Scott Melcher and Melcher Logging Co. have been doing fuels-reduction work for years in Central Oregon, but their efforts have suddenly brought them national attention.

That’s been particularly true in recent months, after Melcher Logging got a $1.4 million slice of American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds to expand a project they were already working on east of Sisters.

Melcher Logging has been thinning overgrown forests in the area since 2002, when Melcher, who is based in Sweet Home, decided to look east for opportunities to try small-diameter thinning and got a contract from the Warm Springs Indians to work in forests around Black Butte.

Melcher has found himself working side by side with environmentalists who once opposed logging, he said, but have realized that over-protecting the forests created a whole new set of problems.

He’s also gotten a lot of attention from journalists, who see him as the cutting edge in a changing industry. In the last few months, stories about his thinning projects have appeared in major newspapers in the Northwest and as far away as West Virginia.

Melcher said his company got into the thinning business in the early 1990s when, after graduating from Oregon State University in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, he had trouble finding a job in accounting, which was where his interest was at the time.

“I’ve been working in the woods since I was a kid,” Melcher said. “I’m a third-generation logger.”

He said he really didn’t understand what forestry science was when he went to OSU, or he probably would have majored in that area.

“I didn’t think there was a lot of opportunity in the family business,” he said. “I thought forestry was logging. There’s a lot more to forestry than cutting down trees and yarding them to the top of a hill.”

But while Melcher was in school, his father Mike Melcher was experimenting with cut-to-length technology, becoming one of the pioneers in Oregon to use the new equipment built in Scandinavia. When Scott got out of college, he saw that the Scandinavian technology presented interesting possibilities.

“It took off from there,” he said. “That was the start of my career right there.”

Through the 1990s the Melchers worked primarily for private landowners, such as Willamette Industries and the Avery family in the Lyons area.

They still did the typical high-lead logging using towers and yarders, but they continued to develop their thinning know-how, Scott Melcher said.

In 2000, when things went south economically, private companies slowed their thinning projects and, after struggling along for a couple of years, Melcher said he got the idea to look east of the Cascades.

“I was looking for a opportunity to keep it going,” he said. “That’s when things kind of took off.”

He landed a timber sale contract to do some small-diameter thinning in the Black Butte area, which then led to the stewardship contract with the Warm Springs Indians.

“Basically, we were doing fuels reduction work in the interface between their private property and Forest Service ground,” he said. “We were basically building firebreaks where the Cache Mountain fire burnt into Black Butte. We did some of the thinning and subsequently, some of other fires that have come out of that area have stopped at our thinning projects.”

The Black Butte work led to Melcher’s involvement with the Metolius Multi-Party Monitoring Team, which was formed to monitor thinning projects in the area.

The group included Friends of the Metolius, the Sierra Club, the Clean Air Committee, Blue Mountain Bio Diversity, local contractors such as Melcher, local industry representatives, community members, and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.

“The multi-party monitoring group was probably my first experience sitting at the table with contractors, people from the Forest Service and people from the environmental community,” he said. “They were monitoring this work that was happening in the forest.”

The early projects involved removing trees –  largely Ponderosa pines – ranging from maximum diameters of 8 to 16 inches, maintain roads, clear brush and otherwise reduce fuels. The goal was to thin the forests but also to use the harvested biomass as much as possible for lumber, chips, paper and co-regeneration.

After his first stewardship contract in 2006, a three-year deal to treat over 1,000 acres that the Melchers finished in two, the company got a second, 5,000-acre contract in 2008 that it is currently working on in the Camp Sherman area.

Scott Melcher’s younger brother Robbie, who leads the thinning crew, said he believes the quality of the work they have been able to do has paved the road for more opportunities.

“They care about the job as much as we do,” he said of his crew, Larry Hutchins, Kelly Lee and Grant Martin, all of Sweet Home. Hutchins, who runs the harvester, is 70 and has worked on the crew for 20 years.

“Their standards of quality are as high as ours. They take pride in their work. The quality of their work is the big reason why we’ve been invited back and is why, I think, we got this job.”

Robbie Melcher said that working in the Camp Sherman area puts them “right in the middle of the environmentalists. It’s a pretty high-profile area.”

The latest development, and the one that has garnered them a lot of the attention from big-city journalists, Scott Melcher said, has been the stimulus package, which stepped up the pace of that latest stewardship contract. The $1.4 million stimulus project funds have allowed him to add personnel to speed up the mowing, thinning and piling of the original 5,000-acre contract.

“Instead of being in year one, as far as task orders, we’re now in year three or four,” Melcher said.

The challenge, from the beginning, has been to find ways to make the operation profitable, he said.

“I have to be real creative about the types of stands I thin in,” he said.

Currently, markets seem to favor smaller-diameter logs, chip logs and firewood from his projects.

Some he sells for animal bedding and he’s partnered with a businessman in eastern Oregon to produce firewood.

“We’re just working to recover dollars out of acres,” Melcher said. “We’re trying to be real creative. It’s been tough. We’ve seen our margins decline but we’re still keeping our employees working. We’re paying our bills and moving forward.”

Melcher said his initial 2008 contract has provided jobs for five to 5-1/2 employees, plus himself, and the stimulus package work is providing thinning work for 14 more.

He said he sees lots of potential work ahead, in central Oregon and in the Deschutes National Forest.

Melcher said that, although he is not too involved with the Metolius monitoring team any more, “people can see what’s been happening, that there can be a very positive result.

“You can’t have no impact on the forest but you can have minimum impact. We’re not destroying the forest.”

He said he’d like to see thinning projects in the Sweet Home Ranger District.

“The Forest Service is becoming more aware, but traditionally they’ve been so disassociated from the value of their resources that they don’t realize there’s value in the younger stands logged over in the 1970s that need thinning,” he said.

“They aren’t being looked at because they deem no value there. They don’t go out to get a second opinion. It’s a collaborative mindset that the value isn’t there until the trees are 50 years old.”

Melcher, who bemoans the waste that occurred in the 2003 B&B Complex Fire – “the value of that forest was so much” – said he believes thinning would “definitely” offset such fires on the west side of the Cascades.

Before the white men took over, “on the east side, fires swept through and kept the forests clean every five or 10 years,” he said. “On the west side, a 100-year event took the forest down and it started over. The Douglas fir is the predominant species (on the west side) and it needs replacement to grow. It won’t grow under another tree.”

The Melchers’ thinning projects have included the Mt. Pisgah restoration outside Eugene, where they removed some oak trees on top of the mountain.

“There were people not happy with what we were doing, but the majority were aware of the project, why it was being done, and they accepted it very well,” Melcher said.

“I’ve put myself in some pretty high-profile projects, and I have yet to come away with any real negative results or feedback. It’s always been a positive.

“If anything, I’ve witnessed compromise. I feel compromise is possible and that the majority of us understand the need to manage the forests and it’s the few on the extreme that don’t see how we can compromise.

Melcher said he’s seeing trust increasing among U.S. Forest Service officials and environmentalists as they see the value of forest thinning.

“With environmental quality and positive results, they’re seeing the need to make (thinning) pay,” he said. “Diameters are going up. It’s still not paying, but it’s getting closer.”