Reading a timber sale packet

A timber sale packet, the prospectus a state or federal agency publishes before an auction, is a tract's whole story in a fixed set of fields. Read the same fields in the same order every time and you can size up a sale fast: what is offered, what it will cost to cut, and what the agency will accept for it. Here is what each field is telling you.

Volume by species

The offered volume is a cruise estimate, not a promise, and it is broken out by species because species mix drives a tract's value more than its raw size. A packet listing mostly Douglas-fir reads very differently from the same volume in a lower-value pine or a mix heavy on pulpwood. The volume is stated in the agency's unit, MBF for a state or BLM sale, CCF for the Forest Service. Remember it is what the cruise predicted, not what the mill will finally scale off the truck.

The minimum bid and the appraisal

The minimum bid is the floor, and it comes straight from the agency's appraisal of the tract. On a Forest Service sale it is an advertised rate per CCF; on a state sale it is a total dollar minimum. The appraisal works backward from the expected mill value less the cost of logging, roads and haul, so a minimum is really the agency's read on what the standing timber can bear. A bid below it is not accepted, and a sale that draws nothing at or above it becomes a no-bid.

Access, logging system and term

The rest of the packet is the cost of getting the wood out, and it is where a tract is won or lost. Road and access conditions tell you what you must build or maintain to reach the timber. The logging system, whether the ground can be worked with ground-based equipment or demands cable or a costlier method, sets much of the price per unit. The contract term is how long the buyer has to cut, which matters when a market can move under a multi-year contract. None of this sits on the appraisal line, but all of it comes out of the buyer's residual before a dollar of stumpage is left.

What the site publishes

This site does not reprint the whole packet. It pulls the fields that describe a sale as a market event, the sale name and tract, the agency and region, the offered volume, the minimum, and after the auction the winning bid, price, premium, bidder count and high bidder, which you see on the board above. The operational detail, the road clauses, the unit maps, the exact logging systems, stays in the agency's own packet, because that is the document a buyer actually bids from. Match a row here to its packet and you have both the market read and the fine print. The site reports the published fields and never advises what to bid.