Blazzard runs a sawmill with his brother in Kamas, along the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest boundary and at the gateway to the Uinta Mountains. He looks like a logger. He’s tall and brawny, and his skin is dark from many days spent in the sun. He chews a wood sliver as he speaks. His family has been involved in the local timber industry since Kamas was settled. Given the surrounding woodlands, it seems like an ideal location to base a sawing operation.

Since the bark beetle epidemic flared up, Blazzard has instead watched mills in his surrounding community shut down their saws and sell their land. Timber harvesting in Utah and throughout the West is a more complicated industry than it might seem, even when surrounded by an expanse of dead wood.

“The public, after they’ve seen the trees die, they’re saying, ‘why doesn’t the Forest Service do something about it?’” Blazzard said. “For a lot of years it was, ’we don’t want to cut all these trees, we don’t want to devastate the forest’ … but we’re one of the tools the Forest Service should be using to keep the forests healthy.”

Supply and demand

The U.S. Forest Service awarded the Blazzards their most recent timber sale on the Heber-Kamas Ranger District, called the “Cold Springs Timber Sale,” an 875-acre site about 23 miles east of Heber City. It’s a salvage sale meant to remove spruce and pine heavily impacted by beetles, before the economic value for the timber is entirely lost.

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