Irishman
Well-known member
I spent several days exploring parts of the Bitterroot last week. I was really impressed with what I saw of the forest there. It was more like the FWP job that you showed above. Nothing at all like I would see on land that Plumcreek harvested.
Like I said on another thread, I worked for Plumcreek for 27 years, and managed sawmills for 15 years. It was a good company to work for, for the most part, but they never had a long term plan for running mills. Their one objective was to make as much money as quickly as possible, by cutting all of their logs and processing them as fast as possible. I actually managed a mill in Lincoln County for them. We pretty much out competed the other mills in the county, caused them to shut down, then shut down Plumcreek's mill there also as company log supply started to run out. Sure the forest service was held up some by the litigation from so called environmentalists, who are really just anti business, but the biggest problem with timber harvest and mills shutting down was the big timber companies greed.
The only thing that the CEO of Plumcreek cared about was getting his $10 million bonus each year, and the way to do that was to run the mills as fast as possible to meet cash flow targets. They did this until they ran out of logs, then they shut most of their mills down, and blamed the forest service for not harvesting enough. The CEO then sold out Plumcreek to Weyerhauser, getting himself a big pay off, and a place on the Weyerhaeuser Board of Directors and a big fat check each year for doing nothing. You could definitely question his ethics, but you can't accuse him of being stupid.
Like I said on another thread, I worked for Plumcreek for 27 years, and managed sawmills for 15 years. It was a good company to work for, for the most part, but they never had a long term plan for running mills. Their one objective was to make as much money as quickly as possible, by cutting all of their logs and processing them as fast as possible. I actually managed a mill in Lincoln County for them. We pretty much out competed the other mills in the county, caused them to shut down, then shut down Plumcreek's mill there also as company log supply started to run out. Sure the forest service was held up some by the litigation from so called environmentalists, who are really just anti business, but the biggest problem with timber harvest and mills shutting down was the big timber companies greed.
The only thing that the CEO of Plumcreek cared about was getting his $10 million bonus each year, and the way to do that was to run the mills as fast as possible to meet cash flow targets. They did this until they ran out of logs, then they shut most of their mills down, and blamed the forest service for not harvesting enough. The CEO then sold out Plumcreek to Weyerhauser, getting himself a big pay off, and a place on the Weyerhaeuser Board of Directors and a big fat check each year for doing nothing. You could definitely question his ethics, but you can't accuse him of being stupid.
