Good Stories From Here To There

Article by Rich Donnell, Editor-In-Chief, Timber Processing, March 2016

We really like the two sawmill features that appear in this issue because they are distinctly different (and about 2,000 miles from each other).

Pyramid Mountain Lumber is the nearly 70-year-old Montana-based operation owned by the Johnson family. Roger Johnson, son of the founder, is still active as president, and his sons, Todd and Steve, manage operations daily, and they have sons who work there—representing the fourth generation.

We’ve always wanted to do an article on the company, and have done stories on various operations all around them through the years, but had just never been able to connect to Seeley Lake, which is the location of Pyramid Mountain Lumber. As COO Loren Rose led me around the sawmill, I found it difficult to take my eyes off the nearby mountains and focus on the business at hand.

The big difference between a softwood sawmill in the Northwest and one in the Southern U.S. is that in the South there’s sawlog timber usually available to run your sawmill with. Sure, weather conditions come into play, the competition for the timber is a factor, and logging capacity might be an issue, but basically the timber is mostly privately owned and it’s available.

In the Northwest, for sawmill operations that don’t own timberland, timber supply is more of a crapshoot, even before you get to the issues of weather, competition and logging capacity. So much of it is owned by the federal government, which doesn’t make much of it available anymore. The state-owned forests are a little more forgiving. And then there are pockets of privately owned timberland that run hot and cold.

“Crapshoot” is probably an unfair way to put it, because a company like Pyramid Mountain Lumber is a leader in forest stewardship, landowner relations and environmental activism and has had to be to make sure it maintains its stake in timber access. But as the story on the company that begins on page 12 relates, timber supply is a fickle lifeline and the matter of survival is never underestimated.

The story on Fly Tie & Lumber’s new hardwood sawmill in Grenada, Miss. that begins on page 20 caused the memory bank to stir. Is this the same Ricky Fly we had featured in our logging magazine, Southern Loggin’ Times, so many years ago? A quick visit to our “archives” answered in the affirmative. It was the August 1984 issue, and a young Fly was quickly growing his logging business and timber dealership.

Thirty years later Fly, who had run a couple of small hardwood mills, has started up the newest hardwood sawmill in the U.S. At 20MMBF of production capacity, it’s one of the larger hardwood sawmills as well and contains an impressive lineup of new machinery and technology. It’s a combination ties-and-lumber mill and does some neat things in the handling and sorting of ties. A rail line and Fly’s own trucking fleet provide transportation support. Obviously Fly’s logging and log procurement experience is greatly beneficial.

Here’s to Pyramid Mountain Lumber for keeping on, and to Fly Tie & Lumber for getting going.