Petersburg mill wins 5-year Forest Service contract to log at Thomas Bay
- Petersburg Pilot
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Orin Pierson
Petersburg Pilot
The U.S. Forest Service has awarded an unusual timber contract to supply Petersburg’s Alaska Timber and Truss with enough logs from Thomas Bay for several years of operation, while also improving moose and deer habitat.
The stewardship project represents a significant milestone for the sawmill and the broader second-growth timber industry in Southeast Alaska. The contract encompasses 4.6 million board feet of timber spread across approximately 140 acres in six or seven units, with a contract completion deadline of 2030.
“By having this first big timber sale,” the recently revitalized sawmill has a “stable supply for the next five years — that in itself is huge,” said Brett Martin, who owns Alaska Timber and Truss in partnership with Mike Duman.
The project differs from traditional timber sales in that it combines commercial timber harvest with Forest Service stewardship work. Alaska Timber and Truss will be responsible for road improvements, habitat enhancements and fish-passage improvements as part of the timber sale.
A key element of the project focuses on restoring moose and deer habitat in Thomas Bay.
“Thomas Bay was a very productive moose hunting area, and that was largely because there were several thousand acres over there that had been clear-cut at one point,” Martin said. “You created tremendous amount of both moose browse and deer browse by having fairly low vegetation.”
The clear-cuts planned under this new contract are specifically designed to create big-game browse habitat. When managed forests are harvested, the resulting low vegetation — including species like huckleberry and other forage plants — provides food for moose and deer for one to two decades, explained Martin.
The project also includes non-commercial tree thinning adjacent to streams. This work aims to create old-growth-like forests along stream corridors.
“They are going to either girdle or fell some of the smaller trees,” Martin said. “The same trees competing for the same nutrients will only grow so big.” The purpose is to reduce standing volume so remaining trees can grow larger, eventually creating conditions to benefit salmon and other fish species.
Improvements include also culvert replacements to enhance drainage and fish passage in the area.
Alaska Timber and Truss will employ two subcontractors for the project. Rock-N-Road Construction will handle road maintenance, reconditioning and construction activities. A & E Timber Cutting out of Edna Bay will conduct the logging operations.
Alaska Timber and Truss will focus on milling the timber.
In order to manage transportation costs, Martin said, Alaska Timber and Truss plans to establish a remote milling operation in Thomas Bay to produce cants — squared or rectangular timber pieces — before transporting the pieces back to Petersburg.
At the Petersburg mill, the cants will be resawed into finished products including cabin kits, house kits, flooring, interior paneling, trim and dimensional lumber.
“Our goal is to try and hire 12 to 16 people here locally to help us mill and turn those dimensional wood products into something that has more value,” Martin said. “It could be flooring, could be trim, could be paneling, it can be all different kinds of things. It could be studs, floor joists, floor beams, rafters, all the kinds of lumber that we would typically produce in the sawmill.”
Logging operations are expected to start next May or June, depending on the Edna Bay contractor’s schedule. Fish habitat improvements, Martin expects, will start in July.
The Thomas Bay contract potentially represents even more than the next five years of work for Alaska Timber and Truss. Martin said the Forest Service is transferring the balance of its original Thomas Bay timber sale — potentially 10 million to 12 million board feet — to the state to administer.
“If the state does end up selling, my understanding is they’re going to sell as much as 12 million feet over there, so we may end up productively working over there for another five to 10 years after that as well,” Martin said.
The stands to be harvested under the Thomas Bay contract are naturally regenerated second-growth forests, primarily from clear-cutting activities in the 1960s.
The natural regeneration in Southeast Alaska includes a mix of species: Sitka spruce, western hemlock, mountain hemlock, Alaska yellow cedar, western red cedar and shore pine. When these second-growth stands were previously thinned by the Forest Service, specifications favored Sitka spruce for its commercial value.
For Martin, the Thomas Bay stewardship contract represents a turning point after recent years of operating with limited timber availability.
“You can’t supply a retailer if you don’t know you have the volume. … We were just waiting and waiting and waiting,” he said. “Now we aren’t just little micro sales, 20,000 (board) feet at a time. We have something that’s 250 times that size.”
• This story was originally published by the Petersburg Pilot.
