By Tim Cox, TimberWest Magazine
January 24, 2025
Published Dec 16, 2024 in TimberWest Magazine and ForestNet.com.
Bellemont, Arizona – Restoration Forest Products Group is ramping up production of a new sawmill in Arizona, an ambitious undertaking linked directly to restoring the health of national forest lands in the region. The mill is also notable for its centerpiece machine centers supplied by Wood-Mizer.
“As Arizona’s largest forest restoration organization, we operate the largest single sawmill ever constructed in the state of Arizona,” said Tony Flagor, CEO of Restoration Forest Products. “Our goal is to build an organization that efficiently utilizes fiber from the world’s largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest – 2.4 million acres – in a way that adds value to the communities, state, and the organization.”
The road to where it is now had some bumps and hurdles. Restoration Forest Products Group was founded in 2008 as a sustainable forestry and wood products manufacturing company. It has undergone many iterations to become what it is now. In January this year the company initiated a consensual prepackaged court-supervised process under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code; it emerged from Chapter 11 in April. Now the company has a “much stronger balance sheet to ensure this important work continues,” said Flagor, who joined the company in January.
Bellemont is located in north-central Arizona, about 13 miles west of Flagstaff. The mill – real estate and mill equipment – represents a capital investment in excess of $300 million. The company had developed a temporary mill before committing to one site and pooling resources to equip one facility for all its sawmill and remanufacturing operations.
The company purchased a vacant building that was previously used as an industrial paper products finishing plant. The 425,000-square-foot plant is located on 35 acres, and the company leases 40 adjoining acres for its log yard.
The last major piece of equipment – a debarker — was installed in September. “We have been operating the facility as a complete operation for just a few weeks,” Flagor said when he talked with TimberWest in early November, “making incredible improvements in safety, production, quality, and product value.” When operating a peak capacity, the plant is expected to process about 120 million board feet of ponderosa pine annually. The equipment is designed to operate two shifts in the sawmill, planer mill, and the engineered wood products facility.
Restoration Forest Products, a member of the Western Wood Products Association, has about 170 employees but expects to employ just over 200 when the mill is operating at full capacity; about 140 people work in the mill facilities, and the other 30 are employed in the logging and trucking operations.
“Our company’s mission was to establish an operation that enhances forest restoration capacity within the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) footprint, contributing to the cumulative industry capacity needed to achieve the initial 4FRI goal of treating 50,000 acres per year,” said Flagor.
The 4FRI is an initiative of the U.S. Forest Service. Four national forests spanning 2.4 million acres – the Kaibab, Coconino, Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto – are engaged in a collaborative, landscape-scale effort designed to restore fire-adapted ecosystems. The forests have been degraded by unsustainable historical land uses and fire exclusion. The result is overgrown forests with thin, unhealthy trees and the threat of unnaturally severe wildfires, which have burned over a quarter million acres in surrounding Coconino County since 2010.
Through ongoing cooperation with a diverse group of stakeholders, the four forests are working to plan and carry out landscape-scale restoration of the ponderosa pine forests in northern Arizona. Appropriately-scaled business and industry will play a key role in this effort by harvesting, processing, and selling wood products. This will reduce treatment costs and provide restoration-based work opportunities that will create jobs.
The plant is dedicated exclusively to processing ponderosa pine. Log specs are 5-20 inches in diameter and up to 16 feet in length. “The mill was specifically designed with the forest’s tree stand profiles in mind, enabling us to best serve our mission of restoration,” said Flagor.
Logs are sourced 100 percent from the U.S. Forest Service and the national forest lands. “Our relationships with Region 3 of the U.S. Forest Service, other Forest Service personnel, and the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management are incredible,” said Flagor. “They have been better partners than I ever imagined. We fully understand that as partners, we share the same mission: solving the wildfire crises in Arizona, protecting the state’s watersheds, and safeguarding our communities.”
Besides harvesting timber on national forest lands, the company also buys gate logs from independent logging contractors. Flagor refers to them as “Restoration” contractors. “Our logging ‘Restoration Partners’ and contracting partners are essential to this critical journey.”
“Our build was extremely unique in nature,” said Flagor. The company turned to Wood-Mizer for new equipment for primary breakdown, edging, and gang sawing, and invested in a new planer from Gilbert, a Canadian manufacturer. Most of the remaining equipment was purchased in used condition and refurbished prior to installation. “We partnered with a variety of sub-contractors,” said Flagor. A company employee oversaw the project and installation.
