A junk to jobs experiment.

For former timber towns, the question is, what next? For one California community, the answer may begin with Chopsticks.

A pale block of polished Douglas-fir gleams from the corner of Joyce Andersen's desk in the U.S. Forest Service Hayfork (CA) Ranger Station. On a bad day Andersen recuperates by holding the small square in her palm and tracing the tiny concentric growth rings that radiate out from a cinnamon center.

For Andersen, the Hayfork District ranger, this little chunk of the woods is part touchstone, part talisman - a token of the innovations afoot in northwestern California's Trinity National Forest.

At a time when national forest management is paralyzed by court orders and congressional policy debates, the rugged watersheds around Hayfork are quickening. While small towns surrounded by national forests are struggling to survive plummeting harvest levels. the 2,500 residents of this rural community are cautiously optimistic.

Their hope is in Andersen's little block of Doug-fir, a sample product from a Trinity Forest experiment. Local workers are producing paneling, flooring, and elegant furniture from forest "junk" - the scruffy, 7-inch trees most loggers leave in the woods. They are adding value to the raw lumber they produce through remanufacturing work that keeps jobs and money at home.

It's a bootstrap operation based on a vision of healthy forests and healthy communities caring for one another. If it works, Trinity's watersheds and wildlife will flourish and Hayfork will hang onto its high school, its two grocery stores, and its one surviving restaurant.

But the innovators in Hayfork are dependent on forces beyond their control. Along with testing new techniques on the land, they are experimenting with new Forest Service procedures and new markets for forest products no one even knew existed a year ago. If they can establish a steady supply of small-diameter logs and a reliable market for their finished goods, their straw-into-gold operation could be part of the future for small towns and national forests in a new era of ecosystem management.

In addition to new federal agency guidelines, however, what Hayfork needs to succeed is the economic expertise of the timber industry and the biological expertise of environmentalists, says Lynn Jungwirth, a Hayfork resident and member of a three-generation logging family.

"We want a different relationship with the forest. We're willing to invest in it, but we don't control the capital and we don't control the policy debate. We can't do this all alone," says Jungwirth, who directs the Watershed Research and Training Center in Hayfork.

Hayfork has been a timber town since its first major sawmill was built in the 1950s. For more than two decades the Trinity National Forest buzzed with chainsaws that dropped an annual average of 250 million board-feet of timber - enough to build a town the size of Hayfork every year.

The dramatic plunge in national forest harvests that has pounded the West in the 1990s hit Hayfork hard. Logging volumes slumped to 26 million board-feet a year, a 90 percent drop. In 1996 the town's primary employer, Sierra Pacific Industries, closed its Hayfork sawmill, a loss of 160 jobs.

Community leaders like Jungwirth had been readying themselves for the blow. They opened the Watershed Research and Training Center in 1993 as a community resource to ease the transition from industrial forestry to ecosystem management on national forest- land. By the time Sierra Pacific left town, around 40 people had graduated from the center's training programs in watershed restoration, forest thinning, and fuel breaks.

Instead of wringing their hands over life without a sawmill, the Watershed Center and other community groups developed a plan for the future and a partnership to back it, then trained crews to do the work. The partners won special Forest Service approval for a timber-sale contract to remove small trees growing in dog-hair thickets that were holding back the larger trees and creating a fire hazard. The Forest Service donated the logs to test the costs of processing and the potential markets.

The small-diameter experiment the Forest Service named Chopsticks is part of an ongoing effort to reduce the natural fuels on the fire-prone Trinity National Forest, says Andersen. Decades of fire suppression have produced a forest so overstocked that the little trees have become kindling for catastrophic wildfire. Removing the threat is critically important to the agency, Andersen says.

On the 37-acre Chopsticks project east of Hayfork, Douglas-firs that germinated around the turn of the century had grown into spindly stems with no hope of becoming the majesties of their species. Traditional loggers would have felled and burned them on the spot or shredded them into chips.

Roger Jaegel thought he could do better - for the woods and for Hayfork. A retired Forest Service engineer and project coordinator for the Watershed Center, Jaegel saw a chance to improve a section of forest through logging that would not damage the ground.

