S.1 Ep.6: Five Decades in the Woods

Ken Swanstrom of Skookum Logging joins the podcast to talk about nearly 50 years in Montana’s logging industry. From getting his start on the landing in the 1970s to running his own operation, Ken shares stories from a lifetime in the woods and offers his perspective on how Montana forestry has changed over the decades. The conversation covers shrinking timber harvests, mill closures, forest health, wildfire risk, and the ongoing challenge of keeping logging infrastructure alive while managing forests for future generations. 

Transcript

S01E06 Wood & Iron

[Blake Manley]

Welcome to Wood and Iron, the podcast for loggers by loggers, we dig into the real stories, hard earned lessons, and iron sharpened wisdom that keep the wood industry moving. I'm Blake Manley with the Western Forestry and Conservation Association.

[Jared Schroeder]

And I'm Jared Schroeder with the Wisconsin Forestry Center. Together, we bring you the voices of the people who live and breathe timber. From the forest floor to the mill yard door, from chainsaws to forwarders, we're talking shop celebrating the craft and tackling the issues shaping forestry today.

[Blake Manley]

So grab your coffee, fire up your equipment and settle in. This is Wood and Iron. Let's get to work.

Big thanks today for our sponsor Manley jobs, promotional educational material for all groups. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Wood and Iron, the podcast by loggers for loggers. We have a special episode for you today, where an old friend, no pun intended, gets to come on and talk a little bit about history of Montana logging, where it's been where it's going.

Ken has been a part of of the Montana Loggers Association in several different capacities. He's been a logger for a long time in Montana. Before we start this episode, though, Jared, I looked up some stuff.

You know, I'm a history buff. You like history.

[Jared Schroeder]

Yeah, big fan.

[Blake Manley]

And Montana in the 80s, late 70s, 80s and 90s, early 90s, was producing over a billion board feet of log every year.

[Jared Schroeder]

This is, you know, a based in America, this podcast, how many football fields is that?

[Blake Manley]

 Right. 100 billion board feet in football field. How many is that? I don't know.

My question for you, Jared. Ken doesn't get to answer this until we introduce him. How many do you think they're doing now?

If they were doing a billion board feet in the late 70s, 80s and 90s, average-ish, what do you think ballpark they're doing today?

[Jared Schroeder]

Okay, with the increase in technology, making extraction more efficient, I would imagine the number has gone up. I want to say it's gone up, but look at your face. I'm not sure.

I'm going to say 20, 20 billion board feet. 

[Blake Manley]

Yeah, right. It's, it's between 300 and 400 billion. 

[Jared Schroeder]

Oh, wow. 

[Blake Manley]

So it's dropped significantly, and I think that's something we talk about throughout the episode.

I kind of wanted to lead with that for our listeners, just to give a little perspective of where Montana's at. And Ken, I'd like to talk about that. But without further ado, I'd like to introduce our guest, Ken Swanstrom from Skookum Logging.

Ken, welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Hello, you guys.

Hello. Thanks for having me. We really appreciate you, Ken.

Jared's doing great things in Wisconsin. You know me, I'm trying to do some good things here in the Pacific Northwest, but we're doing those currently. And I'd like to talk a little bit about where you come from and what you've been doing for a whole career within the industry.

So without further ado, Ken, why don't you give us a little history about you?

[Ken Swanstrom]

Well, when I was in high school, my mom cooked at a roadside restaurant that catered to loggers. And there was a bunch of loggers that stayed there in the campground. And every night, the woman that owned that restaurant would serve family-style meals to the loggers that were camped there.

And I would always be down there, I'd see those guys, I could see how hard of working they were, and they were laughing, maybe having a few beers. And work hard, enjoy life, and eat a lot at night. And I was impressed by all of that.

And we lived 35 miles west of town. So there's no such thing as picking up an evening job. I cut a lot of firewood for our family.

In high school, cut posts for a living, worked at a ranch for a while. But when it came time to go to work, there was really one choice, and it was to go to the woods. And when I got out of high school, the man I went to work for, when I turned 18, I started out at the very bottom, working on the land.

It was a saw log job, big pine trees coming in, and you clean them up, you were just the grunt. And I remember riding home in the crew cab, I asked one of those guys, I said, I sure would like to get off the landing and get a skidding job. And he said, yeah, maybe four or five years from now.

Anyway, long story short, that was it.

[Blake Manley]

And that was me too. That was me too. I started in 99, right?

That was the same mentality as it was, you're going to start on the landing, and then it's going to be years before you work your way off the landing.

[Ken Swanstrom]

That's right. And now they take a brand new beginner and put him on a new skidder. So the next summer, which would have been around July 4th, I think it was the week after July 4th, 1976, at our centennial year, Dad and I went to work together.

So this summer, this July, will be 50 years. And I can't say that it's all been very easy or pleasant or anything, but the goal was to hang in there and do it. My dad and I worked together for the first about eight years.

