Crazy Horse salvage to begin

A timber salvage sale in the area burned by the 2003 Crazy Horse Fire was recently sold to Pyramid Mountain Lumber of Seeley Lake.

About 3.6 million board feet will be removed from an 1,100-acre area south of Condon on the Swan Lake Ranger District. The Crazy Horse Fire burned about 8,900 acres of National Forest land, but roughly 5,000 of those acres are within the Mission Mountain Wilderness, where logging is prohibited.

The fire-killed timber will be removed by helicopter, skyline yarding and conventional ground-based equipment. Much of the logging is required to take place in the winter.

Work will probably get under way in a month, said Gordy Sanders, resource manager at Pyramid Mountain Lumber.

"We look forward to the opportunity of implementing the prescriptions that the Forest Service has laid out," Sanders said. "There's a fairly wide spectrum of both logging requirements."

The sale will beef up the timber supply situation for Pyramid, a company that was in financial trouble several years ago largely because of an uncertain timber supply on federal lands that surround Seeley Lake.

"It was hand to mouth," Sanders said.

But the company has done well in the last couple of years, he said.

"The owners made a major capitol investment in the mill a couple years ago," Sanders said. "It's increased our ability to recover more volume in lumber out of each log that is processed. Since then, they've continually improved by adding minor capital improvements throughout the mill."

Pyramid, a company with 145 employees, was the only bidder on the Crazy Horse salvage sale, and the contract was awarded to the company through a Forest Service "set aside" program that reserves a certain percentage of timber sales for businesses with fewer than 500 employees.

Sanders said Pyramid contractors are familiar with the Crazy Horse burned area, since the company also carried out earlier work removing trees from fire lines and along roads.

Sanders said the Forest Service completed planning and execution of the main salvage sale relatively quickly, fast enough to ensure recovery of burned wood that can rapidly deteriorate and lose value.

Initial work will focus on removing logs that are most likely to lose commercial value, but the entire project will probably take two years, Sanders said.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com