Cedar Comments

Northern White Cedar is popular for its resistance to decay and its light weight properties.  It is the timber of choice for fence posts, shingles, furniture, and outdoor applications...to name just a few of the historically documented uses of this beautiful tree.

Cedar has some traits that make it unique among the trees often harvested in Northern Minnesota:

1.  It is a slow-growing tree that can live to be 400+ years old.

2.  It is an important food source favored by white-tailed deer and snowshoe hares.

3.  Severe browsing by deer and hares can lead to difficulty in reestablishing stands of Cedar.
4.  Though cedar lumber is resistant to decay from the elements, the live trees often have rot in the trunk.  Cedar trees do not usually succumb to the diseases/rot that affect them, however.  They can survive for generations with hollow trunks.  

Although cedar is not rare or scarce, there are some circumstances that limit its availability within the wood industry.  Because of its slow ability to regenerate and grow into a marketable sized log (80 years for posts and up to 160 years for saw timbers) cedar is often reserved from harvesting on county and state lands.  

Because the tree typically grows in wet areas, it is only harvested in winter when logging equipment can cross frozen swamps and bogs.  This creates a relatively narrow time frame for mills to procure cedar for the upcoming year.  Yet cedar logs cannot be stockpiled indefinitely without some loss of quality.
Most of the cedar that Wille Logging purchases and sells comes from private lands.

Concerning cedar, the U.S. Forest Service website states, "..the tree commonly has a curved butt and poor form."  It is also common for cedar to have completely hollow butts or rot throughout the trunk.  Even younger, smaller cedar trees are frequently hollow.

Here is a photo of some cedar logs taken from the top end of the trees.

And here is a photo of that same load of logs taken from the butt end of the trees.
The one solid trunk shown in the above photo displays a half-ring of the discoloration associated with rot that would make lumber from that section of the tree useless.
Cedar trees also tend to have deep grooves in the trunk that give the cross-section shape of the log an undulating profile.  This reduces the amount and size of lumber that can be produced from the rim of strong wood along the outer edge of the trunk.

The grain of cedar wood can also spiral.  Clancy Erickson, a sawyer for Wille Logging for 17 years, explains that tiny veins of rot, undetectable from the outside of the log, can spiral up through the trunk rendering all of the lumber from that log useless.  A sawyer may spend hours sawing cedar only to produce a few good boards.  Erickson recalls sawing 1x3 inch material out of many cedar logs just to salvage some material from them.

It can take a lot more cedar logs, and a lot more saw time, than one might expect to make a stack of 1x6 cedar lumber such as the one shown in the photo below.

Due to the challenges of sawing cedar, unique markets have developed for the seemingly unusable sections of cedar logs.  For many years, Wille Logging has been salvaging unusual chunks of cedar for artists and furniture makers.  Hollow trunk sections have become small tables, the pedestals and legs for larger tables and pool tables, and many other pieces of one-of-a-kind art.  Even unique chunks of cedar limbs, like the one pictured below, are sawed into small sections that can be use for signs, antler mounting boards, and fish mounting boards.

If you would like more information on cedar, please see the websites listed below.

Sources for this article:
http://www.na.fs.fed.us/pubs/silvics_manual/Volume_1/thuja/occidentalis.htm
http://www.myminnesotawoods.umn.edu/2007/04/minnesotas-northern-white-cedar-forest-type/
http://www.atthecreation.com/WOODS/CEDAR/_DEER.CEDAR.html
Don Wille
Clancy Erickson