Friday Morning:
After a breakfast sponsored by Western Timber Products, Friday morning was our opportunity to tour the facilities of the Potlatch Complex in Lewiston. We toured their consumer products division where paper products you see in stores come from, and Potlatch's tree nursery where trees are grown to replenish their plantation forests. After that trekked out East to the Clearwater National Forest to view how national forests are managed. Lunch was in Big Eddy State Park below the Dworshak Dam.
Complex
We visited the Potlatch complex in Lewiston, Idaho which combines a sawmill, paper mill, cogeneration and a tree nursery. The facility employs approximately 2,200 people. Chips from the sawmill are pulped to make paper and the waste is burned to generate steam and electricity. About 70% of Potlatch's energy is generated on-site. It was a perfect place to see complete utilization of the forest resources.
Sawmill
The Lewiston sawmill produces approximately 160 million board feet of lumber annually - enough to build about 10,000 homes. Production is primarily white fir and western red cedar. Only one species is processed at a time.
^ Top Pulp & Paper Group
We viewed Potlatch's chip yard where chips for pulping are stored adjacent to bales of rejects from Potlatch's Las Vegas plant. These chips, paper rejects, and sawdust are all combined into pulp to make Potlatch paper products. Inside, we saw one of Potlatch's huge paper machine producing paper for their consumer products at a rate of a mile of paper a minute.
Potlatch pioneered the use of lumber and plywood residues to manufacture bleached paperboard starting in 1950. The Lewiston facility uses approximately 225 truckloads per day of sawmill waste and by-products.
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On our tour of Potlatch's Consumer Products Division we saw how paper was converted from parent rolls off the paper machine into the various consumer products that Potlatch produces including; paper towels and bathroom and facial tissues. Among the processes we saw were how designs were printed onto paper towels using large 4-color presses and how bathroom tissue is quilted on winders and wound onto cores before being accumulated into packages for shipping and sale. In the testing labs we saw examples of the many common consumer products that Potlatch produces and how they test for quality standards in all their products.
Potlatch's Consumer Products Division began its operations in the 1960's. It is the Western United States' largest producer of private label tissue products and provides 40 percent of all private label tissue in the West. The Consumer Products Division alone produces 1,300,000 cases of tissue products each month, including bathroom tissue, facial tissue, household towels, and napkins.
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Nursery
Abbie Acuff was our host throughout Potlatch's nursery facility. Built in 1976, the nursery grows one crop of trees per year (about 3 million trees) to replenish trees cut in Potlatch's plantation. Seeds are gathered from seed trees on the plantations and sown in the nursery where they are cared for under Abbie's hand. The resulting seedlings are planted in the same area from which the seeds were taken.
Potlatch grows eight species of trees at its Lewiston, Idaho nursery: Douglas Fir, White Pine, Ponderosa Pine, Lodgepole Pine, Western Hemlock, Western Red Cedar, Western Larch, and Grand Fir. It grows about 300,000 trees of each species annually.
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Clearwater National Forest
The Clearwater National Forest is 1.8 million acres in size. It has 30.5 billion board feet of timber, enough to built 3 million three bedroom homes. There are 323 million tons of fuel on the forest (fuel loading). Each of the Nation's 155 National Forests are run by a Forest Supervisor. The Supervisor's Office for the Clearwater National Forest is in Orofino, Idaho. Each forest is further divided into Ranger Districts.
In 1914, the forest had 34.5% white pine and 20.3% Douglas/grand fir compared to 2000, the forest has 0.9% white pine and 39.9% Douglas/grand fir. There are 4000 miles of system (permanent) roads on the forest.
^ TopLunch
Friday's lunch, sponsored by the Associated Logging Contractors, was near Dworshak Dam at the Big Eddy lodge and marina in Dworshak State Park.
Lunch was catered by Country Caterers and included an overview of the US Army Corps of Engineer's wildlife and forest management activities in the area. The Corps were responsible for building Dworshak dam in 1973 creating the 53-mile reservoir that offers opportunities for camping, boating, fishing, picnicking and sightseeing. The US Army Corps of Engineers manages a 33,000 acre forest around the lake.
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