No Bids Received On Burned Timber

Burned timber in the Wenatchee National Forest is finally up for sale, but no one seems to want it.

Prospective buyers say 130 million board feet of timber burned by last summer’s wildfires may go unsalvaged because it took too long to get to market and has spoiled.

Although most of the burned trees on state and privately owned land have already been logged, the U.S. Forest Service put its first salvage timber up for sale only last week, a full year after the Tyee Creek Fire.

And no one bid on it.

“That’s been a concern of industry all along - that the Forest Service would not get the wood up before it went bad,” said Ron Simon, local manager for Longview Fibre Co. “And an awful lot of this wood is spoiled.”

But the Forest Service says the salvage timber sale was only the first of about 10 sales, worth a total of about $16 million, covering some 140,000 acres.

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