TOK, Alaska – Despite having vast forest resources, Alaska has only a very small handful of sawmills in the interior region – a number that, at least in part, reflects how difficult it is to operate a business given the challenges that come with the state’s harsh climate.

Young’s Timber is one of only three sawmill businesses in the interior. It is an intergenerational enterprise, and owner Joe Young takes an innovative, holistic approach to his forest products business.

The company is located in southeast interior Alaska, just outside the small town of Tok, about 203 miles southeast of Fairbanks. The mill operations and log yard are situated on a 300-acre site.

Young, 73, started the company in 1993 with just a chainsaw, a pickup truck, a trailer, and a shovel; he sold firewood. Previously he worked for 20 years out of the International Union of Operating Engineers. He helped build the Haul Road, officially known as the Dalton Highway. Over 400 miles, it connects Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s northern coast. The route is known for its remote and challenging driving conditions, including gravel surfaces and limited services.

“Over the years, we built up the sawmill operation with a lot of help from people,” said Young.

The company still sells firewood, but its main products now are dimension lumber, timbers, and cabin kits. The company supplies lumber products to individual customers, oil companies, mining companies, a grocery store chain, the Tetlin Village Council, and various nonprofits. Young’s Timber has annual sales in excess of $2 million. Young recently built a shed to air-dry lumber products and protect them from the sun and rain.

The company has 10 employees, including two family members. Beside the sawmill operations, the company performs its own logging work and also assembles cabin kits for sale.

Young buys timber from the Alaska Division of Forestry, timber sales on the nearby 1.8 million acre Tanana Valley State Forest, which is forested mostly with paper birch, quaking aspen, balsam poplar, black spruce, white spruce, and tamarack. Young mainly buys tracts of white spruce.

“If you have a value-added or high value-added manufacturing wood plant established, then you can negotiate with the Alaska Division of Forestry for 5- to 25-year timber sales,” explained Young, who has purchased 35 sales.

The terrain in the region is mostly flat along the river bottoms. There is good timber on the south-facing slopes of the hills. “White spruce only grows on well-drained soils that face the south for the spring sun,” said Young. “Soil temperature is critical for white spruce.”

The workhorse of the sawmill is a Helle overhead end-dogging scragg mill that can take logs up to 16 feet. It is equipped with twin circular saws that open two faces of the log; the end-dogging carriage system turns the two-sided cant 90 degrees and sends it through for another pass to finish squaring the log into a cant.

Young did considerable research of sawmill equipment, reading and comparing information available on the Internet. “After doing a lot of research for the size timber in the boreal forest, the Helle mill of all the mills researched was the best fit,” he said.

Helle is a brand of Sawmill Hydraulics, an Illinois-based company that manufactures a wide range of sawmill equipment, including scragg mills, carriages and carriage drives, vertical edgers, band resaws, double-end trimmers, and more, including material handling equipment.

Young’s Timber also is equipped with a Pendu 4500 gang saw that is used to resaw the cants into various lumber products. He selected the Pendu gang resaw “as it had the tooling and best fit the product needs for Alaskans.”

“Before we were just doing rough cut D-logs for cabins,” said Young. “Once we got the Pendu gang, we could produce both 8-inch and 6-inch D-logs that are surfaced on all four sides and have the v notch for the insulation.”

A D-log has a profile like the letter D, a round surface on one side and a flat face on the other. They are used in log cabin construction, with the round side on the exterior and the flat side on the interior.

The cants make one pass through the Pendu gang to shape it into a D-log or to make other lumber products. The Pendu also enables the company to produce 2×6, 2×8, log home siding, and tongue and groove boards. The company’s leading-selling product is 2×6 lumber.

Pendu, which supplies all the tooling for the different shaping cuts, is another well-known brand in the sawmill and pallet industry. Based in Pennsylvania, it manufactures equipment for producing lumber, pallet stock, log home components, stakes, railroad ties, and bridge timbers.

The company also has a Wood-Mizer LT40 portable band mill that is used for cutting material for cabin kits. It primarily mills 8-32-foot timbers used for the base of the cabins.

Because of Alaska’s harsh temperatures and limited daylight – five hours – during the winter, the company essentially shuts down for most of November, December, and January. For now, the Wood-Mizer and Pendu are stored under heavy tarps, but Young has plans to put them under roof in the future.

Even during the fall and spring months temperatures may be freezing, so the equipment needs appropriate care. The hydraulics on both the Helle and Pendu have heaters. When operating the Helle in temperatures down to 10 degrees, the belts must be heated prior to milling. The Pendu is not operated if temperatures are freezing. Additionally, the company follows a strict maintenance schedule for the equipment. Young praised both Helle and Pendu for being responsive when ordering parts.

Young’s Timber has a logging crew. They are harvesting trees from timber he purchased in 2023. It is a tract of 1,000 acres with the timber to be harvested over 10 years. A significant upfront expense is road building, although Young is quick to clarify that they’re actually skid trails.

“If we said roads, we have to build to state standards,” he explained. “We get a stumpage credit for putting in skid trails because after we’re gone, people use them to trap, hunt, gather berries, and get firewood.” Constructing winter skid trails costs around $5,000 per mile, and summer skid trails run around $9,000 a mile.