Instead of traditional equipment that grinds through the woods tearing up trees and the forest floor, Jaegel used "Bertha." The one-ton yarder was designed and built as part of a Watershed Center training program. Bertha's 28-foot tower controls 1,500-foot cables that can reach in any direction. Diminutive by conventional logging standards, the Hayfork yarder is sized to operate from existing logging roads and designed for fast changes in the cable setup.

A crew of 10 Hayfork workers, most of them graduates of the Watershed Center, spent six weeks logging the Chopsticks sale. They hauled 7,854 logs in 66 truckloads to the old Sierra Pacific mill site in Hayfork. With so many small stems, it was an expensive operation - around eight times the cost of a conventional timber sale. The Watershed Center partners sold 67,000 board-feet as poles and saw logs for milling into conventional lumber.

But the bulk of the logs hauled to the Hayfork sort yard were the gangly little Doug-firs. They surprised everyone. This traditional "waste" produced 158,400 board-feet of lumber - nearly five times more than Jaegel estimated. And it was beautiful, says Jim Jungwirth, a Hayfork furniture maker and Lynn's husband. The suppressed saplings that grew in dense and shaded stands developed a tight grain with all the characteristics of old-growth trees.

"We didn't give the wood enough credit at first" adds Jungwirth, who owns Jefferson State Forest Products.

It didn't take long for the Hayfork workers to realize the Doug-fir represented a commodity far more valuable than two-by-fours. From his workshop on the Trinity County Fairgrounds, Jungwirth began building furniture: chairs, tables, book shelves, and benches. How well the furniture sells and what prices it can command are still unknown. But the Hayfork partners already know they have discovered a valuable industry. They can multiply potential local jobs 10 times beyond conventional milling by processing and reprocessing wood from trees logged to improve the forest ecosystem.

No one, not even the most enthusiastic fan, believes the Hayfork experiment can succeed without major changes in the way the Forest Service does business. In addition to replacing the massive timber sales of the past with small-scale management adapted to particular watersheds, the agency must learn to measure its successes not in board-feet but in the long-term vitality of the forest. And it must find a way to fund ecosystem health work.

Andersen is convinced all that is possible. Demonstration projects like the one in Hayfork are showing Forest Service officials what succeeds and what doesn't. The challenge, she says, is to learn enough from these experiments to confront the bureaucratic barriers. When a community like Hayfork comes forward with a plan that's good for the woods and good for the local economy too, the Forest Service has a mandate.

"I'm not shy about pushing back on the administrative barriers" Andersen says."It's good business and it's the right thing to do."

Most of the Hayfork community is skeptical about the long-term future of small-diameter harvesting. Few loggers or sawmill workers have much hope for ecosystem improvements unless the work also produces steady, well-paid jobs. But they are convinced their town will not survive without some dramatic change. Why not spin forest junk into jobs? Maybe turning Doug-fir waste into dining room chairs will create the work at home they all want.

"It's possible - just possible - that we can do forest health work and make money," Jim Jungwirth says. "Wouldn't that be a hoot!"

RELATED ARTICLE: Giving a Voice to Communities

Communities like Hayfork, California, are experimenting with ways to build natural resource economies that maintain and restore ecosystems, rather than merely produce commodities. By developing innovative harvesting and processing techniques and building markets for low-value timber and nontimber forest products, communities across the West are creating a more sustainable future.

AMERICAN FORESTS is partnering with local groups seeking to integrate environmental and community well-being. In 1996 we began an ecosystem management program that helps forest-dependent communities gain a more meaningful voice in policy discussion and decisions affecting public and private forest management.

Finding common ground becomes impossible when discussion become politically polarized, and the resulting conflicts and policy swings can be detrimental to both forests and communities. AMERICAN FORESTS believes that involving the people who actually live and work in a forest ecosystem will result in better ideas for keeping that ecosystem sustainable. And when we take better care of our forests, they are more able to provide the values and services - like water quality, wildlife and fish habitat, and traditional forest product - that build sound local economies.

- Maia Enzer

Jane Braxton Little is a freelance writer based in Plumas County, California.