High stakes, gentle touches.

It's just possible that a growing environmental sensitivity may save the day for this company and its several thousand workers.

PRE-WINTER RAMBLINGS through California's Sierra Nevadas aren't my usual routine, but here I was in November, off-road in patchy snow at 6,000 feet, as storm clouds glowered. I remembered the blizzard-doomed Donner Party: In 1846, a couple of mountain passes north of here, 47 survivors of that group clung to life by eating the remains of their dead comrades.

Today, in remote country near little-known places like Rattlesnake Creek, Burnt Corral and Thunder Hill, I was aboard a Ford F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup on a quite different trek: scouting the survival scenario of a corporate creature.

California's Fibreboard Corporation (92,000 acres of timberlands in California and Nevada, 2,500 employees, $265 million in annual sales) was in my sights, as were details of the company's bold new entry into environmental forestry.

Unlike a lot of studies I've seen that look promising on paper but not on the forest, this one is for real:

* Light-touch helicopter logging where needed.

* Proactive, computerized wildlife consciousness.

* Sustained logging sequences that include mostly selective harvesting, occasional "fuzzy" clearcuts, and plenty of consideration for streams.

* High-tech understory thinning aimed at healthier stands and fuels reduction.

Fibreboard's major motivations in this program are three: a survival stance in a highly charged environmental climate, the corporate profit imperative (which has to drive any successful enterprise), and the company's resolve to succeed over the long haul.

GOING CRITICAL

Under conditions that would have boggled the Donner pioneers, Fibreboard today is "going critical" as it emerges successfully from a decades-long asbestos-products flap, ponders its immediate future, and ventures forth environmentally.

True, the company ended 1993 with a humongous deck of 90 million board-feet of logs at its sprawling Standard and Chinese Camp sawmills in the Sierra foothills. It's the biggest stock in years, thanks largely to Forest Service salvage sales from bug-kill and a devastating fire in 1992. But the deck is deceptive.

The company, which relies on the Stanislaus National Forest for more than half of its log needs, today faces dangerously diminishing supplies from that source--down 75 percent from 1987 levels--as environmental pressure, federal government downsizing, and related budgetary constraints put a hammerlock on timber sales throughout the Sierras.

In addition, Fibreboard deals with a progressively burdened Forest Service that seems to be trapped under an avalanche of legally required impact statements and analyses, environmental and technical assessments ad infinitum, lawsuits, appeals, moratoria, reviews--and forest-management plans that take years to organize.

"The Forest Service is in gridlock," one local told me.

Meanwhile the company maneuvers with high caution through environmentalist-orchestrated storms in the woods, while hurrying to understand the biological needs of the California spotted owl and other disputed creatures on its property. And if all that weren't enough, the company at press time contemplates a possible takeover by Minnesota baseball team owner Carl Pohlad.

The dangers to Fibreboard are reflected in other situations close at hand: In early March, for example, Michigan-California Lumber Company, which produced lumber largely from timber stocks on the nearby Eldorado National Forest, announced plans to permanently close its 105-year-old, 280-employee sawmill in Camino, citing "radical groups using legal technicalities."

Ross Johnson, forest-practices staff chief for the California Department of Forestry, counts "several dozen" similar operations down the tubes since 1987, thanks to legally tied-up timber supplies on both private and federal lands. And thus California joins the Pacific Northwest in the great free-fall drama surrounding timber supply.

But strange and marvelous things can happen when the corporate issue is survival, to say nothing of producing a profit. Which explains in part why Gary Whitson, a lanky Fibreboard forester who plods along in size 13 boots, was talking to me this morning in an upfront way about his company's environmental forestry, seemingly the strongest card in its survival deck.

Loosely defined, this type of forestry aims at maintaining forest health on a sustained-yield, clean-water, habitat-sensitive, profit-producing basis, while also factoring in issues like the spotted owl, old-growth logging, clearcutting, and the use of herbicides to promote regrowth in the forest.

As defined by the Forest Service, "ecosystem management" places forest watershed health first, with timber production becoming a byproduct. Fibreboard's approach admittedly puts timber production first while encouraging responsible, gentle-touch forestry.

HELICOPTER LOGGING

My first favorable vibes about Fibreboard had occurred four years ago in melting slush adjacent to Yosemite National Park. On an unseasonably warm January day, I stood at a log landing on North Mountain on the Stanislaus National Forest. Nikon in hand, I watched a huge Chinook helicopter, the nation's largest, doing "turns" (trips to and from the woods) every four minutes or so, dangling bug-killed but prime sugar-pine logs weighing up to 28,000 pounds from a 250-foot "long line" cable.

