This story originally appeared in the Sierra Nevada Ally and is being republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement. Read the original version here.
Reducing the risk of wildfire devastation in the Sierra Nevada is a daunting and multi-faceted task. Much of the effort is focused on reducing fuel load in the forest so that fires that do flare up don’t turn into catastrophes like the Caldor Fire of 2021.
One sticking point in this effort for the Tahoe region has been the lack of a nearby sawmill. The further away a sawmill is from the logs, the more expensive they are to transport, which can make necessary tree thinning operations prohibitively expensive.
Good news on this front happened several years ago when a partnership between the Washoe Development Corporation (WDC), the business enterprise arm of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, and Tahoe Forest Products, led to a working sawmill near where Highways 50 and 395 meet in Carson City.
The Tahoe Forest Products sawmill was up and running in just 20 months. It began turning trees into lumber in May 2024.
The partnership was put together with help from The Tahoe Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides funding for environmental and recreational projects around Lake Tahoe. The fund has a major emphasis on improving forest health and Amy Berry, Tahoe Fund CEO, was aware of the negative impact caused by the lack of sawmills.
Kevin Leary, CEO of Hallador, an investment company, approached the Tahoe Fund four years ago to see if they could help find a site for a sawmill in the region. Leary saw it as both an opportunity for a profitable investment, and a chance to do something good for the community.
“Megafire was not a thing when I was a kid in Tahoe. With these megafires there is a public awareness now to clean up the forest. This is a market oriented solution to the problem,” Leary said.
Finding a spot for a sawmill is not an easy task.
“We looked at a dozen sites. You need 40-plus acres, lots of water, access to power, a nearby skilled labor pool, and a resource base nearby,” said Leary.
It’s hard to make all those things work out, and then once a usable site is found, the proposal must clear a maze of regulatory bodies and get past potential objections from the neighbors.
“We almost gave up,” he said.
But then, Berry went out to lunch with Wendy Loomis, president of the Washoe Development Corporation. Berry told Loomis that Leary was looking for a good site for a sawmill.
The Washoe Development Corporation provides development opportunities to improve the economic situation for the 1,300 members of the tribe who live primarily in the Washoe Valley. The corporation operates a variety of developments, including a plaza truck stop in Gardnerville, a gas station, smoke shop and storage buildings in Carson City, and the Meeks Bay Campground at Lake Tahoe. It had a parcel of land they felt would suit Leary’s Tahoe Forest Products well.
Berry told Loomis, “You really need to talk to Forest Products.” And she did. They began working with Kevin and his team, signing a lease in just six months and working through an environmental impact study and cultural studies.
“We don’t have as much red tape on Native lands,” Loomis said.
Loomis said the Washoe Development Corporation has three main goals with projects: “It can’t harm Mother Earth, it must create workforce development, and it must provide income for the tribe.”
She found that the project enhanced and created a healthy forest, as well as provided jobs and money to the tribe, so it met all three criteria. She also found it to be a plus that the area the lumber will be harvested from was originally Washoe land, and that the Washoe always believed in being stewards for the forest.
Leary says while logs are being milled and turned into rough green sawmill lumber now, they are still ramping up the size and sophistication of the facility and making sure they have a viable supply of logs. They processed 3 to 4 million board feet of lumber this summer and have 20 million board feet on the ground. At full production, that is enough for just six months.
Leary said one primary goal for the sawmill would be to provide wood primarily for the local market. One approach to reach that goal is to meet with local architects and builders, “trying to get them to specify local species in their projects. They are used to specifying Douglas fir, but here we have red and white firs and pines,” said Leary.
He feels that if architects and contractors use local products, it could save them money on transportation and is better for the environment.
Leary believes there is enough lumber around the Tahoe basin that needs to be cut to operate the sawmill facility for two decades. He does worry, however, about continuing to get a steady supply of trees out of the forest and into the sawmill.
“The Forest Service agrees on the goal and there are terrific people there, but it is a federal bureaucracy and getting things to where we need to be is insanely difficult to do,” said Leary.
One example of the slow pace of approval to log was the Tamarack Fire, which burned more than 68,000 acres in 2021 and nearly devastated the town of Markleeville, California. Efforts to log the burned trees were delayed so long that lots of potential lumber was lost because the wood rotted and was full of bugs before approval could be granted.
On the other hand, a great success story was the major tree removal operation at Sierra-at-Tahoe Resort. Most of the resort was heavily affected by the Caldor Fire. They were left with hundreds of burned trees next to ski runs.
“If they don’t go away they fall over, and you can’t have a public recreation site with trees falling,” said Leary. “Plus, if you don’t get it off the landscape soon the wood goes bad. We didn’t even have the lease yet, we didn’t have a place to put the trees. But there was no other outlet for the wood.”
The WDC and Tahoe Forest Products were able to complete the lease just two weeks before the trees started arriving at the sawmill site, and soon 20 million board feet of burned and damaged trees were removed.
While Leary thinks Sierra-at-Tahoe is certainly a success story, the real goal for the sawmill, and the rest of the folks working to enhance the health of the forest, is to remove the trees before they burn, to limit the impact of wildfire.
Inside a sawmill
More than a century ago, a much larger sawmill operation sat at the same location. The Carson Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, owned by Duane L. Bliss, supplied the Comstock silver mines and occupied about a square mile.
That’s more than 10 times as big as the current footprint (the Bliss family also built the famous Tahoe Tavern Hotel in Tahoe City, ran a railroad from Truckee to Tahoe City and owned the steamship “Tahoe” that plied the waters of Lake Tahoe).
The sawmill grounds today include large stacks of logs in several different locations. There are rows of huge fir trees that burned in the Caldor Fire and stacks of smaller green trees harvested as part of the tree thinning going on at Lake Tahoe.
There were also stacks of milled timber of various qualities and sizes, a pond to keep wood wet to prevent bugs and fire, and the sawmill itself.
The process of saw milling is both simple and complex, and these days it includes very sophisticated machinery that is designed to be quick and efficient and use less labor (there are 50 employees currently at the sawmill). The simple part is a log is put on a conveyor belt and several different machines turn it into lumber. The complicated part is how it is done.
The first step of the journey is when the log rolls up an incline to a bark removing saw, which then passes another saw that cuts the wood into 20-foot segments. Next, the outside of two sides of the log are shaved to turn it from a round object into a rectangular one. It then gets conveyed through three more saws that convert it into various dimensions of lumber (e.g., 2×4, 6×6).
The next stop is the sophisticated sorting machinery. Here, a computer is capable of separating the boards that shuttle past for quality and size, which are then dropped into groups of lumber that match. The wood is then mechanically stacked and binded, ready to go out for sale.
During the process, the smaller pieces and bark are routed to a chipper and shipped to Full Circle Compost in Carson City. This facility used to acquire its wood chips from the nut orchards in California’s Central Valley. Now, instead of a six-hour round trip, the compost just has to travel across town.
Leary said the next phase for the sawmill is to add a facility for planing wood and a kiln to dry it so that the facility can produce higher-quality lumber, which would command a higher price and can be delivered to the local Home Depot or Lowe’s.