And I knew that we had to become mechanized to make it, and my dad didn't want any part of borrowing any more money. And so we had a log truck at the time, and he took the log truck and he went off hauling. And I borrowed money on my own and bought my first Feller Buncher in 84.

And so I'm hoping to do something profitable this summer and say I was still in business 50 years later.

[Blake Manley]

Yeah. Hey, Ken, that has to be one of the first Feller Bunchers in your area, right?

[Ken Swanstrom]

No, there had been some. There was some. They were starting.

It was a Drop 40, and it was from Racine, right near in Wisconsin. But it was the answer. We had to.

And then I really didn't get my first new one until 2020. They were all... After that, I just bought used ones, fixed them up, and hoped to make it and hoped this one will be the one.

So I believe I had about 10 used ones.

[Jared Schroeder]

So if you don't mind me asking, how much was that first one bought?

[Ken Swanstrom]

That first one was $35,000. And I borrowed the $10,000 down from the sawmill that I was selling logs to. That's what you did.

And they wanted it paid back at $2 a ton. So they peeled out $2 a ton before you ever got the check. I owned it 20 days, and the engine shelled out.

[Blake Manley]

Oh, no. Yeah. 

[Ken Swanstrom]

And I had to go back to the bank.

I had to completely redo the engine. I did some other things. I had to borrow another $10,000 from the bank.

But I paid my $10,000 back to the sawmill. And in those days, I think a tree-length log delivered at the mill was $19 or $20 a ton. And when they peeled $2 right off the top, it was a slim pickings.

But we did it. We made it. And I had that Buncher for six years and used it, and here we are.

[Blake Manley]

Ken, maybe talk about where you're at in Montana. I know where you're at, but Montana is a pretty big state. And I think that's going to connect some dots as we move down the conversation.

So tell us a little bit about where you're at in Montana.

[Ken Swanstrom]

I live in Kalispell, and that's about 80 miles from the Canadian border to the north and about 100 miles to the Idaho border to the west. And the town I grew up in was about halfway between here and Libby on Highway 2. So in those days, logging and ranching was what was going on.

There wasn't real estate. There wasn't all this stuff. And you either went to work in the woods or you was ranching.

And it was just so different. And for me to think I was going to drive to town all those 35 miles and go to work, this didn't compute. Now, people drive 35 miles to go get an ice cream cone.

That's just the vehicles are different. The roads are different. It's just a different time.

[Blake Manley]

You know, for our listeners, if you've been to Glacier National Park and you go west of Glacier, you're going to run into Libby, Montana. And it's not perfectly west, but close enough. And when you're going out through there, there is a sea of mountain and forest and timber.

And it's an incredible amount of material, wood, tree that are in that entire region. And for some reason, and maybe you can talk about this a little bit, but for some reason, people don't think about Montana as a forest products state. But every time I'm in it, I'm looking at seas of tree.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah, I'm west of the Continental Divide. And when you go east of the Continental Divide, we here we call that east of the mountains. And that's the primarily the open or rain side.

But there's a lot of timber over there, too. But this side, especially when you get out of the valley, I live in a valley called the Flathead Valley. It surrounds the Flathead River.

Then you get out of this valley. It's all trees to the Idaho border. I don't know how many million acres that is, but it's a lot.

[Blake Manley]

Billions upon billions of board feet.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yes.

[Blake Manley]

Ken, you kind of gave us a little bit of history. What happened to the industry going through the 90s and early 2003?

[Ken Swanstrom]

That's a good question. It's just been it's been quite the decline. We had that 1980 recession thing, and that really set people back.

When my dad and I were logging together, we were, let's see, February of 80, yeah, February of 1980, we were unemployed. We were out of work. And there really wasn't much hope.

We had to sell the skidder we had and just hold back. I don't know what dad went to work and I went to work. I went out to my cousin's farm in Wisconsin and helped them farm for a year.

And it was anything for a roof and something to eat. And it was cool because that fall, I got a job falling timber in the breaks along the Mississippi River. And I was working for a sawmill in Bangor, Wisconsin, by lacrosse.

And I really it was really quite the experience, worked in hardwood all winter. And in the spring, I got the heck out of there and came back to Montana. And dad and I talked about what are we going to do?

The middle of the summer, 81, 82, 82, sawmill called said, well, we'd take a load a day from you. And that's how we did it. We just started back in at almost nothing.

And by 84, I was ready to buy a buncher. It was revving back up. And then this continual decline.

And I tell folks, we've had a we've had a lot of growth here. It's a very touristy, very scenic area. And people want to live here.

Lots of lakes. It's beautiful. And I used to get phone calls from someone that owned 300 acres or 400 acres.

