Guest Essay by Brian Wheeler
There’s a juniper on the edge of a hillside in the Pioneer Mountains that was never going to make it into a lumberyard. It grew too slow, too crooked, too stubborn—the kind of tree that land managers mark for removal because it’s crowding out the grasses and forbs that the high country depends on. Fire mitigation. Conifer encroachment control. The language is technical, but the result is simple: the tree comes down, waterways & wildlife benefit, but otherwise it just lays there.
I decided about 5 years ago that I’d rather develop the skills to turn it into something.
That’s the whole premise behind Wheeler Wood Works—not a sawmill in the conventional sense, not a timber operation, and definitely not a factory. It’s closer to salvage work with a craft bent. I run a chainsaw and an Alaskan Mill. I air-dry slabs in a 10’ x 20’ carport tent behind my place in Dillon and on my mom’s 10-acres in rural Missouri. I trade favors to friends who lend me their backs for a day or two to drag logs out of the woods. What I produce are pieces made from wood that most people would have written off: burned, blown down, bored through by beetles, or stacked by the road after a storm.
Each has a story that runs a lot deeper than its grain pattern.
Blue Pine: The Beetle’s Signature
If you’ve driven through the mountain west in the last twenty years, you know what a beetle kill looks like. Swaths of rust-red standing timber across the hillsides, whole drainages of ponderosa and lodgepole that went from green to grey in a matter of seasons. The mountain pine beetle didn’t ask for permission, and it didn’t leave much behind that the timber industry wanted.
What it did leave behind was blue pine—lumber stained a deep, streaking blue-grey by the fungi the beetles carry with them. The stain doesn’t affect structural integrity. It’s just the tree recording what happened to it, the way scar tissue tells a story on skin. To me, that’s not a defect. That’s the whole point.
I work with logs that never made it to a sawyer—wind-thrown trees, hazard trees near structures, timber that would otherwise go to the burn pile. In fact, I come across a lot of it while cutting firewood, usually while I’m still short a cord or two for the winter, but dammit, sometimes it’s just too pretty to be firewood! The slabs that come out of that work carry color that no stain can replicate. Every piece is genuinely one of a kind, and I mean that in the most literal sense: once the tree is gone, that particular combination of blue streak and growth ring pattern is gone with it.
Juniper: Fire Country Wood
Juniper is a species that most Montanans walk past without a second thought or bemoan as a groundwater glutton, and rightfully so. But it was also the raw material for a lot of my early epoxy pieces. It grows in places that have been increasingly overrun at the expense of open rangeland and native understory. Land managers have been pushing back on that encroachment for years, which means a lot of juniper comes down in the name of watershed health, wildlife forage, and fire risk reduction.
When you open one of those trees up on a mill, you find something worth keeping. Juniper has an aromatic grain—reddish-pink heartwood that
transitions to a creamy sapwood in a way that looks almost intentional, like the tree planned it. It has the smell of backcountry potpourri.
Ozark Hardwoods: Storm Salvage from Home Country
The other side of this operation lives about 1,500 miles southeast, in the hills and hollers of southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas. That’s where I have extended family scattered across the Ozark highlands. And out there in the part of the country that sits squarely in tornado alley, storms have a way of taking trees that had no business coming down.
White oak, red oak, black walnut. These are trees that can take a century to reach a usable size, and when a storm drops one across a fence line or a field, the instinct is usually to cut it up and move it. That’s where I come in. Friends and family call when a big storm disrupts life in the Ozarks, and I make the trip. I mill the logs on-site because they’re usually too heavy to move, sticker and stack and stage them, and eventually haul them back to Montana.
Black walnut has a color to it that’s simply hard to overstate. The heartwood goes from chocolate to near-purple depending on how the light hits it, and it takes sanding and finishing in a way that makes you understand why craftsmen have chased it for generations. White oak is more subtle—an open grain with a cathedral figure in the right pieces that can stop you mid-stroke when you’re planing it. Red oak smells a bit funny at first, runs a little coarser, a little more rustic, but I happen to think it’s downright warm and lovely. These are old trees with history, and a lot of my recent attention has been pulled this direction. Turns out, it doesn’t take much arm twisting to coax my family into helping me with the logging if there’s a promise of a visit….
The Work Itself
None of this process is fast. Air-drying hardwood slabs properly takes a year, sometimes two. Getting around after storm damage in the Ozarks isn’t exactly easy - it means working on uneven ground with the copperheads and more ticks than you’ve ever seen. The Alaskan Mill setup itself requires patience and a tolerance for sawdust in places you’d rather not find it. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Satisfaction in this kind of work is directly proportional to how inconvenient the process is. Slabbing open a log you’ve dragged out of the woods and finding something beautiful inside—that’s the payoff. I still get giddy about what we’ll find inside of a gnarled or ugly log once that first scrap slab comes off. It doesn’t get old. Neither does the knowledge that the material wouldn’t be anything other than smoke or rot if somebody hadn’t figured it might be worth something. And if it’s inconvenient to get to, well, even better…. no competition.
I know that the pieces I make aren’t for everyone—and that’s fine. They’re not perfect. They have character, which is a polite word for “the tree didn’t cooperate” or “oops.” Some slabs have checks on the ends. Some have bark inclusions or wormholes. I leave a lot of that in, because sanding it out would be dishonest. The wood earned those marks.
The people who should own these pieces understand that provenance matters. That a cutting board made from a black walnut tree that survived a hundred years in the Ozarks before a tornado took it down is different from one made from commodity lumber. It carries context that you can’t manufacture and a story that doesn’t need to be explained from scratch, perfectly finished or not.
On the other hand, I always look forward to the conversation that tends to happen when the right piece finds the right person.
Editors’ note: A limited number of pieces hand-made by Brian are available through Burson & Company.