately owned forest near Kingwood, in Preston County.

“One of the interesting things about being a forester is that not every stand or site is the same,” he said. “You know, you walk to the other side of the hollow or the other side of the ridge, the site conditions change, the species change, the understory changes, and so it’s kind of a new canvas any place that you walk.”

Riddle said deciding on which trees to take depends on several factors.

Editor's Note: This story is part of an occasional series from independent producer Jean Snedegar about the timber and forest products industry here in the Mountain State — from seedlings to final products.

“One that we look at is, first of all if we’re dealing with a private landowner, what their goals and objectives are. Second, we look at merchantability of the trees. What I mean by that – is it useable for a commercial process – whether it be for saw timber, or pulp wood or some other product? And then we look at the overall health of the stand and the trees,” he said, looking around a stand of trees he’d marked.

“This stand is composed primarily of yellow popular and soft maple, with some scattered oaks in here. I look at the size of the trees as an indication of whether they’ve reached their biological maturity or financial maturity,” Riddle said.

“Generally, once a tree reaches about 18 inches in diameter – and this depends on the site it’s growing on and other factors – it’s probably reached its financial maturity – meaning, if you harvested that tree, gained the revenue from that tree, reinvested in something else, you could do better from a financial standpoint than if you left that tree to grow. Biologically, the tree may have 50 more years that it could live and produce wood and other values.

“The other thing we’re trying to do is create optimum growing space for the residual trees that you have.”

Age and Condition

Riddle walked up to tree in the stand.

A maple tree in the Allegheny Wood Products timber stand outside Kingwood, in Preston County, W.Va.

“This tree happens to be a yellow poplar – 24 inches in diameter. And given the age and condition of the stand I marked this tree because it’s mature, it’s ready to be harvested. And there are other trees adjacent to it – this hard maple for instance – that is one of the trees that I want to be the next stand,” he said. “So, by taking this yellow poplar out, it creates product for our sawmill and it also creates space for that maple to grow and be part of the next stand.”

When to Revisit a Timber Stand

Riddle said he typically goes back to any given stand about every five years to re-evaluate the growth and response since the last thinning.

“We typically look at a 12-15 year cycle of re-entry to harvest. In these stands that are even-aged – they were all re-generated about the same time – you can do that three or four times depending on the stands, the site and the characteristics of how good a site it is,” he said. “And then, towards the end of that 80 – 100 year period, you have to look at regeneration, maybe in the form of a ‘shelter wood’ type harvest, and get a more uneven aged management distribution.”

Riddle said a shelter wood-type harvest is a little more intensive harvest where you have fewer trees per acre that are remaining.

“It allows full sunlight to reach the forest floor, which most of our species here in Appalachia need in order to regenerate. All of our poplar, cherry, all of our oaks are shade-intolerant and they will not regenerate without that full sunlight, so it’s a requirement to initiate the next stand,” he said.

Signature Marking

One of Kelly Riddle’s timber marks. He uses a slash to indicate the tree has an imperfection or it should be cut and used for pulp.

Kelly Riddle uses a dot to indicate a tree should be cut and sent to a sawmill for board wood.

Walking through the forest, Riddle pointed out the various types of marks he has put on the trees. These marks tell the loggers which trees to cut – and whether they should go to the sawmill nearby or the pulp mill in Luke, Maryland.

“Foresters have their own signature way of marking. If I have a tree that’s primarily a saw timber tree, I’ll just put a dot, whereas a lateral slash may mean that there’s some imperfection in that tree, or that it’s a pulpwood, or a cull type tree. A full cull tree would be an ‘X’,” he said.

‘Bad Management’

Riddle said there are some misconceptions about what “bad” management is.

“Sometimes you have something that doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing and people might consider that to be bad management,” he said. “As foresters, we know that that’s not necessarily the case. There are some fairly intensive harvests where most of the material is removed that can be very good management, though it’s not aesthetically pleasing.”

Riddle said as a forester now for more than 30 years, the worst thing we can do is high-grade timber stands.

“That was a harvest philosophy where all you took was the best and left only the low-grade, non-commercial species – something like these soft maples that are damaged or have issues already. And all you were taking was the ‘cream’, so to speak,” he said. “If you do that more than one thinning cycle, then you’ve left a stand that has trees – it might look fine – but from a commercial standpoint, it has no value to the landowner.”

A truck drives into the Allegheny Wood Products timber yard outside Kingwood, in Preston County, W.Va.

Riddle said we have a great resource in West Virginia as a whole.

“We say that we’re trying to provide a resource for today and manage it for future generations,” he said.

This series is made possible with support from the Myles Family Foundation.