Restructuring the Forest Floor

Tricon Timber, Inc. finds a way to turn small diameter wood into tongue-and-groove flooring

By Barbara Coyner

When Christy Hollenback hands out her business card, it doesn’t always fit in a wallet. That’s because the Tricon Timber sales representative sometimes shares a handsome chunk of stained tongueand- groove western larch flooring with the company’s address and phone number inscribed on it. The St. Regis, Mont.-based lumber mill recently began churning out the blanks for flooring as a value-added angle. With wood floors all the rage in decorating circles, and packs of laminated flooring flying off the shelves at big box stores, Tricon seems to be on to something. “So far marketing has been mostly word of mouth,” says Hollenback, who’s been with Tricon for over a decade. “Passing out the samples has really helped spread the word.” Staving Off Fire with Flooring Western larch boasts a tight grain and small knots similar to old-growth wood, making it good for flooring. The honey grain holds paint and stain well, and the wood has exceptional durability and strength. Plus, the wood is harvested from overgrown forests so it aids in reducing wildfire potential. With over 50 log home manufacturers in the nearby Bitterroot Valley alone, the attractive and durable western larch floor could have huge market potential just miles down the road. Hollenback and assistant plant manager Angelo Ververis point out that the planets practically had to be in perfect alignment to get the larch flooring from concept to actual product. Craig Rawlings, Smallwood Enterprise Agent for the Montana Community Development Corporation, did much of the coordination after connecting key players. The ball got rolling as Ken Verley, co-owner of Tricon, attended one of Rawlings’s smallwood seminars in 2003.

Value-Added Product
Ken pondered the idea of flooring as a possible value-added product for his mill, contacted the Forest Service’s regional wood products guru, Dean Graham, then invited Hollenback and Ververis into the mix. The markets of course are often the biggest hurdle, but enter Peter Stark, an outdoor writer from Missoula who had recently thinned 80 acres from his property, and didn’t want the wood to just take a ride to any old mill. He too focused on flooring, enlisted restoration forester Matt Arno, installer Shannon O’Keefe and lawyer Mike Wood, and looked into “green-certified” larch flooring. Amill at Dillon, Mont. did the early cutting for Stark and his associates, but Rawlings again waved his magic wand to find a closer location, and Tricon appeared as the logical choice. Meanwhile, in 2004, Stark formed Northslope Sustainable Woods with his associates, turning to Tricon for wood and processing needs. Tricon, on its own quest, is now exploring various other options in flooring, as well. At present, the mill cranks out the larch blanks, and sends the kiln-dried stock to Buckeye Hardwoods in Arlee, Mont. for tongue-and-groove work. “We’re still small right now and don’t have enough product for the orders coming in,” says Hollenback. “This is just a supplement at our mill, but it’s increasing our bottom line. We’re working with Northslope as our contact on the flooring. Peter Stark originally put some down in his wife’s dance studio, liked it and approached us. He also wanted a chain-of-custody for his wood when he came to us, so that’s how things got going.”

Positive Impacts from Chain-of-Custody
Ververis says the chain-of-custody feature, favored by sustainable advocates, gets a lot of attention at Tricon in the name of working with people to form new alliances. With many area forests risking wildfire because of dense stands, the time seems right for various sides to band together to thin forests carefully, especially in the urban interface. Even better, if all sides work together, new uses for all the material emerge. That’s the name of the game at Tricon these days, and everyone appears pleased it’s working so well. As timber funnels into the mill at St. Regis from a radius of up to 150 miles, Ververis explains that the promising small-diameter larch is pulled and the flooring is run in separate batches. Because he has some of the solid wood flooring in his own home, he has an eye for the good stuff when it comes to raw material.

Kiln is Key
So far, one of the keys to producing successful blanks rests largely with the newly installed kiln, designed by Irvington Moore, which has a mister in it. Kiln manager Jim Lommen, a 13-year veteran at Tricon, says the mister acts as an equalizer, tempering moisture content. “With the new kiln, we have the capabilities for better quality wood, but we’re still on a real learning curve,” says Lommen. “The unit has manual controls and we pick the setting, and set for a certain species. The mister system is experimental and none of us had ever been involved with this kind of system before. The fans are different and are mounted on a common shaft. We’ve really had to start from scratch and talk to a lot of people and tweak things from there. On every charge, we do a green check on fresh cut out of the mill before we push it in. This helps with the basis when we want to stop drying and check the kiln. We’ll undershoot the time and temperature to find out where we’re at and that helps us. It’s at least an 80-hour process for flooring, and we do the slow process to avoid splits.”

Focus on Small Logs
For Tricon, being progressive is nothing new, and Ververis said the mill itself was built in 1990 to handle small logs, because the mill nearby at Superior wasn’t equipped for anything but large logs. “This was a new location for a lot of used equipment,” says Ververis, also putting in a good word for the reliable work force. “The mill is a product of creative engineering, and the sharp chain line handles the small logs very well.” With a payroll of 95, Tricon is the largest employer in Mineral County, a traditional timber area. The mill gathers its timber resources from a generous wood basket that breaks down to 30 percent Forest Service, 23 percent state, 3 percent Bureau of Indian Affairs, 12 percent industrial, and 33 percent private ground. With a new track-mounted Vermeer grinder out working in the woods, Ververis says the company has at last achieved 100 percent utilization. “We think pretty progressively around here,” he adds. As a company motto announces in the main office, “Our lumber is framing the future,” to which one might add, “Putting a floor under it, too.”

TW

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