Conservationists boost logging to restore national forests near Grand Canyon

WILLIAMS — There was never enough wood.

Despite all the ponderosa pines clogging northern Arizona’s forests with fire hazards, and despite all the cries for the government to remove enough of those trees to restore natural conditions, too few trucks dumped too few logs at a Williams sawmill after it opened in 2014.

“We have lost millions of dollars here in three years,” said Rohit Tripathi, owner of Grand Canyon Forest Products, formerly Newpac Fibre. Twenty employees lacked the promise of steady, year-round work.

The mill’s struggles reflect the U.S. Forest Service’s larger, lurching efforts to attract the private industry necessary to affordably thin pines that a century of fire suppression has allowed to grow thicker by the hundreds-per-acre.

But Tripathi isn’t despairing — he’s investing.

A new partnership with the nonprofit Nature Conservancy and some promised experiments with federal rules should provide all the trees he needs at reasonable costs for the foreseeable future, he said.

Grand Canyon Forest Products is spending $2 million to add a second mill to handle small trees from the project, which the Nature Conservancy is calling Future Forests.

“If it succeeds,” Tripathi said, “generations of Arizonans will have forests.”

If it fails, massive wildfires may continue to burn through the region and threaten forested communities.

Such fires could also shift the landscape away from the region's towering ponderosas toward shrubbier piñon and juniper, scientists say. Since the turn of this century the Rodeo-Chedeski and Wallow fires scorched about a million acres, subjecting the land to dirty water runoff, and to regrowth that is influenced by drought and a warming climate.

When a forest is thinned to open up the kind of grassy patches that were common before fire suppression began, fires can burn at a low level without climbing to the canopy and killing off the big, older seed producers.

A nonprofit tries to help turn a profit

Foresters believe it would be possible to reduce wildfire risks by thinning overgrown pine forests across a 2.4-million-acre evergreen zone stretching from about the Grand Canyon southeast to the New Mexico line.

The Forest Service has attempted to move the process along for years, pushing for up to 50,000 acres of logging per year under its Four Forest Restoration Initiative, known as 4FRI. But the relative cost of fetching the logs and the lack of local industries and markets has kept the pace at a few thousand per year at best.

Simply opening areas to logging, it turned out, was not enough. Logging companies didn’t flock to Arizona.

“They don’t think they can make money,” said Pat Graham, the Nature Conservancy’s Arizona state director.

Tripathi’s mill couldn’t, though it continued sporadically buzzing out 4-by-4s, 2-by-12s and other lumber for builders.

But on a weekday morning last month, his workers were on overdrive, dumping logs at one end of the building and feeding them through the saws; feeding leftover chips into bins for sale to landscapers; rolling finished boards down conveyors to be bundled and shipped.

The nonprofit Nature Conservancy had stepped in to help prove Arizona’s forests can still turn a profit, an unusual partnership between a conservation group and the logging industry.

READ MORE: Years later, forest thinning 'just not happening'

Hoping to speed the action, the organization hired a private timber-management firm, Campbell Global, to study the economics and recommend changes that it could test out in the field. The Conservancy then bought a timber sale that Graham expects to be the first of several allowing it to thin 20,000 acres over four years, and hired Campbell Global to manage the work.

The conservation goal includes protecting and enhancing the Verde River watershed that helps supply water to metro Phoenix, and the project is getting a boost from utilities and water suppliers. Salt River Project announced a $400,000 grant last month, and the APS Foundation has given $250,000.

The Nature Conservancy expects to spend several million dollars.

Small changes can add up

Campbell recommended several changes to the Forest Service’s standards for timber sales. One would allow loggers to leave logs piled on the ground for more than the standard 30 days before hauling them to the mill. The extra time allows them to dry, shrink and lighten up, reducing trucking costs.

Another asks foresters to group prescribed cuttings closer to each other and to the mill, rather than targeting priority areas no matter how far out. This also reduces trucking costs, though foresters could pair some of the more lucrative tracts with some sure money-losers if they average out as a win for the contractor.

A third change suggests logging machine operators use tablet computers to mark locations of felled trees, and to follow aerial maps pinpointing which trees to cut. This reduces the considerable costs of walking the forest and marking trees for cutting.

Other tweaks reduce the need to tag, track and weigh logs as frequently, relics of a time when a timber sale’s biggest value was in the timber instead of in the restoration.

READ MORE: Forest service, conservation group adopt new forest thinning plan

“There’s a shift,” Campbell Global consultant Stephen Horner said. “What’s really valuable is the restored acre. On the stump, (these trees) are worth 50 cents.”

Companies now struggle to make money because forest managers don't want them to cut the largest trees, but mostly focus on the spindly younger trees crowding them. The small trees don't make the most lucrative lumber.

Campbell Global's analysis took that into account, and still projects a possible profit.

The partners hope little changes add up.

“No one thing is going to make this thing work,” Graham said. “It’s the combination.”

'It's also about learning'

The Forest Service agreed to the tests and will consider more. The idea is to trim the costs — maybe slightly, but methodically — that currently discourage companies from making long-term investments in new mills.

“It lets us put new thoughts and efficiencies in place, test them right away and then use them,” said Scott Russell, CEO of the Forest Service’s 4FRI restoration program.

Ultimately, Russell said, the program could seek changes that would require congressional approval, such as contracts that last longer than 10 years, a shift that might ease a company’s worries about investing.

The Conservancy hired a logging firm to remove hundreds of trees per acre and open grassy patches at Chimney Springs this fall in the Fort Valley area west of Flagstaff. It’s in the foothills just off a highway that offers a cost-effective experiment site in view of the San Francisco Peaks. The work should help create fire breaks to protect those mountains from burning and creating flood hazards for the city.

“This is about getting some (restoration) work done,” Russell said, “but it’s also about learning.”

Bringing back natural fire behavior

To Tripathi, it’s about business. The Conservancy’s initial 1,600-acre Chimney Springs project is the start of what he hopes will be a steady, 20,000-acres-a-year supply for his mill in coming years.

With its small-log mill coming online by spring, the company can handle that many trees and profit, he said.

“It’s a volume game,” Tripathi said. With guaranteed volume, he’s considering building a siding from the rail line that passes his property so truckers won’t have to haul the lumber into Williams for loading.

The Nature Conservancy will log different parts of the forest for at least four years, and may continue for 10, depending on what it learns and what sort of industry interest it can drive.

“Our goal is not to become a logging company,” said Graham, the group’s Arizona director.

Long-term, he expects the Forest Service will maintain the renewed forest health by allowing fires — natural or planned — to burn off new growth and lap safely at the larger surviving trees every eight or 10 years.

That’s the natural condition of the ponderosa forest, but the thickets of spindly trees that grew throughout the 20th century made the forest too flammable to let burn.

First, someone must put up the cash to cut and process millions of trees.

The fate of Arizona’s forests may depend on whether subtle but carefully calculated changes in harvest practices can save enough money to attract an industry equal to the task.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in the Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow the azcentral and Arizona Republic environmental reporting team at OurGrandAZ on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

READ MORE:

Months after Frye Fire, squirrels future dims

Why 350,000 burned acres in Arizona may be a good thing

Fires act 'like a janitor, to clean up the forest'

Setting small fires to prevent the big ones