Kohli Plants A Legacy Timber Spokesman Remembered As Energetic, Man Of Action

Ken Kohli was Mr. Timber.

And so it was natural that each of the more than 300 people who attended his eulogy Monday received a white pine seedling - drawn from a brown, waxed cardboard box with the markings of Potlatch Corp. - “to plant some quiet place in the woods in Idaho.”

Those were Kohli’s words. It was one of his final requests.

Kohli, chief spokesman for Intermountain Forest Industry Association, along with IFIA biologist Seth Diamond, were killed in a small plane accident Friday morning near Troy, Mont. Pilot Al Hall, of Hayden Lake, also was killed when the Piper Cherokee crashed into the west slope of the Cabinet Mountains.

Kohli, 35, was photographing timber stands at the time of his death. Kohli is survived by his wife, Susan, and children Kyle, 8, Lauren, 6, and Luke, 6 months.

Mourners’ automobiles filled the massive parking lots at Coeur d’Alene Bible Church and spilled over into the parking lot at Coeur d’Alene High School, where Kohli earned his diploma in 1979.

A photograph of a mountain stream Kohli had taken graced the funeral program.

A video compilation of photographs of him and photographs he had taken came early in the service. It took him from the black-and-white prints of babyhood to the color snapshot of a grinning bow-tied boy, and on to skier, fisherman, sailor.

The video included the Idaho Forest Products Industry commercial he conceived and that is currently running during the broadcast of the Olympic games. There were shots of him at Little League with a son, a shot of him golfing with a baby in a nearby child carrier.

Laughter punctuated the somber setting several times. Joe Hinson, executive vice president of IFIA, set that tone.

“There ought to be a whole book of Ken stories,” Hinson said. The one about him working on a fly rod all winter only to break it on the first fishing trip of the summer. The one about him riding his mountain bike into the middle of an elk herd without realizing it because his cap was over his eyes.

Kohli also was described as a perfectionist, a go-to guy, a man who didn’t go to work for the timber industry, but adopted it. His classmates from Colorado College, where Kohli earned a bachelor’s degree, are planting a tree with a plaque in Colorado Springs in his memory.

Although Kohli was born in Spokane, he was one of Coeur d’Alene’s native sons. His greatgrandfather homesteaded in the Coeur d’Alene area.

He and his wife returned to the area in the mid-1980s and he went to work for IFIA in 1991.

“He was energetic and adventurous,” Pastor Ashley Day told mourners. “He had strong views on every subject.

“He made no claim to be a super saint,” Day said. “But he was a believer.”

, DataTimes