New Sawmill to Help Residents in the Path of the Dixie Fire Rebuild and Recover

Last summer, Indian Valley and the towns of Greenville, Taylorsville, and Crescent Mills were right in the middle of the largest single-source fires and one of the most destructive blazes in California’s history. The Dixie Fire ran flames up and down the surrounding hills and pushed, at times, onto the valley floor.

When the Dixie Fire’s flames finally subsided, most of Greenville had burned to the ground. Dozens of homes were lost in nearby Indian Falls and Canyon Dam, as well. The surrounding mountains were transformed from green to black, with tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of trees killed by high-severity fire.

The Dixie Fire chaos has linked together two Indian Valley organizations, the non-profit Sierra Institute for Community and the Environment and J&C Enterprises, a 4th generation timber harvesting company. Between the two of them, they have the right combination of knowledge, experience, and resources to quickly set up a new sawmill in Crescent Mills. And both saw this venture as an opportunity to do something to help their community recover and support long-term restoration efforts.

Recognizing the project’s potential and the community’s needs, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) worked with the Sierra Institute to slightly modify grant agreements and make available the $360,000 necessary to get a mill up and running quickly.

Purchasing a new mill would take too long to meet Indian Valley’s immediate needs. Instead, the partnership is piecing together a “new” mill by hunting down, buying, and assembling used equipment. Machinery was purchased used from as far away as Tennessee and Kentucky, while other components were bought new or fabricated locally. More parts have been ordered but remain mired in supply-chain backlogs, preventing the operation from running at full capacity.

When the new sawmill is finished, it will be able to create up to 5 million board feet of lumber per year, roughly five truckloads of logs per day. It’s a relatively modest output; the nearby Chester Sawmill owned by Collins Pine Company has an annual capacity of 120 million board feet. However, the new mill is not looking to compete with industrial-timber operations. Instead, the mill looks to fill important gaps in local wood-processing infrastructure. Over the next few years, that means providing small local landowners a way to turn thousands of burned hazard trees into low-cost construction materials to help the community rebuild.

Beyond hazard-tree removal, sawmill operators hope to provide a market for restoration byproducts, like smaller diameter trees, created by forest-health work in the area’s remaining overgrown forests. Long term, the Sierra Institute also hopes the mill can anchor its vision for a diversified wood-products campus in Crescent Mills that would feature even more innovative wood-utilization strategies — like cross-laminated timber production.