And they'd say, hey, Ken, would you be interested in working on this 160 I got or this 200 acres or something? And today, especially after I get a phone call, they go, hey, we just bought four acres. And our realtor, this is famous, our realtor says the timber will pay for the property.

And I go, you really want a tree left? And if you took every single one, it will not pay for the property. And so the land has become so divided.

And to be honest, a lot of those folks aren't really proud of the timber industry. They're not really fans of tree cutting. And boy, they, any timber sale that comes up, they're the first to fight it.

It's the ongoing struggle. It really is. And then along the way, we've been losing mills like crazy.

That number I don't have right in front of me. But in the last 30 years, I think we've lost 25 mills or something. We're down to the bare bones in infrastructure, actually.

And now more than ever, the bugs are just, it's getting worse and worse. There's an overstock of the, what we call the non-saw, the really small trees that need to be something done with them. And then on top of that, last December we had world record rain and then the hurricane came through.

And we think there's the people that know are saying there's a hundred million feet on the ground or something to blow down, wind throw trees. So we're all wondering where we're going to sell those this summer. If we get a chance to clean some up.

The age old dilemma is still becoming age old.

[Jared Schroeder]

Yeah. And if you don't clean it up, that's a nice fuel load.

[Ken Swanstrom]

It's a bug factory too. Yeah. And it's primarily doug fir.

Then you, if a doug fir goes down, then that begs the bugs to come to it. That's part of mother nature's breakdown. It's a mountain or a doug fir bark beetle.

And if those things go unchecked pretty soon, they're then they're so hungry. They're flying after good trees that are standing. So we've got to get them cleaned up, move on.

And we're hoping we can find a place to sell those logs. And sadly, already there's a lot of guys right here in our valley. You're talking, they're going to have to take them to Idaho to sell them.

There's a lot more sawmilling capacity in Idaho than here. And wow. The truck industry eats up whatever money you thought there was.

[Blake Manley]

For our listeners, you might not understand like the distances here. Deer Lodge, Montana has a sawmill and it's a, they get fiber from all over the place, but their chip, you have to get rid of your chip and the chips from Deer Lodge are going through Clearwater paper in Lewiston, Idaho. So when he talks about Montana to Idaho, he's not talking about just these cities that are on the borders between the two.

Like there happened to truck, look it up. Like, like I can say numbers and all that people won't understand. Look up Deer Lodge, Montana, and then do your little Google search to Lewiston, Idaho, and see that distance.

And that's how far they're taking the sawdust and the chip from one sawmill because there's no infrastructure.

[Ken Swanstrom]

I think 12 or 14 hour round trip, I believe. So it's a long ways. It's not an easy run.

It's a lot of hills and curves and up and down and bad weather and all that. So just to get rid of a load of chips. And two years ago, the mills were dumping them on the ground.

They just had no place to get rid of them, just making chip piles out there.

[Blake Manley]

And trying to circulate them into like farms, you know, some guys were, were grabbing sawdust material and then tilting it into their farms because it broke up the soil and they had too much clay, whatever the case may have been, but there's only so much, like people don't understand how much is coming off. And because we're in an industry that cares so much about every single tree. And I say that people can argue about that, but, but I, people like you, Jared, me, my dad, right, they care about every single individual tree.

We want to use everything possible. And so taking those chips and burning them just to burn them like we used to do. We're not doing that anymore, ever.

They have to be used in some capacity. And boy, it's a struggle.

[Ken Swanstrom]

A couple of years ago, that sawmill owner in Deer Lodge was calling ranchers going, Hey, do you want to load the chips? We'll bring it to your yard, put it out in the feedlot or something, do something with them because they just literally had no part.

[Jared Schroeder]

So with the, with the board feet changing so much, going from billions of board feet down to hundreds of millions of board, was there a significant change in the amount of canopy cover then as a result of that, like the, or is it just small trees really expanded?

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah, the small trees, if we, what we call them, the forest service calls the non-saw is we're reaching epidemic numbers here, two, three, 4,000 trees per acre, when we really need about 500 or 350 or something, and I get having a beautiful forest, but I also, to clean things up a little bit, we just got way too much of that little stuff. And there's literally nothing you can currently. And it's becoming a pain.

It's a problem.

[Blake Manley]

Management objectives have been severely changed because the infrastructure is not there. The infrastructure is not there because management objective change.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And, and one of our sawmills here put in a, I don't know how long ago it was 20 years ago or 15 years ago, put in a power plant, a biomass power plant that makes two megawatts and originally when they built it, they were worried about having enough fuel, which turned into our power co-op, not wanting to buy as much as they wanted to sell because of the cost of it.

And I think then it was going to be around 13 or 14 cents a kilowatt. They were going to sell into the grid. And our co-op said, we don't want to raise the price of the customers by buying too much.

And now I think the co-op would take another plant or two like that. They're looking for some power and we have an excess of fuel. So if a person could chip that non-saw stuff and get it in a, get it dried out a little bit, get it in a boiler and make some power out of it, my God, we got it.