Wood-Mizer built its reputation on portable band sawmills but has moved into the arena of manufacturing industrial sawmill equipment. The decision to invest in Wood-Mizer equipment, made before Flagor joined the company, “was unique in nature,” he noted. “It posed an opportunity with innovation to handle the diameter distribution and length structure that we required.” With two primary breakdown systems, two gang saws and two board edgers, the company can simultaneously cut a range of different thickness material. “It gives us that flexibility.”
Wood-Mizer industrial products are heavy-duty solutions for high-throughput sawmill applications. They are designed to operate as standalone units that can be used in existing saw lines or form an entire line that can be customized.
The Wood-Mizer TV6000 – the mill has two of them – features heavy duty, automated infeed and outfeed systems. It can handle small to medium diameter logs with a maximum length of nearly 22 feet. The twin band mills achieve equal open face cutting using a fast, accurate log loading system coupled with pressurized hold-down rollers and a sharp feed chain.
The mill is currently taking cut-to-length 16-foot logs, so no log merchandiser is needed.
Logs being processed first go through a Nicholson A5 debarker. From the debarker, logs are fed to one of the two Wood-Mizer TV6000 systems for primary and secondary breakdown. Lindex chip heads from Lindsay Forest Products open two faces on the log, and Wood-Mizer vertical twin band mills remove a flitch on each side. The side boards are routed to a Wood-Mizer EA6000 edger.
The two-sided cants produced from each line are turned onto a side merge onto the same cant deck and are conveyed on a single belt line. They are fed to one of two Wood-Mizer ‘bull’ edgers that squares the cant and feeds it inline to a Wood-Mizer MR6000 gang saw.
The lumber travels to a tong loader and trimmer before it is collected in a 32-bin sorter. Packets of lumber are dropped and transferred to a sticker-stacker in preparation for kiln-drying.
All the lumber production processes are optimized with Joe Scan scanners and Nelson Brothers optimization.
All lumber production is kiln-dried in the company’s 12 new Nyle front-loading kilns, which are heated with gas. Drying cycles range from three to five days. The 12 kilns have a combined annual drying capacity of 120 million board feet.
Kiln-dried lumber is fed to a tilt-hoist to remove stickers and then a Gilbert high-speed planer for surfacing. The surfaced lumber is read by a Comact scanner before a drag-chain bin sorter, and the finished lumber is eventually stacked, packaged, and banded.
The mill also has extensive equipment and remanufacturing operations to produce engineered wood products and pattern stock. Finished lumber is graded to optimize three chop lines cutting material to feed a 24-foot finger jointing line, and additional chop saw lines equipped with WEINIG and Paul Saws machine. Other equipment includes horizontal resaws for rough face and specialty cuts, multi-rips, two moulders, and edge gluing. The mill also has a paint line.
Target products include premium fascia, patterns, specialty cut stock, and boards. “We are exploring options to supply feed stock to large, established organizations,” said Flagor, “helping to leverage their success and build strong partnerships.”
The region’s ponderosa pine grows at elevations from 7-11,000 feet. “We offer a unique, tight grained, slow-grown product,” said Flagor. “Our vision is to focus on balanced boards and specialty products, leveraging a variety of avenues to market.”
Cut-to-length logging is done by logging contractors. Some Restoration Forest Products crews work behind company loggers or contract loggers to clean up sites and prepare them for replanting.
The company’s wood crews are equipped with a John Deere feller buncher, John Deere and Cat loaders, and three grinders: two CBI machines and a Vermeer grinder. The trucking operations have 14 semi-tractors and 23 trailers, an assortment of chip vans and log trailers.
The company’s mission statement calls for sustainably managing forests “to mitigate wildfires and protect watersheds, enhancing community safety and promoting economic growth.”
It has been a challenging project, observed Flagor. “Building a sawmill in a state that hasn’t had a facility of any scale since the early 1990s — with employees who have never worked in the industry, utilizing experimental sawmill equipment, and relying 100 percent on U.S. Forest Service timber supplies — has been a Herculean task. The incredible commitment, dedication, and clarity of vision by all stakeholders have led us to where we are today.”
Flagor has 25 years of experience in sawmill operations, including plant and production management positions at Boise Cascade, Interfor, Roseburg Forest Products, Swanson Group and Potlatch. He previously worked as a region manager for Boise Cascade, responsible for operations across five mills in Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
“As a restoration company, we are changing forest management with a first-of-its-kind restoration scorecard that involves all partners, ensuring our restoration standards exceed all stakeholder expectations.”