LARAMIE, WYOMING – Another Wyoming sawmill is calling it quits. Big Horn Lumber Company accepted its last load of logs the first week of March. Management blamed abysmal lumber markets and a mountain pine beetle epidemic that has been devouring mixed conifer forests in Wyoming and Colorado for more than a decade. 

Once the mill processes the last of its logs, 67 employees will lose their jobs.

Big Horn’s closure will further undermine Forest Service efforts to regain lost ground in a too little too late effort to corral the infestation. “It’s really disappointing,” Clint Kyhl told Brandon Gee of the Steamboat Springs, Colorado Pilot. “Unfortunately, we have a situation where we need them now more than ever with the bark beetle. It’s going to cost us more to treat an acre if we can’t sell to a saw mill.”

Sawmills across the western United States are the only marketing outlets the federal government has for hundreds of millions of tons of small diameter trees that fire ecologists say must be removed from federally-owned forests as a first step in reducing the risk of wildfire in insect and disease infested forests.

But even when lumber markets were soaring, before the U.S. housing market collapsed, the market for low quality wood was never very good. Most consumers don’t want it, especially so-called “blue stained” pine. The bluing in dead pine, the result of a fast moving fungus that discolors the wood, does not damage it structurally, but high-end window and door manufacturers and so-called “big box” stores – including Lowes and Home Depot - refuse to buy it, even though a coat of paint hides the bluing.

Throughout Wyoming and Colorado there is great concern for the loss of critical mass in sawmilling infrastructure – the amount of wood processing infrastructure needed to maintain an efficient and profitable marketplace.

“I hope to hell we learn something from this experience,” declared Dan Colgan, owner of Teton West Lumber Company, which marketed Big Horn Lumber Company’s wood for 35 years, and markets lumber for a handful of other smaller mills in the area.
“Had we used our forest, we’d have one,” he said of the widespread devastation the pine beetle infestation is causing.”

Colgan, a former Steamboat Spring ski patrol member, is not optimistic about the lumber industry’s future in Wyoming and Colorado. “It’s not going to be real fun for the next decade,” he told Gee. “We used to have eight times more mills than we have now, and we can’t sustain what we have now with the forest the way it is.”

In a recent letter to Wyoming Governor David Freudenthal. Colgan expressed a fear that by the time the federal government finally figures out what to do to reverse the cycle of wildfire, insects and diseases, it will too late for the region’s struggling saw mills. Meanwhile, the Forest Service’s Kyhl is hopeful that the Obama Administration’s stimulus package includes sufficient money to fund a series of thinning projects in overstocked and dying forests near roads, trails and campgrounds.