[Jared Schroeder]

How much of the land out there that you work is still privately owned?

[Ken Swanstrom]

Right here in the Valley, there's quite a bit, but you leave the Valley and it turns into national forest or industrial private, a lot of industrial private inherently, but then North or South, it's all forest service, a lot. And we got a lot of wilderness here too. I'm sitting here from this office.

I can see the Bob Marshall wilderness. And that's one of the bigger ones in the U.S. And it's, that's not a place where you're going to harvest trees. But down by Libby, there's the Cabinet mountain wilderness.

And again, that's not a place you're going to harvest trees, but we have a lot of forest service. And I don't have the numbers before me here, what we have in state. But when Blake was talking earlier about our record high harvest was around a billion, like he said, about 10 years ago, we had a professor from the university come up and he gave a spiel about a talk about Germany and Germany is really close in size to Montana, like really close, like within a hundred thousand acres and the open and forested acres are really close as well.

And at that time, when Peter gave that talk, Germany's forest industry was 15 times. So we were, we never, ever will see, and they have tough ground too, but they just manage, they just do it different. And everybody is on board with cutting trees.

I've been there. I've been there twice and toured. And every single town has two or three sawmills and they want a place to take their trees so they can get the boards, they farm, it's just, it's all about growing some trees and it's really something to see it.

And so when Blake is talking about a billion feet or 300 million, what I tell private landowners that don't have a lot of experience with this, my number for Montana wood and the way it scales is roughly about 225 truckloads is a million board feet. That's a good rough way of talking about what a million board feet means. And I know two loggers that have ongoing forest service sales that after the December windstorm, they said each one of their sales has a million feet on the ground that the wind right now.

And that's just, it's just a staggering number. And it's going to look like the Dickens when they go to clean it up, because there's not going to be much left. So we had world record rain with this unbelievable storm and they were coming down like rain.

So we got a lot of cleanup to do. I hope we have a place to sell the logs.

[Blake Manley]

Yeah. That's Rosie, Rosie and peachy Ken. Thank you.

The most positive person we've had on the podcast. We really appreciate it.

[Ken Swanstrom]

I'm just saying it the way it is, man. I wanna… sorry.

[Blake Manley]

Support for this podcast comes from the Western Forestry and Conservation Association. For over a hundred years, WFCA has delivered trusted forestry education, professional development, and workforce leadership across the region. Learn more at westernforestry.org.

For the listeners out there, you really need to grab a map of Montana and take a look at this where he's talking about in the, in the Libby, the Flathead Valley, which if you've never been to the Flathead Valley, you know, I'm not going to make a pitch for tourism, but it is literally one of the most beautiful valleys in the entire United States. It has an amazing lake in it, amazing people in it, the timber, the wilderness areas, like everything. It is, it's an incredible place.

When you go West of there, you are in industrial private, mostly, not mostly, but there's a lot of industrial private, but if you go South, and especially if you go down toward, you know, Anaconda, Butte, Montana, and that area, you're primarily for service land, primarily. One of those mills is servicing eight different national forests because those national forests sell such a little amount of timber that it takes that many in order to keep that mill running. 

[Ken Swanstrom]

And two, and two states. He's going to Idaho and Wyoming for logs.

[Blake Manley]

That's right. That's right.

So three states, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming. Holy cow.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah, exactly.

[Blake Manley]

So when we talk about the land ownership in Montana, yes, there is the large industrial that their main purpose is to grow trees, to harvest them, but there is billions of board feet on the national forest that needs just been like, it's, it's way overcrowded for what it used to be. And, and I'm going to connect a couple of dots and then I'm going to give it back to you, Ken. But it being overcrowded means we should be sending it out for fire danger and all the rest of the things, keep infrastructure going and all that, but by it not being harvested, companies like yours are struggling to survive in Montana right now, which then in turn means that the mill struggle, which then in turn mean we're not able to do some of that work on those properties to keep them from burning up the entire world. That's a problem.

[Ken Swanstrom]

It is. And the last four or five or six or seven years, if you buy a forest service timber sale, the non-saw is mandatory removal. It's not a bid item, but it's a bid sale.

You pay 99 cents a ton for it. And for the last five, six, seven years, you got to cut it, process it, and get it roadside and then drive away because there is no market. Earlier before we would, you could sell a load, we called it pulp.

You could sell a load to a couple of the chipping outfits here and there. But the last five years, they're piling it up and letting it rot on the edge of the road. It just looks like the Dickens.

And what we're finding is a lot of guys aren't bidding on sales because some of them have 10,000 ton of non-saw that has to be removed. So you got to pay for it. Granted, that's only $10,000, but getting it, those little trees, sometimes you have just as much, if not more as a nice saw lot and getting, and it's just, you got to process them.

