Working in the thickly wooded foothills east of Echo Lake, Jerry Okonski is using what he has termed “artisan forestry” to manage an 80-acre swath of forest spanning seven different property owners.

“The ecology of these forests is based on fire, but we’re kind of miniaturizing the treatment of the land,” says Okonski, a 30-year veteran of the timber and forestry industry.

“It’s not just the health of the forest — a lot of people like the depth, being able to see into their forest, see different birds and wildlife.”

Okonski and his business partner, Chris Evans, own Great Northern Land Services, a contracting company that custom-designs management plans for forest land owners.

The two-man crew begins by surveying the land, analyzing existing fire hazards and using Evans’ “eye for trees” to select the best specimens based on health, proximity to structures and other trees, species diversity and a variety of ages.

The owner of one 40-acre parcel, a California-based physician and mechanical engineer, owns a cabin dating back to the 1970s, built over a two-week period with a few friends.

“That house is an old, dry, wood frame,” Okonski said. “It would go up in seconds, and he knows it.”  

Great Northern is working to create a fire-safe forest around the octagonal home, and Okonski keeps up with commercial timber prices to try to give the landowner the most dollars per tree.

This style of forest treatment isn’t cheap, but the timber can help offset some of the expense. The homeowner also is getting help from the state’s Forests in Focus program, which is funding millions of dollars in forest management to prevent fires, buoy the timber industry and improve habitat and water quality.

The doctor is out, but Okonski says he has expressed nothing but gratitude for his work.

Each project begins with a survey of existing conditions, identifying fire hazards such as tree proximity, ladder fuels (including parasitic mistletoe and mid-sized flora that allow a wildfire to jump from the ground into the treetops), along with age distribution and species diversity, which can go a long way to preventing devastating insect and disease outbreaks.

“You have to earn a level of trust with them,” Evans notes. “When it’s all done, not only are they happy, but they’ll say, ‘I didn’t even know we had this beautiful larch, or that beautiful white pine here.’”

There’s no one-size-fits-all plan, however, and Okonski explains that every landowner wants something different. At another place down the road, he’s managing a separate forest for a landowner looking to develop a stand of white pines resistant to blister rust disease.

Open patches of scarified soil are scattered among the larches and white pines to allow the latter to seed those areas.

For another landowner, it was all about the view.

He found a picture taken from his house 30 years ago — showing the Mission Mountains rising above a break in the forest canopy — and asked Okonski to replicate it. The forester surveyed and logged a patch of forest about a hundred yards from the house, and expects that in time it will grow to fit the homeowner’s vision.

Walking along a dirt road that doubles as a property line, Okonski points to one side of the road where thinning has been undertaken in multiple phases.

“This lady, she never had never cut a single tree until three years ago. It was a big leap of faith. ... It’s all about talking to them every day, so they understand exactly what you’re doing and why,” he explains.

Okonski has an obvious commercial interest in converting more landowners, but he also clearly loves his work, which allows him to interact with the far-reaching spectrum of people attracted to Northwest Montana’s wild forests.

Some are more reticent to start chopping down trees than others, but Okonski hopes to eventually develop a landscape-wide fuel break for wildfires extending as far up through the mountains as the North Fork of the Flathead River.

“We want to accomplish something bigger than five acres here, ten acres there,” he says. “It takes some missionary work, but little by little, they’re learning.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com