Lumber

Ponderosa trees, popular in Oregon

While I was serving in Oregon between 2003 and 2016, one of the most common scenes on the road was the sight of huge trucks carrying lumber from some forest to a local lumber yard. There they would unload the logs and clean them up, shave them and eventually cut them up in strips or planks of wood. Depending on how big the trunk is, they could get a nice supply of wood even from one huge log.

A typical Lumber Yard in Prairie City, Oregon.

The most popular trees were the Ponderosa Pines which have a reddish/light brown texture to it, and you can see them in the close-up of the bark of the ponderosa tree in the first picture above. In Lumber yard you can see hundreds of log waiting to be  cleaned up. I was told that there is a plentiful supply of trees for the next few decades, but the loggers and farmers keep planting more trees which would take a good 40 to 60 years to grow a large tree that would give you a good supply of wood when cut. Then whenever there is fire, which are pretty frequent in Oregon and California, not everything is lost, because when a tree is cut down, another one starts growing. And in a burnt up area, the seedlings starts growing within a few months of the fire.