They won't let you leave them lay there with the limbs on them. And it's, it's a Royal pain. And guys are just walking away from a lot, not bidding on a timber sale because of that.

And we need to figure out some way to expedite that. And in Germany, I saw where they just leave it roadside and they have these trucks come along with truck mounted chippers and a trailer pulls beside them and they chip it and that everybody goes, Oh, that's energy wood. And you can sell it.

And if you had a pile of it, the size of your pickup, they'll come and grind it and take it away. And they'll give you a check for 30 bucks or 40 or something. Or if you have a monster pile of it, they'll pay you well for it.

But they all just, they all go, Oh, that's energy wood. And it goes to a biomass plant somewhere and it gets turned into electricity. And we are a long ways away from that here.

And I wished it wasn't.

[Jared Schroeder]

Is there any room? I think about like, you know, tree removal services you find in cities and whatnot. Like you pay to have your tree felled.

Yeah. Are we getting to the point where we need to start looking at the removal of these small non-economic trees as a service? Like you need to be charging the service to remove these trees.

You can actually get the stand to look the way you want it for your management objective. Is that something that is potentially feasible?

[Ken Swanstrom]

There was a lot of grants given out in the last couple of years. And a lot of guys did do that, but we're talking such a small, it's mostly like in the WUI, it's the round, the urban interface and it's stuff. And it's just to try and clean up around land, homeowners lands, talking 10 acres or 20 or something.

It's a lot of work to do it by hand. But if there's a grant, those people are going for it. And a lot of people have been very happy with what's happened.

And yes, we do have outfits doing that. But to saw those 7,000 trees down per acre and get them out to a trail where something can grab them, take them to the roadside and dispose of them. That's a lot of doing.

And then there's nothing for the landowner. He comes out with an improved forest and less fire danger. So it accomplishes what the grant wanted to do.

[Jared Schroeder]

Yeah. I'm just wondering at some point too, if like insurance might step in and say, you're a forest landowner, you need to be clearing that out. Otherwise your, your structure is at risk and we're not going to insure you anymore.

[Ken Swanstrom]

We'll see what this summer brings.

[Jared Schroeder]

Yeah.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Oh, we hope not, but I bet it's going to be a dry one.

[Blake Manley]

Yeah. You know, Jared, my uncle lives in Northern California and his insurance walked away from him and he doesn't even live in a heavy forest land, but they, they flat out said, and I won't name the insurance company, but it's a, it's a large one. Um, they flat out said you have too much total biomass on your property to insure you in this area, right?

It did not matter that it, nothing mattered. It was just, that's the way it is. And, and come to find out there was like 15,000 small landowners that that happened to in Northern California.

Not positive. Uh, speaking of not positive, no, um, Ken, I, I'm so fascinated by the Montana story right now. And the chief of the forest service, Tom Schultz has been there.

They've got some stewardship agreements. They're, they're working to solve a little bit of the problem. But I think on a positive note, people should understand how great your fiber is.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Oh gosh. Oh yeah. Yeah.

[Blake Manley]

So for our common listener, let's talk about Doug Burke, Ken, and use your history of Doug Burke. I grew up in Oregon, but I did a lot of stuff on the West side. A great fiber on the West side.

I'm not saying anything different, but it grows, you know, a quarter inch, half inch, an inch in a year, sometimes in the right circumstances. And that fiber is used for different purposes. Your fiber in Montana, talk about your fiber.

[Ken Swanstrom]

So the main thing is we're fairly high elevation. Town where I'm sitting here is 3000 feet and then everything else is up. And we're a dry site.

You might not think it, but we are. I think out at our international airport, the rainfall, including snow is around 16 inches. That's pretty, pretty dry.

So you got some slow, when you get up on a South slope out here, out of town, you're at 5,000 feet or something. Those poor old Doug fir are having a tough time just making a living. And we have a very slow growth.

And those growth rings, honestly, where you've got to use a magnifying glass to count them, that is some incredibly hard wood. And it's stable and it's beautiful. And I've been down South and following along on the highway, following a log truck, and I can see the growth rings from my car and here in Montana, we look at our growth rings with a magnifying glass.

It's, you literally can just barely tell any growth at all, but boy, does it make some fabulous wood. And we do have mills here that sort for like the glulam industry. It's just perfect.

A lot of stress rated lumber. They test batches for what it can take in a bend or strength wise. And it's fabulous for that.

And it's beauty. We do have that going for us. But on the other hand, when you do a forestry activity, it's a long time coming around and to have a knee high tree can take five, six years in the wrong place.

We have other places, the North slope on it. We get a year where we have a little bit of rain, like last summer. You might see a two foot leader or two foot of growth on the top, which is really good for here.

But on the coast, Washington and Oregon, those people will see four, a four foot. So it's just a whole different world. And if we have some volcanic soils, it's not like Idaho, but we have volcanic soils.

