Red Rush

When I pulled in, Dave was talking on his cellphone. At thirty-three, he still had a boyish mien — patchy blond facial hair, thin build, no wrinkles. He’d gone from plumber to millionaire logging contractor in less than a decade, all while working on five or six hours of sleep a night and a steady diet of coffee, microwaved burritos, and chewing tobacco. “Still drink the coffee, but I quit the chew,” said Dave, now off the phone and leaning against his F-350.

Dave got into logging in 1995, guided by his wits and a penchant for whiskey. Within a year, he’d bought a feller-buncher, a machine capable of cutting down three hectares of trees in a single twelve-hour shift. Dave’s wits soon beat out the whiskey, and he began bringing home more than $100,000 a year. He bought a house and married a girl who now runs a successful veterinary clinic out of their home. In 2000, he amalgamated his logging company with his brother’s silviculture (tree cultivation) business, and the two started acquiring equipment and crewmen, of which I was one. A cousin of mine who was raking in $1,500 a week running machines for Dave convinced me to quit school and do the same. Dave was so desperate for workers that he kept me on even after I nearly killed one of his crew by changing a truck tire incorrectly — a task anyone else could’ve done stone drunk. (Luckily, the poorly fastened tire flew off while the driver was bumping slowly along a logging road.)

The Stephen brothers’ entry into the business could not have been timed better. They got in right before the provincial government switched to its policy of creaming value from the dying woods. A housing boom in the United States was heating up, and local mills were buying, processing, and shipping all the lodgepole pine the Americans could handle. Even the 27 percent tariff that the US Department of Commerce was slapping on Canadian lumber couldn’t stop Canfor, Canada’s largest forestry company and the operator of Vanderhoof’s biggest mill, from posting record profits in 2003 and 2004. During a two-week period in March 2006, Dave and Scott grossed a million dollars — not bad for a couple of farm boys.

a blue streak

The next morning I joined Dave on a drive out to Burns Lake, a logging town about an hour and a half west of Vanderhoof. He was planning to size up a stand of bugwood the province had recently put up for bid. Normally midsummer is a slow season for logging. Roads can be sloppy, and the fire hazard level generally hovers between “high” and “extreme.” (Under guidelines set by the BC Ministry of Forests and Range, when the fire hazard has been set at high for three days, logging crews can’t work between 1 p.m. and sunset. After three days at extreme, they can’t work at all.)

“I got six or seven guys working right now,” Dave told me as we drove out of town, double-doubles in hand. “Me, I’d rather be taking it easy right now, but if the crew says they wanna work then I have to find them work or else they might not be there when I really need them.” For the most part, work hadn’t been hard to find. Every five years, the province’s chief forester sets annual allowable cuts for each region in British Columbia. In the last five years, the allowable cut for the Vanderhoof Forest District, an area encompassing over 1 million hectares, had shot up from 2 million cubic metres to 6 million. To put this in perspective, a town of fewer than 5,000 people was felling enough timber to build more than 150,000 homes per year — roughly two-thirds the number of housing starts in Canada in 2006.

“You haven’t seen any of this, have you? ” asked Dave as we sped west through a portion of the valley that I remembered as verdant. “I don’t think any of this was red a couple of years ago. Now she’s all hit.” The big Canfor mill soon appeared on our left. A recent $100-million upgrade had made it the highest-capacity mill in the world. Among the improvements was the addition of a laser-equipped machine that detects faults in wood and rotates each log so that saws don’t cut across the cracks and checks that inevitably form in pine-beetle-infected trees. “With the volume of wood they’ve got coming through here now, they couldn’t keep up with the old layout,” said Dave.

We both noticed that the lumber yard was full. The mill wasn’t keeping up because of a few glitches with the new upgrade, Dave said. The other possibility — that they didn’t have any buyers — seemed too remote for discussion.

