Tahoe Forest Products is leasing 37.2 acres in Carson City, Nv., from the Washoe Tribe, where it has broken ground on a new sawmill.
Expected to begin production in first quarter 2023, the facility will be able to mill about 50 million bd. ft. of lumber annually.
Ten acres will be needed for buildings—including a sawmill, rough lumber sorter, dry kilns, and planer mill—and the remainder for log storage.
Logs—initially salvaged during fire clean-up efforts at Sierra-at-Tahoe—will be milled into a wide range of products, including dry-surfaced 2” construction lumber, timbers, fence posts and landscape products from the fir, and boards and factory lumber for windows from the pine. Bark will be sold for landscaping and other uses, chips and sawdust will be sold to agricultural end-users and to power plants, and planer shavings will go for animal bedding.
The first logs arrived at the site on July 18, with an additional 17 million bd. ft. expected to arrive by November.
John Shinn, CEO of Tahoe Forest Products, said the project came about very quickly because there was no other practical market for salvage logs or thinnings from the Tahoe Basin or the Humboldt Toiyabe National Forest.
He is joined in management at TFP by chairman Kevin Leary.
