SEATTLE — Ty Abernathy tips his head back and judges where this big tree will fall as he starts cutting it with a chain saw. This is a hand faller’s work, all eyeballing and experience to land a more than 100-foot-tall Douglas fir without breaking it — or getting killed.
Abernathy pauses to pound a wedge into the cut with a sledgehammer. Open it wider, then cut again, deeper, the saw screaming through the trunk until he feels the tree start to let go. He kills the saw’s motor and jumps back. Stands to watch, as with a crack and shudder, the big fir begins to fall. Slowly, it cuts its last arc through the sky where it has persisted through some 100 winters. It tips, totters, picks up momentum.
Its thundering crash shakes the forest floor.
For more than a century, this has been a way of doing business in Washington, cutting forests owned by the state and today managed by the Department of Natural Resources. But in an era of climate warming — and growing climate activism — there is a new war in the woods.
This fight is not over old growth, the trees sprouted before 1850 and never cut since settlers came here. Those ancient monarchs are already protected by state and federal policy spurred by the Timber Wars of the 1980s and ‘90s that led to protection of more than 6 million acres of old growth (older than 200 years) on federal land in three states within the range of the northern spotted owl.
The conflict now playing out across Washington is over the old-growth forests of tomorrow. These are second-growth forests originating before 1945 and never sprayed with herbicide or replanted to a dense monoculture of nursery-grown seedlings. Today they are diverse, full of life and booming with big Doug firs and cedars just revving up for the long haul. In the right conditions, these trees can live 500, 800, even 1,000 years.
The fight over these forests started in 2021 with a tree sit — the first such protest in an older forest that didn’t meet state standards for old-growth protection but wasn’t a plantation tree farm either. Channeling climate dread and extinction doom, defenders have been putting these mossy, unprotected stands of trees in the spotlight all over Western Washington. They also did what people usually do when things start getting scarce; they gave them a name: legacy forests, evoking both what they are, and could be. Things have not been the same since.
Suddenly, DNR timber sales that can fetch millions of dollars are being paused, canceled, litigated and protested, throwing the state’s timber business into disarray. Log buyers are facing uncertain supply. Mill workers and some local community officials say they want harvest of older forests back on track for the money that grows on those DNR trees, among the most lucrative on the market.
Washington’s forest trust lands raise about $180 million a year for schools and local government services including hospitals, libraries, EMS and more, in addition to $63 million used to manage more than 2 million acres of state forestlands and maintain 14,000 miles of roads.
Money grows on DNR trees
Harvest of state forests on DNR lands provides money for beneficiaries from road departments to hospital districts in rural counties. As the sales of older forests have been stalled or cancelled because of opposition to cutting older forests, that funding has been reduced or put in doubt.
Washington Department of Natural Resources (Fiona Martin / The Seattle Times)
Yet opponents — including some City Council members and county commissioners — say these forests are worth more standing than cut.
A stark example of the logging blowback can be found in Thurston County, where commissioners have asked for a pause on sales in the 110,000-acre Capitol State Forest, southwest of Olympia, to protect big trees for biodiversity and human well-being — and to preserve the carbon stored in these sentinels.
“They are going about their business like it is 1950 and we know nothing about climate change,” Tye Menser, chair of the Thurston County Board of County Commissioners, said of DNR officials.
“They are not listening to us. Instead what we get is a reeducation campaign about why we don’t understand why nothing can be any different. … It’s, ‘You don’t really know, and if you did, you would back off.’”
DNR officials also express frustration. They say the agency actually has made changes to its forest practices, lots of changes. Today, the agency sets aside about 48% of the lands it manages, including 1.6 million acres protected under a habitat conservation plan. That brought relative peace in the woods and stability for the timber industry. Until now.
WA’s legacy forests, the old-growth of tomorrow
A new timber war is taking place over some of the state’s older forests managed and logged by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). These are the old-growth forests of tomorrow, comprising a second growth of trees since huge swaths of forests were cut in the 1800s and 1900s. They are not protected like old-growth in federal parks and only represent 3 — 8% of DNR’s harvestable lands.
Washington Department of Natural Resources, Forest Resources Division (Fiona Martin / The Seattle Times)
To be sure, state forests managed by DNR are just a portion of the timber cut in Washington. And legacy forests comprise even less, 16,000 to 25,000 acres, or just 3% to 8% of state forests available for logging, according to DNR. Most logging in Washington occurs on private lands.
But DNR forests are special. They are logged on longer rotations, and state timber stays home, unable to be exported as raw logs because of state law. They also stay forests forever, never to be converted to development. Legacy forests are the rarest of these lands, not plantations but true forests. Diverse, alive and beautiful, these are forests highly valuable for habitat, for recreation — and primo, fat cuts.
Todd Welker, deputy supervisor for uplands at DNR, says the goalposts keep shifting in the debate over which forests are too old to be logged.
“First it was pre-1850 [forests], then it was 1900. Then it was forests grown before 1945 and now it’s pre-1960 — the narrative keeps changing,” he said. “We set aside more than any timber company in the world. And it’s never enough.”
In months of interviews and field visits to older state forests from South Sound to Hood Canal to the Olympic Peninsula, The Seattle Times explored this controversy.
