St. Helens, OR, December 6, 2005--Ross Bennett watched from a safe distance as his three-man crew prepared to harvest the rarest kind of wood, old-growth timber, according to the Columbian.
Working from a crane mounted atop a barge plying the Columbia River near Sauvie Island, the operator swung the boom down close to the glassy calm surface. One end of a partially submerged log bobbed at the surface.
"That's going to be a big log," Bennett said.
Bennett, guiding his own boat just off the barge's port side, watched with anticipation as the crane's mechanical claw reached into the water and grasped the log's butt end. In a deft maneuver, honed by hoisting thousands of logs in exactly this fashion, the crane operator pulled just enough so that the entire log floated free from the river's muck and bobbed on the surface. Quickly, he slipped the claw to the middle of the shaft and swung the dripping log out of the river and onto the barge deck.
Though the log turned out to be smaller than Bennett anticipated, it will easily pay its way out of the river by the time the company's sawmill cuts it into lumber.
Bennett's Underwater Timber Salvage Corp., with a dock and a small sawmill employing 10 people at the Port of St. Helens, sells directly to woodworkers and contractors who covet the tight-grained characteristic of the wood in old, slow-growing trees.
It is an increasingly rare commodity. "You can't cut down old-growth trees anymore," said Steve Strable, co-owner of the company with Bennett.
Using side-scan sonar, Bennett and Strable have glimpsed a treasure trove of logs resting like scattered toothpicks on the river's bottom. Loggers have used the river to transport logs in large floating rafts for more than a century, and Strable figures some of those rafts lost as much as 15 percent of their cargo before they got to the numerous sawmills that once lined the river.
"The number laying on the bottom is huge," he said. "There's got to be millions of trees sitting on the bottom."
Even though the men who cut some of the trees have long since died, the cold and oxygen-free environment at the river's bottom keeps the logs in near-perfect condition. Strable eschews the environmentalist label but said he prefers to pluck big trees from the river instead of cutting them in the rare old-growth forests that remain in the Northwest.
"We like to think we're going to leave something to our kids," he said.
As long as the company limits itself to salvaging logs floating in the river or sitting loosely on the bottom, Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman Diana Fredlund said Underwater Timber Salvage doesn't need a permit. The corps doesn't want the company muddying the river by pulling logs out of the river's bank or bottom, she said.
"Once it's imbedded, then we have issues," Fredlund said.
From the U.S. Coast Guard's point of view, the company is performing a useful service by removing navigation hazards from the Columbia.
"Oftentimes when there's a log floating downriver, we'll tell them where it's located and they'll go out and pick it up for us," said Lt. Shadrack Scheirman, chief of port operations for the Coast Guard in Portland.
Strable pointed to parallel 4 1/2-inch-thick divots gouged out of a sun-bleached slab, a telltale sign of the log being whacked repeatedly by a large propeller.
"This is what happens when a very large ship hits a log," he said.
Strable, a former warehouse and distribution manager who met Bennett eight years ago while both managed area marinas, said they have invested close to $1 million in research and equipment since starting the business in April 2004. The company expects to turn a profit by the start of the year, Strable said, although he leaves the impression that the endeavor is as much a passion as it is a vocation.