This Columbia Helicopters operation, which eventually logged 1.8 million board-feet of pine for Fibreboard, required virtually no road building (with its associated erosion), and produced no discernible impact on the land, while removing explosively flammable trees in a seriously overfueled forest.

At a cost of $9,000 per hour at the high end, the Chinook and cheaper copters are being used increasingly by Fibreboard these days. One result is far fewer complaints from environmentalists, but another is higher lumber prices to consumers.

OPEN FORESTS

During a far-flung drive late last autumn through some of the 75,000 acres of Fibreboard-owned timberlands in California's Tuolumne County, adjacent to the Stanislaus Forest, I stopped at a management unit named Basin Creek and began to note some things that buoyed my spirits: Open, sunny spaces in the forest canopy; differing heights of firs, pines, and cedars of up to maybe 36 inches in diameter, producing a multi-story canopy; a notable absence of heavy understory fuels; and a variety of ground covers, forbs, and brush types like you'd see in a classic old-growth forest.

I was, in fact, looking at a plot that has been logged repeatedly for well over a century, but with keen sensitivity over the past several decades. In short, this was a scene of selective log harvesting, pre-commercial thinning, and what looked like especially careful log skidding and stream protection.

FUZZY CLEARCUTS

One morning, with Gary Whitson and Fibreboard's chief forester Bill Snyder, I stopped near Spring Gap deep in the woods. Gazing up-canyon to the snow-capped Dardanelles, we saw a magnificent volcanic outburst in the high Sierras that has always fascinated me.

To my surprise, I was looking right past a so-called "fuzzy" clearcut--one created to allow sun to reach the forest floor so shade-intolerant ponderosa pines, Fibreboard's principal species, can be replanted here.

Maybe seven acres in size, the opening wasn't really clear at all. Several large, rangy black oaks were growing there, as were four healthy ponderosas that hadn't yet reached marketable size.

"Those oaks? Fifteen, 20 years ago we would have felled, piled, and burned them," Snyder explained. "But now we know the acorns they produce are important for wildlife habitat, so they stay."

Added Danella George of the Forest Service, who was with us, "Oaks have a higher Ph value; they actually benefit conifers by contributing to soil fertility."

Small oaks and conifers were getting a start in the foreground, and the uneven edge of the clearcut was ragged with lower, random growth and hence "fuzzy."

"We logged this area last summer," Snyder added. "Left 40 to 60 percent of the ground cover--leaves, twigs, branches, tree boles--for our 'nutrient budget.' The rest, after the sawlogs were removed, was chipped and hauled to a local biomass plant for fuel production."

This fuzzy clearcut, which might have been almost totally shorn a few years ago, was scheduled for ponderosa and sugar pine planting this past spring. It's part of a gentle-touch restocking program that takes place on about five percent of the land harvested by Fibreboard each year, in the name of long-term forestry. The company's selective timber harvests, and occasional clearcuts and replanting, are part of an ongoing program to sustain a cut of approximately 40 million board-feet a year on its property (figuring a three- to four-percent annual growth-and-cut rate), which gives you sustained-growth forestry-- the real thing.

GIVING A HOOT

The Californian spotted owl--similar in appearance and in habitat needs to its Pacific Northwest northern spotted relatives--is not officially endangered or even threatened at the moment. Despite official pronouncements that owls are old-growth creatures, folks who live deep in the Stanislaus back-country have said for years that they see spotted owls often in both old-growth and in younger stands.

But the possibility that the owl might be declared endangered, locking up additional large tracts of timberlands, is thick enough to cut with an ax hereabouts.

How is Fibreboard reacting?

People like forester Gary Whitson have for the past four years been venturing out in the middle of the night with hoot-sound tape players and locator antennas, meeting up with California spotted owls and mapping their territories.

"We've located 54 spotted-owl activity centers, which we now voluntarily protect. The owls are in our ponderosas of varying ages, in our white firs and our incense cedars," Whitson explained.

"They readily hoot back from as close as six feet when they hear our tape recordings, and they easily accept a mouse (which contains a tiny, swallowable, $500 radio transmitter for location tracking)." Therefore we know their location, their habits, their biological needs."