And if we just could get a little more rain, man, it'll grow, but it's also it's steep and it's a fine line. If we have an epic rain event, why then we lose a lot of our soil. It's coming down the creek.

That's the bad part. So it's amazing how things are designed to, to work, how they work. Well, we do have some beautiful lumber and I have a little, I have a little Wood-Mizer sawmill myself and Blake knows about them and I love just taking a piece of firewood out of the firewood pile and sawing a board out of it and enjoying the beauty of it and then make something with it.

It's great stuff.

[Jared Schroeder]

Are there any mass timber producers in that area?

[Ken Swanstrom]

There's one about 20 miles North of here. They've had some problems with their press, I believe, and they're limited on what they can press and they sell to a market back East and they have a, they have another plant in New York and I think a plant in Georgia, and I believe they send their stuff out to those plants, the panels and go from there. We haven't seen a lot of CLT construction around here.

It's coming. There's some in Missoula, 110 miles South here, but not so much right here, right now.

[Blake Manley]

And maybe the next portion of your story is that you're not, obviously, I think listener will understand from, from listening so far, your story is not just, I go out in the woods, I cut down trees, I load them on a log truck and I go home and I go to sleep. Like you've been very involved in several different processes and and organizations and maybe tell a little bit about your story of advocacy and work for the forestry industry and your involvement in other things directly tied to it, but not cutting down a tree.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Here in this country, we've had some very progressive people, some smart, way, way smarter than me, very progressive. And we realized that we needed to step up and get ahead of the curve. And we created our accredited here at the Montana Logging Association.

We created our accredited logging professional program in the early nineties. And then we were part of the group. We wrote our own SMZ rules and got them approved by the legislature and became law, I believe in 92.

And then we put some penalty in there. We got a penalty in place in case of infractions and we have audit teams that audit what we do and still do. I think they audit every other year and it's been very successful.

And it was one that loggers were able to help create. And boy, it, I think it's smart. It works good.

It's we haven't had any problems. It's been good. And then in 1994, when the American Loggers Council, our man right here at the Montana Logging Association, Keith Olson was kind of part of it right from the very beginning, and he went to the original meeting in St. Louis in 94, the American Loggers Council was formed. And then the third president was Sherm Anderson from Deer Lodge. Then when he, they came here to Kalispell for his meeting, you always go to the town of the, or the state of the president that year. So in 97, when it came here, that's when I started paying attention and I went to the meeting, spent all three days there and met all the guys, started being real active with the American Loggers Council.

And by 2005, I'd gone through the chairs and I served as their president for a year, which was really awesome. And I'm still involved. I still attend the meetings.

And again, it's just, you just got to keep up the fight. You just got to keep the pressure on and keep trying to improve how we look to the world. The end game isn't just number of loads at the end of the day.

Yes, I understand. You got to pay your bills and got to pay the crew and all that. But especially here, where there's so many eyes upon us and so many of those eyes aren't really happy that we're doing the timber harvest in the first place.

So we've got to bring ourselves up and try and make this industry as good as we can. So it's just a, it's a never ending, as far as I'm concerned, it's just a never ending struggle. I guess you could say it's struggle.

And I don't call it a fight. I just, it's just a struggle. I'm not going to fight them, but I'm going to say, Hey, and for me in my whole life, it's always easy to talk to a rancher or a farmer, they get it.

I can say, Hey, here's, and they go, Oh yeah, you got to do something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But some of these folks that have moved in here, it's a little hard to explain to them what can happen out there.

And sadly, we get some of our greatest responses after a bad fire. That's to me, that's very sad because we could burn up, who knows 5 million acres here, and then they're really proactive for about a year and then it starts going the other way. But boy, after a fire year, you can get some phone calls.

People wanting to clean up what they got. It takes a fire to wake them up. I hate to say that.

[Jared Schroeder]

So what's your script? So you have someone who comes up to you who's not from the area. Now they are, they born and raised in the city and they're like, I don't like what you're doing out there.

Well, how do you handle that? Like, what's your, what's your approach?

[Ken Swanstrom]

That's a really good question, Jared. And one of the things that I used to open with, and I think I still do, is I ask him a question. I say, have you ever had a garden?

You ever in your backyard till up a spot and have a garden? Oh yeah. Yeah.

I said, what's it like if you till it up and then don't do anything? What's it like if you don't even look out there after two years and don't run over it the more it becomes a jungle? I said, it's kind of like that.

And they said the forest, the forest will take care of itself, which is true. But when mother nature take care of it, it's a lightning strike and then there's fire. And that's all really groovy, except for now, right here, these hills are full of houses.

And in 1800, everybody lived right down here by this bottom of this valley, because they were all farmers. Now, all these folks that have bought a piece of Montana, they're way up on the hills, when those hills catch fire, it's pretty hard to save them and save their house. And a lot of people actually kind of get the garden analogy.

