August / September 2023

2023 Timber Harvesting Logging Business Of The Year

Article by Jessica Johnson, Senior Editor, Timber Harvesting

KALISPELL, Montana – For Ken Swanstrom timber harvesting in Montana means more than loads per day. For the entirety of his five decades-long career, it has been about so much more. He is the original environmentalist—his whole life’s legacy is in the land where he lives and works, and he takes tremendous pride in the way his crews have worked tracts, focusing on how the forest looks after the machines have rolled, preserving the natural beauty of Big Sky Country. His company has never been the most productive—one of Swanstrom’s regrets he admits as he stares down the barrel of retirement—but he says he holds his head high because he held the woods to a higher standard. It’s because of this higher standard he set and achieved for himself and his company that Swanstrom’s Skookum Timber Co. is the 2023 Timber Harvesting Logging Business of the Year award winner.

Swanstrom, 66, is the second winner from the state of Montana and the first past-president of the American Loggers Council to receive this award. So, when he somewhat rhetorically asks, “Where do you draw the line between pride in what you did and how you are going to end up the last 20 years of your life?” The answer might not be measured in cabins on the lake or flat screen televisions. Instead, this age old and incredibly tough question can be answered by riding around the Pleasant Valley and the greater Flathead Lake and the city of Whitefish Lake and countless other spots in and around Kalispell, Montana where Swanstrom’s emphasis on the land has helped preserve it for generations to come.

Over the years, Swanstrom has seen his fair share of industry changes—like when he and his father made the move from hand falling salvage timber to purchasing a feller-buncher. Then later effectively, amicably, splitting up their partnership. Swanstrom has watched as selling land became an industry that brought vibrancy to the area in the form of construction jobs for mega mansions and folks “not from around here” who are anti-harvesting.

Or the opposite, a real estate agent tells a dentist from California that his new 10 acre piece of property has $100,000 worth of trees. It then falls to Swanstrom, who 15 years ago was getting calls from 160 acre landowners who wanted property thinned, to give these smaller landowners the bad news: “I say, sure, if you want to take them all off, it probably does.” This means tracts have become smaller and smaller, unfortunately, he says.

Another huge blow is the loss of infrastructure. Swanstrom says in his area they are down to just two sawmills, affecting what loggers can sell logs for and how much truckers can be paid. Add to that the ever-changing climate becoming drier and hotter—things are not easy in the mountains.