What does all this prove? First, there's no particular shortage of California spotted owls on Fibreboard lands, most of which have been logged three or four times over the past 50 to 100 years. And second, the spotted owl is not exclusively a creature of the old-growth forest, as some environmentalists have mistakenly claimed.

There remains, however, a big question mark: Will environmentalists and state/federal wildlife managers perceive Fibreboard's owl and other wildlife initiatives as responsible forestry and let the company go about its business? Or will they try to use the company's hard-earned wildlife data to further restrict logging activity on this private land?

Who knows in this dangerous, high-stakes business.

NINTENDO FORESTRY

No one who works for Fibreboard can fail to sense a certain tug to the past after reading Sugar Pine Railway Memories and other local histories. Logging and lumbering companies preceding Fibreboard built rail lines that snaked for miles into the Sierras. Pines seven to 12 feet across at the butt, a seemingly endless supply, were up there for the taking, no questions asked. Logging back then, by the way, was a lot harder on the land than it is now.

Hobos once camped in the oaks just yards from today's Fibreboard timber operations building at Standard. Matter of fact, an old train station, still standing, was used in Little House on the Prairie sequences.

It fascinated me that much of the timber division's healing-type hospital building of the earlier Standard Lumber Company, circa 1920. Today bats fly in and out of a former operating room next to "Lumber Sales," and ancient 12 x 12-inch ponderosa beams support the building.

As you walk the upper hall, the whir of a powerful computer and the beeps of an electronic signal announce a new mode of enviro-sensitivity here. With help from a local programming firm and sophisticated GPS (Global Positioning System) technology for determining precise ground locations, Fibreboard foresters are deep into GIS (Geographic Information Systems) these days.

Translated, this means that watersheds, wildlife-habitat areas, timber types, roads, contours, soil types, place names, and other land features can be "layered" (displayed together on a computer terminal), then color-printed on command, for use by forest managers.

For example, for each spotted-owl nesting site throughout Fibreboard's holdings, techies can easily "image" a 500-foot nesting ring, a 1,000-foot perching ring, and a 1.3-mile foraging area for protection purposes--together with any of the above data layers.

"Later, as the Fish and Wildlife Service establishes special habitat ratings, we'll put them in, too," Whitson explained.

Fibreboard is a leader among California timber producers in using computers to integrate environmental forestry with logging production.

HIGH-TECH DEFUELING

One afternoon, deep in the forest near old Camp Sequoia, where steam donkeys once whistled and logging trains chugged up steep grades, I met high-tech forestry head-on.

No chainsaws. No cats. No log skidding. Rather, a Timberjack 25-20 shear (also called a feller-buncher) that cuts trees as big as 22-inch-diameter and stacks them for hauling. Plus a rubber-tired grapple skidder that gathers the logs for decking or chipping. And chippers for smaller-dimension trees and brush.

Operated by a vigorous, entrepreneurial Sonora logger named Joe Martin, the gear--new to this area--was brought in to thin Fibreboard timberlands. The shear, a low-ground-pressure tracked vehicle with an excavator-type arm that reaches out 20 feet in all directions, fells, carries, and then neatly produces piles of logs for pick-up by the grapple-skidder.

The shear became a star player a couple of years ago when the 4,000-acre Ruby fire (see American Forests, May/June 1993) exploded near Twain-Harte, and the Forest Service suddenly called it to duty for hurry-up salvage operations. For a while it was actually harvesting smoldering trees.

Joe Martin's new equipment, which can run $300,000-plus per copy, has unlocked some promising environmental doors for both Fibreboard and the Forest Service: It's a winner for fast and economical precommercial thinning, it spares the land the impact of heavy bulldozers and soil-disturbing log-skidding operations, and it produces an ongoing supply of chips for a nearby biomass power producer.

As for understory fuel reduction, the equipment is the most promising thing I've seen in these woods in decades. Standing in a recently thinned understory, I beheld a marvelous openness that at least approximated some of the forests so eloquently described by naturalist John Muir, when he first visited this region in 1869. Importantly, the scene did not look like it was over-fueled, as does most of the area.

As the Forest Service's Pat Kaunert later told me, "We've moved over the past 15 years from thinking only about fire suppression to thinking about ecosystem management. Frankly, some areas of our forest have just too many trees. If humans don't manage these forests, fire will."

Significantly, this type of understory thinning, now being practiced by both Fibreboard and the Forest Service hereabouts, may be the first step toward allowing natural fire, at some later time, to once again play its traditional fire ecology role: scrubbing the understory with low-intensity ground fires and thus protecting the forest from conflagrations that so commonly plague it today.

