By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber and builder Pat Clark and other investors announced Thursday a joint venture to create a new mass timber production facility to build large format, cross-laminated timber panels in Columbia Falls.

New new company, called Stoltze Timber, will be eventually be located across the road from the the F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber plant. It is a separate venture from the mill itself, noted Paul McKenzie, resource manager at F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber. 

Cross-laminated wood is wood that is, in essence, glued together by a press under extremely high pressure, typically to create a beam or a panel.

Smartlam, another Columbia Falls firm, has been building a similar product for years now, but this new venture targets the use of small trees that produce a smaller lam that is then glued together to create high-strength panels made of wood, suitable for homebuilding and other construction products.

Smartlam utilizes regular dimension lumber, like two-by-fours.

Clark said he’s been in talks with Stoltze leadership for several years on such a facility. A builder, he’s been working with cross-laminated timber products for decades now, he said in a recent interview.

Initially, the company could manufacture products here from panels imported from Europe, he said. The Stoltze lumber mill will produce the lams as well.

“The timber industry has been struggling for years to find a viable matched end-use for our high-value wood coming out of Montana because we’ve been operating in a commodity-based market when in reality our Montana timber is far superior. With our new plant, we’ll be solving many problems across many interest groups as we’re helping to mitigate the overabundance of small-diameter timber in our forests that currently have limited marketable value, for one. Secondly, we’re offering a whole build system that is efficient to construct, sustainable for the resource, and fundamentally a better way to build. The effort of removing that small tree is now mirrored by a superior, high-value product with high demand.” McKenzie said.

Small diameter wood is anything less than 10 inches in diameter at breast height. Local woods, particularly those that have seen forest fires, are often choked with smaller trees.

“Our goal is to utilize as many local species as possible,” Clark said.

McKenzie said the company will look to break ground sometime next spring or early summer. It’s still working on its capital plan.

The plant would be built in a phased approach.

How many people would be employed and the cost of the plant depends on the phasing and capital, both Clark and McKenzie noted, but McKenzie said it “wasn’t a huge investment.”

“We’re trying to do it in a smart and reasoned way,” he added.

Clark said the potential of CLT is to penetrate between 5 and 15 percent of the construction market, most notably the brick and mortar-type buildings that utilize a lot of steel and concrete.

The idea is to “bring value to Montana wood it deserves,” McKenzie noted.

Douglas fir and larch are known for their strength and resiliency, but they’re also a slow-growing tree, taking about 70 to 80 years to grow large enough to be sawlog size.