Wood products Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

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.

W.Va. Timber: From Unending Canopy to Ashes and Back Again

“Just as we came to the hills, we met with a Sycamore…..of a most extraordinary size, it measuring three feet from the ground, forty-five feet round, lacking two inches; and not fifty yards from it was another, thirty-one feet round.”

– George Washington, written while exploring the Great Kanawha River, Nov. 4, 1770

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.

Washington’s description of the virgin forest that covered most of West Virginia is one of the few early written accounts we have. We do know that the trees were huge, and that the vast forest canopy was often unbroken, making it dark underneath. But there were exceptions.

Native Americans used fires to make clearings for agriculture, and in the late 1700s and early 1800s, European settlers built iron ore smelters, or furnaces, in the forest, according to Joe McNeel, a forestry professor at West Virginia University.

“They needed iron to make things that would be durable – tools and weapons – iron was a valuable commodity. And so they would go out and find iron nuggets, or iron ore deposits and they would dig holes, dig trenches to acquire the iron ore,” he said. “And so then they would have to smelt it, and so they would build these large iron ore smelters. And they would use coal, but they also used a lot of wood, and so over a long period of time, you had not only people digging huge trenches in the forest, but you also had them cutting the trees down to serve as fuel for the smelters.”

A timber stand at Stuart Recreation Area, part of the Monongahela National Forest.

At the Stuart Recreation Area outside Elkins, part of the Monongahela National Forest that was last logged more than a hundred years ago, surveyor and local historian Don Teter points to out a large tree.

“This tree is a red oak – very impressive size. I’m going to stretch the diameter tape around it… We have a diameter of almost 44 inches on this tree,” he said. “Now the diameter is measured, generally speaking, four-and-a-half feet from the ground. It’s called DBH, or Diameter at Breast Height. And that’s the standard measurement that’s used in the timber industry. This is the sort of tree that would excite a logger.”

Within a relatively short walk through the woodland, there are large specimens of red oak, black oak, white oak, scarlett oak, chestnut oak, eastern hemlock, yellow poplar, beech and black cherry.

“Notice this one large stump over here – there’s a red maple growing out of that stump – the stump itself is probably chestnut. Chestnut was one of the most common trees in the Appalachian Forest. It was a very valuable tree,” Teter said. “It tended to grow on dry sites. It grew rapidly. It grew with good form. It was an easy wood to work and it was very durable. And of course, foresters and scientists are still trying to bring the chestnut back from the chestnut blight.”

Industrialization

But Teter said that before the period of major industrialization in the U.S., most of the timber in West Virginia was relatively worthless, except to build your house, or a barn or a fence.

Don Teter – a surveyor and local historian in Randolph County.

“When the early settlers got to this area, the forest was actually an impediment to them, because there was no market for the logs. The trees would keep the ground from being able to produce the grass that they needed to raise livestock. It would keep the sun from being able to reach the ground for them to grow crops,” he said. “So what they did a lot of times was what was called “hacking” – or “deadening” – where they would girdle the trees. They would cut through the bark on a strip four to eight inches wide near the stump of the tree so that the tree would die. So once the tree died and you didn’t have the thick foliage up there, the sun could make it down through, and gradually over the years they would clear the stumps out of the fields. But they may have for a couple of generations on some of those early farms have been farming amongst those dead trees.”

But, the beginning of an intense period of industrialization in the U.S. meant that West Virginia’s ancient forest was about to disappear.

Wildell Lumber Company landing near Wildell, Pocahantas County, circa 1910, showing a log loader picking through a massive log landing and loading railroad log cars.

“Prior to the end of the 19^th Century, going into the 20^th, we saw this huge swath of the Appalachian Forest cut down,” McNeel said. “And places like Dolly Sods were dramatically affected – I mean the entire ecology was affected – by the harvesting and then the aftermath of burning, and re-burning and then re-burning again.”

Between 1879 and 1920, there was a great logging boom – hundreds of sawmills were in operation across 30 counties. Lumber boom towns flourished. During this period, devastating logging practices and fires removed almost all of the old-growth forest in West Virginia – 30 billion board feet of timber was cut down. Don Teter says that, in the early days, logging was mostly done along rivers, so companies could float the logs to sawmills.