They kind of go, oh, sure. And like I said, it's easy with a rancher or a farmer. They know what you've got to do too.

It's the cycle of life and you've got to clean it up. But I'm not sure I've made a lot of headway. I keep trying, but I'm not sure.

And the fire is, it cleans it up, but it's a little much. It's just too much.

[Blake Manley]

You are making headway. You are making headway.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah. Okay. All right.

Thank you. I try. And I love getting on an airplane, going somewhere, going to a meeting somewhere and having someone that you can strike up a conversation to sit next to you.

And it's getting, I've noticed that's getting harder and harder. A lot of them tune in, put their headphones on and kick their head back and they're not going to converse. But there was a time in my life I had some great airplane conversations with a passenger beside me that had never even heard of.

I would say I'm in the logging business. I say, what does that mean? I just can't connect with a man going to the woods and cutting down trees and putting them on a thinning, thinning the forest and putting them on a truck and sending them to the sawmill.

[Jared Schroeder]

Like the problem is like this career, there's this whole industry when it's working well, nobody notices.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah.

[Jared Schroeder]

But if it stops, if there's a problem, you're going to notice because now you go, what are you going to use a corncob when you go to the bathroom? I mean, you're going to notice when things aren't working right. We take it for granted.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah. Yeah. And I had coffee. Like I go to a restaurant in Whitefish every Sunday morning, go there early and have coffee and meet some friends.

And I left there last Sunday and I've done it before. I asked the gal, I know who, I know her very well. I said, Hey, Natalie, can I get a go cup?

I love your coffee. Can I get a go cup? She goes, where's your cup that should be in your car?

And I said, I forgot. She says, you know, these things are made of paper. We shouldn't be wasting paper.

And I said, but Natalie, we have a worldwide glut of paper and she's not going to, she's, I could try until I'm blue in the face and she's not going to her mind is made up, we need to save the paper in those cups and stop handing them out for go cups. And I would love to catch her when she's not working and say, look, here's some numbers have some. Cause she's by far not a dummy.

She's a sharp gal, but she got it in her head that we need to keep conserving it. We still have a long ways to go, gentlemen.

[Blake Manley]

You know, what I want people to understand is one paper product or a by-product. So we don't use saving paper is doing nothing to save a tree. Actually, some might do the opposite, right?

[Ken Swanstrom]

Correct. 

[Blake Manley]

But the one that really rules me is they'll use plastic or steel. They're like, well, we've got plastic or steel rather than wood product.

And we three know, and there are a lot of our listeners know that steel, the footprint of steel and the footprint of plastic in our environment is seven times, 10 times, 25 times, depending on where you're at more than using wood.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah. And they somehow saw a commercial on TV or a commercial in a magazine or something. They perceive, and I bet Natalie does too, that paper cup came from a three foot ponderosa pine, our state tree came from the most beautiful tree on the planet.

And it does not. And they see that one photo. It's like I always said, they always, you always remember the worst photo and they all have seen a photo of a clear cut and they all seen some really horrible logging photos, and that's what sticks in their mind.

And they don't see the properly thin forest with the three or four different height groups of trees and the mix of timber and species. And they don't see that. They see that they still have that picture in their mind, a very worst logging situation ever.

And it's happened. I'm not going to, I'm not going to fib and tell you that it hasn't because it has, but things are on the improve and people are trying to do better. And here there is no, it's all selective harvest.

And when you go to the coast, I get it. It's kind of on hand. Like it's like a wheat field.

You can't selectively harvest a field of wheat. You kind of gotta, it's the wind and the way the roots are growing and stuff. You kind of gotta get them and start over.

It's a little different story than here, but here it's all selective work. We like to leave some grandpas and grandmas and some parents and some kids and some grandkids. Just have all those, that four level height to the forest and mix it up and get a little opening in there and maybe get some new stuff coming in.

And I think it's really pleasing to the eye.

[Jared Schroeder]

Well, I think that that, that message that you said earlier, if you're not going in and managing that forest, then Ma Nature is going to come in and she's going to clear cut it and it's going to be devastating and it's going to take much longer time to recover. And I don't think that is a connection that has been well-made.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah. And a lot of them, there's so much fuel that it just cooks the ground and it just takes forever. And then the next spring get the big rain and you lose a lot of that down at the bottom and say, it's a sad deal.

And salvage after a fire is a really touchy subject here. I wished it wasn't, I wish we were more proactive about it, but a lot just gets left to fall over. I'm not saying they don't put up a salvage sale, but it's the amount that gets salvaged versus the amount earned.

It's a, there's quite a bit.

[Blake Manley]

We were advocating over the last 18 months in Idaho and Oregon, just to do the roadside stuff.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Exactly.

