Who says money don't grow on trees?
By Andrew Smith

I've been marking some timber recently, down near Custer. It's great to walk through the stands of tall, silent trees in this season of moss, and mud and fickle spring snow. This is the time of year when moss is in all it's miniature green glory, glowing like emeralds on rocky outcrops and peeping out from beneath stale winter snowbanks. Spring is here, barely, and summer is on it's way. By the time summer gets here the moss will be turning dull again, and ready to hibernate through the months of long dry heat. But now it's about as green as green can get.

I like to walk through the timber stands and study their structure, and how the forest grows. The forest is not just a giant handful of trees and brush, flung haphazardly across across the mountains in a chaotic, meaningless arrangement. It came to be through an orderly, if untamed, process. And there is a cause, and a story, behind every grey, time-gnawed stump.

The forest constantly replaces and renews itself. Where it gets it's inexhaustible vitality, it's ceaseless wooden sinews, I don't know. But it is ever changing, ever growing; ever dying and being born again.
We take advantage of it's awesome power, cutting it's pungent timber, and watching with amazement as it grows anew.

Walking through the timber stands, marking them to cut, I like to look at each tree as if it were a financial investment. Indeed, managing a forest wisely is a lot like managing a stock portfolio. You want to buy into stocks that are growing, and cash in those that have stopped increasing in value, or even started to lose value. And you've got to stay in for the long haul. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that whoever first said, "money doesn't grow on trees," simply wasn't paying attention.

The forest where I'm working is composed of several layers. The tallest layer is scattered, large, 200-300 year old pine. These trees are 70 to 80 feet tall and 20-30 inches in diameter. They are weak, and many of them are beginning to die. There are not very many of them, because a fire many years ago killed most of that original stand. These are the survivors.

Below these older trees is a dense layer of younger timber. These trees seeded in after the fire, and most of them are 80 to 125 years old. They are seven to twelve inches in diameter, and 50 or 60 feet tall. They were thinned when the area was last logged, about 25 years ago, but are still quite dense. In areas where logging opened the forest substantially, re-seeding has ocurred, and there are now seedlings, saplings, and small trees.

The younger timber is our most productive investment, and that is mostly what I am marking. Each tree I mark is our stake in the forest of tomorrow. Is it straight? Is it strong? Will it grow quickly and produce valuable wood, or not?

A healthy 30 year old pine in the Black Hills may increase it's diameter as much as four inches in a decade. This is a substantial increase in value. A Black Hills ponderosa pine will grow quickly, hence increase in value quickly, from the time it's about 15 years old until it's between 100 and 125 years of age.
After about 125 years, the tree begins to slow down. Rather than putting on four inches of diameter in a decade, the tree will likely only put on an inch, or less.

And as the tree gets older, it's growth continues to slow down. A 300 year old tree will typically increase it's diameter only about two inches a century. In addition, older trees become very susceptible to rot and insects, which can destroy their commercial value entirely. In the Hills I'd estimate that about 70% of the trees 300 years old or older are rotten in the center.

Rotten in the center is good for squirrel nests, but bad as far as economics go. Some of us want old-growth, and some of us want timber. There's a trade-off in there somewhere that we have to hit. To manage the forest solely for financial gain results in something that is not even a forest any more. The wildness and beauty are gone. On the other hand, to manage the forest to get the maximum amount of rotten trees is just plain wasteful. Trees produce a wonderful and beautiful product called wood. And we'd be ungrateful fools not to make use of it.

It's always surprised me when environmental groups attack the Forest Service for losing money on timber sales. I don't know if the Forest service loses money or not, but I'm surprised it's considered a relevant issue. The Forest Service strives to achieve many different goals in the forest, and many of those goals are financially counter productive, though valuable in other ways.

For instance, what's the value of an open road through the woods? And if you take this road, and camp with your family in some lonely spot, far from a crowded campground, what's the value of the sunrise you will see? Or the trout you may catch? There may be elk in a meadow there, and the meadow habitat may have been purposely created during a timber sale in the hopes that elk would graze there. But if it cost the Forest Service more to create that meadow than the value of the wood they took off it, surely that doesn't make those elk worthless? So, was it a good investment?

I amble through the woods, looking at the forest before me, trying to see the forest of the future. This tree will grow into a giant slingshot. This one into a bow. And this one into a stout log. Which one should I leave?

Anyway, that's this weeks stock market report. Always remember to buy low and sell high. And take a walk out in the woods now and again. Be sure to stop and look at the moss. It's green as green can be.