Flathead Forest's Huey timber sale will help Stoltze

A Flathead National Forest timber sale named after a Disney cartoon character was recently sold to F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co.

Stoltze purchased the Huey timber sale near Lakeside at an auction for about $1.1 million. Part of the Wild Cramer project first developed two years ago, the sale will treat about 838 acres.

The total volume of the sale is about 9.6 million board feet, but only about 6.6 million is saw logs, Stoltze land and resource manager Paul McKenzie said. The remaining 18,000 tons of wood will go to post and pole sales or Willis Enterprises in Bonner, which chips wood and sends it by rail to Boise Paper in Idaho.

“It’s a good sale for Stoltze,” McKenzie said.

He said the company would likely begin work on the project next summer and continue into the winter months. A sale that size is about 2,200 truckloads of timber and comes at a time when the timber supply has been tight.

The project is within the Island Unit on the Swan Lake Ranger District, a block of Forest Service lands that are wholly surrounded by private or state land and includes Blacktail Mountain.

The auction was very competitive, Flathead Forest planner Rob Carlin said. Bidding started at about $12 a ton and rose to $25.80 in 5 cent increments, he said.

Two more sales are planned for the Wild Cramer project. The Dewey sale is about 8.2 million board feet and the Louie sale is about 8 million board feet, Carlin said.

The sales were named after the Walt Disney cartoon characters Huey, Dewey and Louie, triplet ducks created in 1937. The Huey sale represents about a third of what the Flathead Forest sells annually.