Oregon Public Broadcasting

I'm Ethan Lindsey in the Fremont National Forest outside Lakeview.

The forests in the southeastern part of Oregon look a little different than those west of the Cascades.

Looking at a hillside in the distance, almost as many trees appear red as do green. The red and orange needles show just how unhealthy the forest really is.

Paul Harlan: “The dark red trees are lodge pole that are dead. The orange trees that you see, those are all old-growth ponderosa pine trees that the Mountain Pine Beetle - at the epidemic level - has killed as well.”

Paul Harlan is a vice president with the Collins Companies, which has been cutting and sawing trees in Lake County since the 1940s. He says there are just too many uncut trees nowadays.

Paul Harlan: “They're too thick, the stands are stressed, and basically all the trees aren't able to resist the insect infestations, and it just creates a firestorm of bug activites.”

Harlan says because the east side gets so much less rainfall, the trees are fighting for every single drop of moisture. When trees don't get enough water, they are susceptible to disease - or in this case, bug bore holes that look a lot like freckles.

Paul Harlan: “There's another one, in the back, with bugs hits. Its green, but its got bug hits all the way up - its dead, it just doesn't know it yet.”

And a dead tree is darn good firewood.

Paul Harlan: “Basically, the material has been dried down, its dead, the needles are red. In the next couple of years, that stuff is going to fall down and make a literal mat of logs and firewood. Conditions would be absolutely ripe for a fire that would really move through this.”

In the past quarter-century, foresters have moved towards the idea that wildfire risks can be reduced by thinning and good forest stewardship.

But in years past, thinning was a bad investment for timber companies. A smaller tree means less wood, means less money.

Until last year, Collins Companies' Lakeview Sawmill couldn't even process those small logs.

But after an almost $7 million investment, the mill now boasts a laser-imaging saw that can cut 3, 4, sometimes 5 sellable pieces of wood out of a small diameter tree.

Paul Harlan: “Basically, we're talking out all the small trees and protecting the medium and larger sized trees. And that's the prescription to lessen the risk of a catastrophic fire coming through here."

In fact, Harlan's company just received a lucrative U.S. Forest Service contract to thin local forests.

The Lakeview mill still processes larger, old-growth timber.

But Harlan says with the small diameter saw, a forest management middle ground is possible.