Montana Company Turns Larch into Fine Hardwood Flo
Missoula, MT, December 20--At a house under construction in the Rattlesnake Valley, Mike Wood of North Slope Sustainable Wood LLC tapped a section of unfinished larch floor with the toe of his boot, according to the Missoulian.
"See that speckled look?" Wood asked. The guys installing the floor had paused for a few moments. Even unpolished, the buttery wood had a dappled appearance from hundreds of tiny knots.
"We've had the knots tested. They don't pop out like larger ones will," he said.
Then he leaned over and brushed the floor clean to illustrate the tightness of the grain. Larch, also known as tamarack, is among the hardest of the soft woods.
And this larch is harder than most because it came from a thick stand of "dog-hair" timber that suppressed its growth, Wood said. It's easy to see the result. The growth rings are tiny and jammed together.
"That's why it's so good for flooring. That suppressed growth makes it act like a harder wood," said Matt Arno, another North Slope partner.
Larch as flooring material may prove a breakthrough in western Montana's wood products industry, local and national experts say.
"For the last 20 years the forest products industry has been figuring out how to do more with less. Crisis has been the mother of invention," said Shawn Church, editor of the Eugene, Ore.-based forest industry journal Random Lengths.
In this case the innovation - and the reason North Slope was founded by four Missoula men - involves the floor's origin.
The larch being installed for the floor came from so-called "waste wood" that was thinned from Ninemile Valley forests by Arno.
In the eyes of most foresters and timber workers, the thick growth that plagues Western forests is simply a fire hazard and a nuisance. Generally, thinning projects yield skinny logs that are processed into pulp or cut into studs and shipped into the worldwide commodity market.
"Not to downplay studs. Both are necessary, but it's a good thing to find the highest value for the fiber," Church said.
The U.S. Forest Service and other agencies that manage public forests think so, too. In recent years, they have increased efforts to clear fire-prone thickets from Western forests, and have encouraged entrepreneurs and others to search for profitable uses for logs with diameters as small as 4 inches.
That's why in November the Forest Service gave a national award to the Montana Community Development Corp. for its role in fostering North Slope Sustainable Wood and other innovative projects in the area.
Other companies have used round wood to make building trusses as well as new kinds of composite boards. At least one other company, Jefferson State Forest Products in Hayfork, Calif., makes flooring material from round wood; that company uses Douglas fir.
"There's not been a use of western larch like this before. Flooring is one of the highest value-added products coming out of the thinning projects of small-diameter timber, round wood, whatever you want to call it," said Jean Livingston, a spokeswoman for the federal government's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis.
Missoula is about the best place to find uses for larch. The town is in the heart of larch country. The larch, the only conifer whose needles drop every fall, prefers moist north-facing slopes.
The key to Livingston's interest is the "value-add," a term that refers to the labor that goes into the raw material, turning it into a more valuable product.
The larch flooring and all of its added value is possible because of significant collaboration.
"What we are learning is that 'small diameter utilization' is a problem whose solution is spread out along the whole timber value chain. It won't be solved by the small producers or the big mills alone," wrote MCDC director Rosalie Cates in an e-mail.
