Race Against Insects

Ten years ago a $350,000,000 forest fire swept over 250,000 acres of Oregon's finest stand of Douglas fir and hemlock. It ravaged more standing timber (mostly in Tillamook County) than the entire U.S. consumed in 1933. Last week logging crews (called "Tillamook minstrels"--the charred bark makes them look like a blackface act) were still carrying on their ten-year race to salvage the billions of board feet of timber (see cut) not yet ruined by the insects that always move in after a big burn.

Consolidated Timber Co., a cooperative formed by the owners of Tillamook, started this frantic race with the insects before the embers had cooled, poured more than $3,500,000 into building logging railroads, highways and lumberjack camps. By the end of last year they had salvaged 3.5 billion feet (Tillamook timber built most of the new West Coast shipyards).

This year, with operations stepped up still further, Consolidated Timber hopes to take out more than a billion feet--one-sixth of the U.S. 1942 lumber "deficit." By 1945, when lumbermen expect that the bugs will have taken over what remains of the old stand, Consolidated's nursery at Nisqually, Wash, (which turns out 10,000,000 seedlings a year) should be well on the way to reforesting Tillamook.

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