From auction to mill: the timber supply chain

Between the winning bid and the mill deck a tract passes through four steps, and each one takes a piece of what the timber is worth. Award, logging, haul, mill: that is the chain a public sale sets in motion. Understanding where the cost sits along it is the whole reason haul distance decides who even shows up to bid on a tract.

Award and logging

The chain starts at award. Once the agency confirms the high bidder and the contract is signed, with the deposit and bond posted, the buyer owns the right to cut the marked timber inside the contract term. Then the logging: falling the trees, yarding them to a landing, bucking them into logs and loading them out. The system the ground demands sets this cost. Flat, dry ground can be worked with ground-based equipment cheaply, steep ground needs cable or more and the price per unit climbs with it. All of this is the buyer's to carry, none of it is in the stumpage they paid the agency.

The haul is the swing factor

Then the logs move to a mill, and the haul is the cost that swings a sale. Log trucks are expensive to run and a load only holds so much, so every extra mile to the nearest mill comes straight out of the residual, the mill value less all the costs, that becomes stumpage. A tract an hour from three mills can bear a high bid. The same wood four hours out, with one mill that will take it, bears far less, because the haul has eaten the difference before the timber is even cut. Fuel prices ride on top of that, tightening or loosening the residual on every distant tract at once.

The mill, and who bids

At the mill the load is scaled and the delivered-log price is settled on the wood that actually arrives. That price, worked backward through the haul and the logging, is what set the ceiling on the bid in the first place. This is why the bidders on a tract are almost always the mills and loggers within economic haul of it. Unprocessed logs off federal and Washington state land cannot be exported under a 1990 federal law, so the buyers at these public sales are domestic mills and the loggers who feed them, not the export market. A sale near a cluster of mills draws a crowd and a premium; a remote sale draws the one or two outfits close enough to make the haul pencil, and often sells near its minimum or not at all.

See it on the board

The board above is the front of this chain, the price a buyer agreed to pay for the standing timber before a single log moved. The county and region pages sort those sales by where they sit, which is really a map of haul distance to the mills that bid on them. A thin premium on a remote tract and a fat one near the mills is the haul cost showing through the numbers. For how competition reads on the board, see bid intensity. The site reports the sales and the geography, never what a haul is worth to a given bidder.