Loggers explained why they relish their work. Workers at a local mill that buys the trees for their quality fiber talked about their pride in jobs that also support a small-town lifestyle they cherish.
Educators and hospital workers praised an industry that helps pay for everything from a badly needed hospital expansion to a program in which students raise rabbits to sell at the county fair.
In nonviolent protests, opponents of legacy forest cuts are taking the flags and boundary markers off sales to try to foil them. They say they are desperate to save these older forests for the next generation.
The climate crisis has turned up the heat. The ability of forests — especially bigger trees — to take in carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it safely in their leaves, wood and roots makes older forests a climate stabilizer.
Voters statewide will soon have their say, in an election for the position of commissioner for public lands that amounts to a referendum on the fate of these older forests. The lands commissioner holds great influence over state forests managed by DNR. Two candidates face off in the general election. One of them, Dave Upthegrove, has promised to end commercial sales of legacy forests his first day in office.
Evergreen Gold
Mike Sly scopes out the height of the towering Douglas fir, eyeing it for market value. Its trunk is tall, straight and free of scars. Utility pole potential.
“That’s poles all day long,” Sly says. Each one could be worth $1,000 or more.
This proposed timber sale in the Capitol State Forest, called Evergreen Gold, was full of beauties just like it, as well as glorious red cedars.
A DNR forester had already marked the sale’s boundaries, scoping the plot for everything from stream types, which determine buffers where trees are left, to the slopes, geology and archaeology, which can lead to more areas being preserved.
The question now for Sly was the value of what was left.
“It’s as much an art as a science, something you learn over time,” says Sly, scrambling deftly over logs in spiked boots. He is what is called a timber cruiser, trained to assess forests commercially, for their grade and sort — the possible products that could be made from them. Added up, his estimates determine the stand’s cash value and the minimum bid DNR will set for potential buyers.
“You live and die by your cruise,” Sly says, sizing up another big Doug fir. “There is huge potential for error, to either under- or overvalue.”
Sly is the lead cruiser and marketing manager for the product sales and leasing division at DNR. He was impressed as he took stock, seeing, through his eyes, arrow-straight poles, trees big and strong enough for cross arms on utility poles, or good clean cuts off a lathe for high-grade veneer.
“This is super rare to find,” Sly says, admiring a stand of first-rate Douglas firs, “there is hardly anywhere in the world that grows that.”
State Department of Natural Resources biologist Alan Mainwaring visits the Evergreen Gold timber site in the Capitol State Forest. It’s his job to set aside trees that will seed the next generation and provide habitat for wildlife after the forest is logged. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Older forests are havens of biodiversity and vaults of carbon storage. Bigger trees store the most carbon because of their mass. But once a tree is cut, its carbon storage days are over and they begin to decompose, releasing CO2. Furniture and other wood products can’t provide the long-term carbon storage of a Douglas fir or cedar, which can live 500 to 1000 years. Furniture winds up in a landfill. and buildings are torn down long before then. (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)
Meanwhile, DNR biologist Alan Mainwaring is looking at the trees from an animal’s perspective. “That is just a big old hooter Doug fir,” he says, setting it aside for protection. He noted a cedar stump so old it had springboard notches from the first cut on this forest more than a century ago. “There was intensive logging here and, at some point, a fire,” he says, reading scars on the stump. But the quality of most of the trees, growing for about 114 years since the last cut, was still extraordinary, he notes. “This is a monster plot.”
The cruise report documents a trove of large Douglas firs mixed with red cedars, including 815 utility pole-quality trees — among the most valuable. “Evergreen Gold is aptly named,” the report says. It includes nearly 6 million board feet of standing timber, which can produce enough lumber to construct about 729 homes with 2,600 square feet of living space. The trees age from 44 to 114 years. Sale appraisal: $3.5 million. Valuable material for buyers, and a gusher of money for beneficiaries, from the Port of Olympia to the Timberland Library, local school and fire districts, the Capitol campus and more.
Most privately owned industrial timberland owners manage monocrop farms, clear cut about every 40 years to maximize efficiency and profit. Harvest from federal land of old growth was mostly stopped for any commercial purpose in the Northwest Forest Plan, enacted in 1994 on federal lands protecting more than 24 million acres of old growth in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. That leaves DNR land as a preferred source for local harvest of older, larger trees.
It’s these older trees that have the strength and size needed for telephone poles. They also have the quality fiber that is used for railroad bridges, engineered wood products and big, architectural-quality beams. The trees from most private timber farms are too small, too young, too weak. Just babies, as far as Doug fir goes.
Big-tree defenders led in part by the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition have been using every legal tool in the public process to fight the logging of these older forests. They have filed lawsuits; built community outreach by organizing community forest walks; packed public meetings; filed dogged public records requests and detailed, deeply researched comments on proposed timber sales; staged protests at the DNR building; launched petitions and letter-writing campaigns; built internet-based rescue missions, illustrated with compelling photos; and made videos of older trees and forests for sale.
For DNR, the instability caused by the conflict has been challenging. It takes the agency about 18 months to prepare a forest for a proposed sale, engineering the logging roads, cruising a sale for merchantable timber, surveying the site for environmental set-asides, flagging the boundaries and surveying the roads for culverts. Those are all sunk costs DNR doesn’t get back if a sale is canceled — or even sabotaged.