WHERE FROM HERE?

Will environmental forestry save the day for Fibreboard and for its several thousand employees?

Will environmentalists slacken their legal moves and allow responsible forest producers like Fibreboard to operate without endless opposition?

As logging stocks diminish and lumber prices climb, will the value of Fibreboard's timberlands exceed the book value of its stock, thereby inviting a takeover by the baseball team owner, or by someone else who might not care about long-term environmental forestry?

The questions are real. The concerns are grave.

Personally, I'm wishing good things for Fibreboard because I believe they're doing the right thing for a forest that deserves respect. And I fervently hope their imaginative, responsible environmental style will be picked up by other timberland operators in today's beleaguered forest environment.

Rediscovering the Super Sugar

After repeated urgings on my part, Fibreboard forester Gary Whitson and I drove up an old brush-lined railroad bed, the remains of an earlier toot-and-hug logging era in the central Sierras. We worked our way cautiously down a half-iced grade that looked like a skid road, and then hiked a shod distance on Fibreboard property to behold the piece de resistance in the company's environmental forestry program.

Here, on a slope above the north fork Stanislaus River, is an open stand of magnificent, velvet-barked incense cedars probably six feet through at the butt, interspersed with a scattering of skyward-bound white firs. Among them, seeming to scrape the clouds, is a small, centuries-old stand of the most magnificent sugar pines I've ever met.

Could such old-growth crown jewels be owned by a forest-products company, I asked?

"Yes indeed," Whitson affirmed.

We stood gazing for a moment at this tree the company calls "Super Sugar." Then Whitson said: "Awesome--probably 600 to 2,000 years or older. It's been through lightning, through fires. Look at the butt--it's hollowed out."

Indeed, I could have slept inside it during a cold winter night.

"Look at those limbs--they're wider than a lot of the trees surrounding it. Look at the swell of the butt, the knarred branches, the plating of the bark."

Here in hiding, so to speak, was a statement about environmental responsibility that goes back nearly 100 years under four logging ownerships that similarly respected this sanctum and let it be.

"We just didn't have the heart to fell that stand," a Fibreboard manager later told me.

A little research by Deborah Gangloff, AMERICAN FORESTS' vice president for program services who oversees the Notional Register of Big Trees, showed that this magnificent specimen had actually been crowned a national champ in 1967. "Good vigor, crown intact, can walk through base," read the official nomination. Later it was dethroned by a Yosemite rival.

Whitson and I carefully measured the 232-foot-tall tree according to American Forests' criteria for champions, and guess what? We found that Super Sugar, at 681 points, outscores the current reining Pinus lambertiana in Yosemite by 46 points.

If no larger tree is found, its status as a world champ will become official in the 1996 National Register of Big Trees.

But it will be more than the world's largest known sugar pine: It will be the champion of all of the world's 100-plus species of pines, of which the sugar pine is easily the most magnificent.

"Gentle Touch" Momentum Builds

Fibreboard gets excellent marks from the California Department of Forestry and others for its environmentally sensitive forestry. But other forest-products companies in the western U.S. are also cutting impressive trails.

Collins Pine, with main operations in California's northern Sierras, has no clearcuts on its 92,000 acres--and even after more than 50 years the company maintains 200- and 300-year-old trees as part of its sustained-yield harvest program.

"Thanks to sustained-yield management, the forest still contains as much wood as it did over 50 years ago," says a corporate brochure.

Plum Creek Timber Company, headquartered in Seattle, was one of the first timber companies to hire a full-time wildlife biologist. And it has special programs for minimizing logging impacts on elk, grizzly bears, bald eagles, and spotted owls on the company's 1.4-million-acre holdings in Washington, Idaho, and Montana.

Helicopter harvesting lessens the visual impact of logging on Washington's Snoqualmie Pass, and highly specific timber-management rules here require "50-11-40" protection for spotted owls: At least 50 percent of the stands must hove frees at least 11 inches in diameter, with 40 percent canopy closure.

Weyerhaeuser, the nation's largest forest-products firm, developed a successful emergency plan to save bald eagles during a seven-year drought on its tree farm near Klamath Falls, Oregon. The company also voluntarily assembled a diverse team to study the Tolt River watershed in Washington State, where it owns some 40,000 acres and is now harvesting trees according to new rules developed by environmentalists, biologists, and others.

The company has its own "forest esthetics team" to help minimize negative impact connected with its logging operations.