“But the real decimation of the forest you could say – in a lot of areas – could not occur until you had the logging railroads, when you could punch those railroads up into all the little hollows and you could reach all the trees. And the Shay geared locomotives, the Heisler and the Climax locomotives were critical in that because they could be used on a grade that was much steeper than other railroad engines could use, and you could also have sharper curves,” he said.

“The geared locomotive, the very nature of it was, it was like an all-wheel-drive vehicle today, where every wheel was a driving wheel, so you had the most tractive force. Of course someone who wanted to see an example of this today could go someplace like Cass Scenic Railroad. But tremendous power in those engines and the ability to remove large loads from the woods.”

A logging train near Dobbin, W.Va., circa 1910.

It didn’t take long for those early logging operations to cut down most of the trees in a valley.

“Usually a logging railroad grade in one particular area was only there a year or two, maybe five years depending on how large the hollow was and how good the timber was there,” Don Teter said. “And then they would pull the rails there, move them somewhere else.”

The most valuable lumber that came out of the high-elevation forests of West Virginia was the red spruce. It was used not only to make many expensive musical instruments, but also to build early Wright brothers flying machines.

And cutting down that much forest in a relatively short time had some pretty horrific consequences: fires burned over large areas, including logging boom towns, and once the surrounding forest was cut down, many of those towns disappeared altogether. In addition, there was devastating soil erosion, flooding and degraded water quality.

National Forests Are Born

So in 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act, which led to the establishment of many eastern national forests, including the Monongahela National Forest. Today it covers more than 900,000 acres across 10 counties in West Virginia. Soon after, professional foresters started managing forests, to protect wildlife and waterways and to try to maximize the many assets of the forest, especially experimenting with different cutting practices that were sustainable.

Over the next few decades – the forests across West Virginia began to recover. Today, West Virginia boasts 12 million acres of forest – much of which is harvested on a regular basis.

“When somebody cuts a stand of timber down, it’s not gone forever. If you leave a field just sitting, over time it becomes a forest again. We’ve had a variety of harvests across the state, and yet right now, there’s a huge amount of timberland that exists in the state – almost 80 percent of our state in terms of area is forested,” Joe McNeel said.

“We’ve seen a resurgence in the amount of land supporting forests. We’ve not cut like we used to, so don’t be terrified when you see somebody cutting timber down. Go find out what you can about it. The other thing I would say is our forests are renewable. They do come back. Sometimes even when you don’t want them to. That would be what I would leave you with.”

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

W.Va. Timber: Yes, Money Can Grow on Trees

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 of the oldest and largest industries in West Virginia is the timber and wood products industry. West Virginia is rich in this renewable natural resource, but the housing downturn that began 10 years ago hit the industry hard.

“We are the third most forested state in the United States. We have 7 million more forested acres in West Virginia than we did 100 years ago. There are more than 250,000 forest landowners in West Virginia,” said Frank Stewart, Executive Director of the West Virginia Forestry Association – a non-profit that represents those in the forestry and wood products industry.

“There are 30,000 jobs that we provide by our industry and we have over $3 billion in income gross a year in the state. We are a naturally regenerating, biodegradable industry.”

And West Virginia’s 12 million acres of forests are among the most biologically diverse in the world.

Fernow Experimental Forest

To see how different species of trees regenerate and thrive, we visited the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County, where, for nearly 70 years foresters have been studying how different management and cutting practices affect the regeneration and growth of trees – from seedlings to saplings to healthy, mature specimens.

“True seedlings are that first plant that forms from the seed – that can be a year old, they can be five years old,” said Melissa Thomas Van Gundy, a research forester with the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station. “Foresters use the term “sapling” when a tree finally gets out of that little stage, reaches for some sunlight, gets up to be an inch in diameter – taller than five feet, and starting to look like a tree.

“Saplings people think are young, but because sugar maples have such a slow growth habit, they’re shade-tolerant, this could be an 80-year-old tree – just a couple inches wide. Its strategy to compete with other species is to hang out in the understory and grow at slow levels with little light until it gets its chance.”