Half an hour down the road, Dave pulled onto a dirt driveway that brought us to a small sawmill and an atco trailer. He hadn’t mentioned this stop. “I just need to talk to these guys for a few minutes,” he explained. Inside the trailer, he shook hands with Adam Castle of Rocky Mountain Log Homes, a Montana-based company that is one of the world’s biggest builders of log homes. After a few pleasantries, Dave started negotiating the sale of timber he’d accumulated over the summer. “You guys need any more wood? ” he asked.

“How much you got? ”

“About 30,000 [cubic metres] on the ground. It’ll be 40,000 by August.”

“Yeah, we can probably take that.”

And just like that, $2 million in timber traded hands. So it went in the red rush. After the transaction, Dave and I made our way over to a small show home close to his truck. It was barren. The logs had not been varnished, and the smell of freshly cut pine was overpowering. “There’s that fungus, eh,” Dave said, pointing to a blue stain running through one of the logs.

“Don’t buyers mind? ” I asked.

“Don’t seem to. These guys gave us most of our work this winter.”

The blue stain is the mountain pine beetle’s calling card, a mark that persists through most of the milling process, long after the red limbs have been discarded. The stain is the byproduct of a symbiotic relationship with a fungus that is vitally important to the bug’s defences, and to the pathology of mountain pine beetle disease.

When a female beetle in search of a nesting site settles on a particular pine, she uses her powerful jaws to bore into the tree, digging until she reaches the phloem, the moist living tissue just beneath the bark that conducts food up and down the tree. Here she sends out pheromones that invite other beetles to join her in her burrow. In response to the ensuing onslaught, a lodgepole pine will try to send sap into the holes in an attempt to force the attackers back out. But the beetles have their own counter for this: a mixture of bacteria and fungus. Once deposited, this blue stew disrupts the movement of fluids inside the tree and plugs its phloem. Unable to produce the sap it needs and overwhelmed by dozens of attackers, the tree bleeds dry.

After mating, the female beetles lay eggs, which hatch into larvae that feed off the phloem over the winter. By May, when daytime temperatures are hitting around 20°C, the larvae have become adult beetles, ready to fly off in search of fresh phloem. Depending on the weather, they can fly for anywhere from two days to six weeks. Most migrate within tree stands, but some — around 2.5 percent, according to the Canadian Forest Service — catch a ride on the strong winds swirling above the canopy and swoop into new stands altogether. In 2002, as many as 30 million beetles soared 400 kilometres from the area around Vanderhoof to the east side of the Rockies.

the rotten stand

After leaving the Rocky Mountain site, Dave and I surged toward Burns Lake. Compared with the rest of BC, the Nechako region is relatively flat, part of the 370-kilometre-wide Fraser Plateau, which fans out in gentle undulations between Prince George in the east and Smithers in the west. When receding ice plugged up the Nechako River during the Fraser glaciation, the area was flooded, rounding off many of its geological features. Rolling hills of red tailed off as far as I could see in every direction.

An hour down the road, we turned onto a dirt path. As we closed in on the stand, the Ford bucked and groaned over the bumps. Dave shut off the engine at a dead end and got out to survey the site on foot.

Up close, an invaded pine tree is a sad sight. Small piles of sawdust lie at its base, and solidified drips of tan sap hang from each of the beetle entry points like blood from a wound. By the time the beetles flee, the tree’s needles, deprived of resin, have lightened to a yellow colour. (Trees at this stage are termed “faders” by foresters.) The needles take on a cardinal-red hue by late summer and become dull red within another year. Three or four years following the attack, the tree will have shed its foliage entirely. Left uncut, it can stand for as long as twenty-five years, a brittle grey skeleton.

Until 2006, the BC government set the stumpage fee for trees like these at twenty-five cents per cubic metre — low enough to encourage mills and contractors to buy dead trees. Then, in April of last year, the province jacked prices up to global market rates. (The hike bolstered Canada’s claim during softwood-lumber talks with the United States that the BC forest industry wasn’t subsidized.) “The mills have to pay around twenty bucks a [cubic] metre now,” said Dave.

“How long before these trees aren’t worth anything? ” I asked.

“Five years ago, I thought we’d only be able to log for another five years,” he replied. “Now I’m thinking we have another five years. It’s tough to say.”