Felling is done with a Timbco 455B feller buncher with a 24-inch Quadco hot saw. Trees are seldom larger than 24 inches DBH, so “it’s the perfect hot saw for the size of timber we have here in the boreal forest,” said Young. He has owned the Timbco for over 19 years. “And it’s going strong,” he said. “We do good maintenance on it.”

Two Timberjack skidders transport the downed trees to a landing area. At the landing a few men with chainsaws cut off the limbs and buck the logs to 44 feet. They have a couple of John Deere dozers, one with a grapple and one with a ripper, to move the logs as needed.

Two self-loading log trucks pick up the wood and haul it to the sawmill log yard. Two loaders equipped with forks, a John Deere and a Case, sort and stack the logs and also stage them for the Helle or the Wood-Mizer.

The company conducts logging operations in the fall after hunting season; the crew works until the dark and cold temperatures make it no longer feasible. They resume logging in February, when there is more daylight and temperatures are above -20 degrees. They continue working until the spring break-up period and road restrictions are imposed. Some logging is done in the summer after weight restrictions are lifted and bird nesting season is over, around July 4. Five men usually work in the woods, another two or three process the logs, and two operate the self-loading log trucks. When the mill is running, seven men may be involved in the operations.

The logging slash is formed into piles. The piles provide habitat and shelter to voles, mice, rabbits, foxes, and birds, which in turn provide food to predators such as wolves, lynx, and birds of prey.

Young is exploring the feasibility of adding another machine, possibly a Woodland Mills portable band mill, to cut 2×4. “I’ve got to find an outlet for them before justifying the cost of the mill,” he said.

Young’s Timber also assembles the cabin kits it sells. Brian Holman, operations manager, and a team can assemble 10 cabins in 30 days. “Brian runs everything for me and keeps me on the straight and narrow path,” said Young.

“We build an insulated log cabin shell with windows and doors,” said Young. “We don’t cut any holes in the roof for heat, and we don’t do any interior work or electrical because we’re not certified.”

By managing all aspects of cabin production, from timber harvest to lumber manufacturing to final assembly, Young’s Timber can maintain a level of quality control that is one of the company’s selling points.

“We produce wood products on time and at the price we said,” said Young. “When we say a price, that’s the price – even if it costs more or less. We don’t change the price on the customer.”

Young is in the process of trying to develop and produce fuel logs made by compressing and gluing together wood chips and sawdust in a molding process. If successful, it would be a good outlet for his residuals.

“If you have a sawmill business, you spend all this money producing a product,” noted Young. “You create maybe 35 percent waste. What can you do with that waste? Because you have a cost sunk into it, a cost to store and handle it. So can we turn this cost into a profit?”

Before the COVID pandemic he invested in a debarker, a chipper, and a dryer to produce the material he needed, using slab wood and sawdust, and also a machine to mold the logs. However, the product didn’t break even because of the cost of debarking and high energy costs to dry the material.

Young pivoted and was able to obtain a $300,000 Wood Innovation Grant from the U.S. Forest Service to develop a more economical fuel log product. The first challenge is to dry the wood material – chipped wood and bark and sawdust – to 10 percent moisture content in a cost-effect method. To keep energy costs low, Young will use free waste oil from equipment at a gold mine to fuel the dryer.

Young partnered with Idaho-based Folk Fabrication to manufacture the 4-foot by 30-foot drum dryer and the machine to produce the logs. “Got it designed, and the parts are being made for it,” Young said. He anticipates by the fall of 2026 to have product available for demonstration.

Once he begins manufacturing the fuel logs, 3-4,000 tons of residual material – slabs, trim ends, shavings and sawdust – can be utilized annually for the new product.

Young has been a longstanding supporter for a viable forest products industry in Alaska. He serves on the board of directors of the Alaska Forest Association, and this year he received the Service to Forestry Award from the Alaska Society of American Foresters. Young credits his collaboration with the research community, timber industry, and the Alaska Division of Forestry for his success.

“This is my philosophy,” he said. “It takes local knowledge – scientific knowledge, and timber industry knowledge – to have a successful forestry program and forestry industry. We appreciate all the science that comes in, and we pay lots of attention to it.”

He cited as one of his mentors Dr. Edmond C. Packee, a forestry professor at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. His research demonstrated how to improve clearcuts following a harvest in order to increase habitat for moose. Young’s loggers follow the guidelines Packee developed.

Young’s daughter, Patricia, worked summers in the business running a loader while she was in college. Now she is the office manager. Young’s grandson, Richard, has worked for the company since he was 14 and can operate all the sawmill equipment. “He’s the best dozer operator and best welder in Tok,” said Young proudly.

When the business shuts down for the winter, employees are able to collect unemployment benefits. They also can take some vacation time and spend time trapping, ice fishing, and other winter pursuits.

Young’s business does not have any debt service. When he buys equipment or has a building constructed, Young pays for it out of pocket.

Young credits his success to his employees. “You’re only as good as your crew, and I have a damn good crew, so they make me look good, and I’m pretty happy about that.”