Van Gundy says the sapling’s chance will come when the mature black cherry beside it – which doesn’t live as long and has a different strategy.

“It’s a shade-intolerant species – so when it was a seedling, it shot up for the light as fast as it could, trying to out-complete this sugar maple, and in the long run, they’re both going to win,” she said.

Economic Footprint

Our forests help clean the air and water, provide habitat for wildlife, a place to hunt, fish, hike, bike, camp, or just get-away into the woods and enjoy its beauty. Timber and forest products also have a huge economic footprint across West Virginia, according to Joe McNeel, Professor of Forestry and former head of the Division of Forestry and Natural Resources at West Virginia University.

“If you go into any county in West Virginia, there is a forest products company, or a wood yard, or somebody manufacturing something out of wood that they’re making their livelihood from,” he said. “And so, 55 counties, we’ve got companies all over the state in every one of those counties.”

“But Elkins and the surrounding counties are what I would say are the center of the hardwood industry in the state – both in terms of volume and in terms of quality,” said Mark Haddix, wood specialist for Farm Credit of the Virginias.

“Elkins is the headquarters of the Hardwood Alliance Zone – nine mountain counties that have more than 200 manufacturing, processing and wood-product-related operations.”

Members of the Hardwood Alliance Zone during a recent meeting.

Changing with the Times

At a recent Hardwood Alliance Zone meeting, Haddix pointed out how wood species go in and out of fashion – how oak, for example, wasn’t valued back in the 1950s and 60s.

“They would leave oaks in the woods – they had no value. Along came the 80s and we created value out of oak,” he said. “We sold homes because they had oak trim, oak cabinets. That trend ran until about 2004 or 2005. At that point in time, everyone was moving to the maples. And so at the end of the day, even with great forest management, it’s consumer preference.”

But wages in the timber industry – whether it’s logging or manufacturing – typically are not high, though thousands of families across the state who own woodlands supplement their income by selling timber from time to time – to send a child to college, or buy a new vehicle. And the timber business is notoriously cyclical, with dramatic peaks and troughs, like the housing crisis, that started in 2007 and 2008.

But, says, Joe McNeel, it’s still a fairly robust economic driver in the state.

“When things were tough, amazingly the forest products industry were able to find basically products that they could market to specific groups of people,” he said. “From 2007 – 2008 to right now we’ve seen a shift in what companies produce because of the markets they found during those tough times. They’re mostly industrial-type products: rail ties, wood mats, pallets, industrial bracing – material like that – have taken a larger portion of the manufacturing sector.”

Upswing

So what brought it back?

“We’ve had some improvement in housing, but not robust. It’s been a steady, small climb. That’s been good. It’s healthy, sustainable, that’s OK,” Mark Haddix said. “The biggest factor has been the worldwide desire for American hardwoods. They like our hardwoods. We have some economies worldwide who for the first time are gaining a middle class. They’re westernizing just like a lot of other countries have done in the past. They desire the same things that we have.”

Haddix went on to say that in the past, the U.S. exported lumber for production for a product that was re-imported for our markets.

“Now our customer base, our sawmills, are exporting lumber for domestic markets elsewhere — 2016 was a record export year for hardwood lumber across the nation,” he said.

More than $10 billion dollars worth. And West Virginia is aiming to grow its share of that market, and other jobs within the industry.

A timber stand at the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County, W.Va.

More to Come

In coming segments of this series, we’ll be looking at the past, present and future of the industry – from forestry practices, to logging, to sawmills, to manufacturing facilities. But all through the ups and downs of the wood business, families tend to stay involved – generation after generation. For more than a hundred years – in Pocahontas and Randolph counties, Jim Wilson’s family has been in the lumber business.

“I’m the fifth generation and maybe with one connection I’m the seventh generation, and it’s a saying that if you want to make sure that the offspring continue in the lumber business, that you take some sawdust to the hospital and put it in their hair just after they’re born, and they never get out of the wood business,” he said. “So I suppose that happened to me.”

Jim has kept that tradition alive with his own son

“I definitely took some down and he’s joined, so he’s the sixth generation that we know for sure,” Wilson said.

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