[Blake Manley]

Yeah. That's all we wanted, which when I talk roadside again, for our listeners, you're talking, if you can reach it from the roadside plus a hundred feet. You know, give or take, so that's a roadside salvage on national forest.

So if it will fall through the road, plus a hundred feet, that's about all you're doing. When you're looking at a hundred thousand acres fire, you're not even talking about 1%.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Yeah. And the reason that salvage gets a hall pass is because in the name of safety, it's safety, it's not about getting those, letting those, instead of letting those trees rot, let's get them to the mill. It's not like that.

It's in the name of safety, which I get. That's good.

[Blake Manley]

Well, yeah. On that note, you know, all roses and peaches in Montana, everybody. Uh, everybody moved to Montana to become a logger.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Woo. Gosh, I'm just trying to be honest here. I wish it was, I wish it was rosier.

I really do.

[Blake Manley]

Hey, it's a challenge right now in the state of Montana. I think you bringing light to that for, for people clear across the nation is extremely valuable. That we know that the smoke from these, these massive fires is very detrimental to health and that health is not in the state of Montana.

Only if you look at the Canadian fires from last year, the year before that smoke, Jerry, you were choking on that smoke and that's, we're not talking a hundred miles from your house. We're talking about a thousand miles from your house. So this is a problem, this wildfire epidemic.

And I believe loggers have a solution. They are part of the solution, but this wildfire epidemic and the smoke and the health hazards that come with it, that problem needs to be told all throughout the whole United States, it's not just your local people that have this effect. So as we look at this problem and we look at solutions, the infrastructure of logging, milling, all of that going away in Montana inhibits our ability to take care of that wildfire problem.

That's a, that's a problem.

[Ken Swanstrom]

It does. And when I first went to Germany on the forestry tour in 2017, we were led there by a PhD professor out of Missoula who spoke perfect German. And we just talked about growing trees and we went to a lot of different sites in Southern Germany and Bavaria.

Then I had a chance to go back six years later and it's like to kind of say Germany is the mother, the home motherland of sovaculture, they've kind of been messing with it for 500 years and they take it seriously. And they were in 2017, not very concerned about the bugs. They said, oh no, we have it under control.

And we are, and literally the way their forest, their foresters work is the state forester. If he sees a patch of red trees, he can come knock on your door and he can say, hey, Mr. Manley, you have those two dozen trees there. Here's a, here's your ticket.

And you need to have those removed and all the brush cleaned up in three weeks, or we will come do it for you. And they thought they had the plan all under control. And when we went back in 2023, we found out and they found out that they couldn't stay ahead of the bugs and they have whole hillsides covered with red trees and even, so one of the most proactive forestry countries there is, could not stay ahead of, and it's so totally accepted over there to cut a red tree and get it to the sawmill.

And I even looked in Switzerland, I looked way up on a mountain under a power line and they had fell some trees like we do here to keep the power line right away clean. And those guys had barked those trees they'd peeled because they did not want the bugs to get in. They knew they couldn't really get the logs out of there, or if they could, it was going to be a while.

So in the meantime, you peel those logs because they don't want the bugs. And that is a totally different program than here. So if one of the most proactive countries in the world can't stay ahead of them, holy smokes, we've got our hands full.

And then now like this spring where we have this big wind throw event, I'm really concerned that it might become a mess. I hope not. I really hope not.

[Blake Manley]

On that note, Jared, you got any other questions, Ken?

[Jared Schroeder]

No, I think it was a really interesting conversation. Thanks for coming on, Ken.

[Ken Swanstrom]

You betcha. Thank you. Thanks for asking.

[Blake Manley]

Ken, we really appreciate you. We appreciate our Montana loggers out there. You know, I have a few very close personal friends that are out there doing some really hard work in the loggers, lumber mill workers, the whole nine yards.

And we really appreciate you guys doing that. So on behalf of all of us, we appreciate you. Thank you.

[Ken Swanstrom]

Thank you. 

[Blake Manley]

And I'll end with that. Wood and Iron episode with Ken Swanstrom, Skookum Logging comes to an end.

Thank you, everybody. That's going to wrap up this episode of Wood and Iron. The podcast for loggers by loggers.

Big thanks for joining us out here in the woods in the air today. We appreciate you making us part of your day.

[Jared Schroeder]

And be sure to subscribe and share. And more importantly, send us questions and stories. We want to hear from the people who keep this industry running.

[Blake Manley]

So until next time, stay safe, stay sharp, and keep the woods working.

[Jared Schroeder]

Wood and Iron is brought to you by the Wisconsin Forestry Center. The WFC is dedicated to promoting vibrant, sustainable forests and forest-based economies. Learn more at uwsp.edu slash WFC. Special thanks to those that brought Wood and Iron from the studio to the cab. Editor Joe Rogers, producer Susan Barrett, and theme music by Paul Frater, Todd Hornick, and Sammy Mead.