MPR: The Timber Treasure Hunt

The Timber Treasure Hunt
By Leif Enger
July 7, 2000

Old-growth timber is making a comeback. Not just as an environmental issue this time, but as wood; as polished floors and cathedral ceilings. The timber-salvage industry has taken off in Minnesota. It is saving old beams from condemned warehouses, pulling old logs from lake bottoms, and spicing up new architecture with antique woods.

The market for reclaimed wood is quite new; 15 years ago, demolition contractors would give old timbers to anyone who'd haul them away. But in the early '90s, a few high-profile projects were designed to display the strength and beauty of reclaimed timbers. Since then, demand has exploded. See more images.

PICTURE A TREE, a Douglas fir, 200-years old, trunk four feet across, cut down near Spokane a century ago by two men with a double-end saw. Dragged through the boreal mists by a team of horses, milled into square timber, the Douglas fir became a railroad trestle leg, or a beam holding up a factory roof.

Peter Krieger's job is to find these venerable sticks before they're lost, demolished or sold to his competition.

"You have to walk in, you have to look past the pigeons, look past the scrap metal that's been stored here for 60 years, and say, 'There's a 12-by-16 timber that's 30-feet long, and if I give you X dollars for it, I can sell it for X plus two,'" says Krieger.

Krieger, a self-described refugee from the suburban march of quick commercial housing, runs Duluth Timber. The warehouse and yard are stacked with posts and beams, whose size and tight grain reveal their age. This is the harvest of the industrial forest. It's a re-use of history, Krieger says; it's an enormous business.

"There's a certain cache that goes with recycled anything, with a certain section of the market. It feels good. They have the resources to spend - the product costs three or four times as much as green timber out of the forest - but they're in a position where they don't want to go cut down a big tree to make a 30-foot timber. Since there's an alternative, and they can afford it, they'd rather recycle the timber."

The market for reclaimed wood is quite new; 15 years ago, demolition contractors would give old timbers to anyone who'd haul them away. But in the early '90s, a few high-profile projects - including Bill Gates's home in Seattle - were designed to display the strength and beauty of reclaimed timbers. Since then, demand has exploded. You can't get such logs new, after all. They're only available from history.

Akeley, Minnesota, was busier in 1880 than it's ever been since. Mature pines and hardwoods now rim this lake nearby, but in those days, says Craig Waddell, "the water wore a rough dance-floor of floating logs."

"You go to just about any of the history books, and they've got Akeley in there. They got pictures of wood stacked all the way to town. You could see to town and back," says Waddell. "You had a massive train system in here, three spur lines and a main line. That's a lot of board footage."

It's estimated that 10 percent of logs, which began the float to market on lakes and rivers, sank; which is why Waddell, and his assistant Chris Hinton, are patrolling on a home-built pontoon boat up and down this particular lake.

The pontoon drags a sonar device that transmits a scrolling photograph of a wide stretch of lake-bottom. The device resembles a torpedo, but is called a Fish. The Fish, once used to seek out mines in the waters around the Middle East, is worth its ample price today. Chris Hinton points to how it's exposing clumps of massive logs far below the lake surface.

Waddell and his assistant patrol lakes on a home-built pontoon, looking for signs of sunken timber.
Photo: Leif Enger

"We just ran over a pretty decent concentration of wood," Hinton explains. "Looks like, 75 meters square. We're probably looking at 100, maybe 200 hits here."

Reclaiming sunken timber is nothing new in Minnesota. Between 1920 and World War II, many local sawmills subsisted on logs pulled from the shallows. Only recently has it become practical to locate and raise the deep timber, and the state Legislature this year passed a law allowing recovery. Once again, there is a supply of virgin timber.

So who's using the new, old wood? Restaurants and retailers, looking for a certain atmosphere; builders of furniture, cabinets, musical instruments; and, increasingly, homeowners.

Paul Larson is a member of the Duluth-based Builders' Commonwealth, which is nearly finished with a client's new home near Willow River. The wood for the open-beamed ceiling, floors, trim, and soffits is all reclaimed. The timbers, made of Douglas fir, are the color of sunsets.

"The outside weathers, and it checks, and it falls apart," he says. "But you run it through some planers, and mill it, work it with your hands, and next thing you know, you've got a new tree again, a hundred years later. It's sweet. There's no other words for it, it's just sweet."

While Larson enjoys working with reclaimed wood, he says the expense will keep most new-home builders shopping at Menards. The price, after all, obeys the laws of supply and demand. These new supplies, the industrial forest, the sunken forest - are not the renewable kind.

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