Sunken Treasure

Former river guides find new passion in recycling lumber

written by Paul McHugh, As appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday, June 28, 2003 (edited here for spelling only)

You can make a room in your home look like the inside of an old wine cask.

An unusual design inspiration, to be sure. But that thought came to me quite easily as I admired lovely samples of vertical-grain redwood. I was standing at the TerraMai booth, a highlight of the recent PCBC 2003, the Premier Building Show in San Francisco's Moscone Center.

The rosy redwood panels, stained a light purple by their decades as staves in giant aging casks at Sebastiani Vineyards & Winery, had some elegant company. TerraMai, a reclaimed-wood firm in McCloud (near Mount Shasta), also had on display glossy blocks of beautiful flooring made of recycled tropical hardwoods.

These attractive samples showed that there's a way to enjoy the most attractive woods the earth affords without adding fresh damage to our diminishing supply of old-growth trees.

At TerraMai, you can score clear, dense-grain, ancient redwood without causing a single drop of gas to run through a logger's chain saw.

"From a wood buyer's perspective, this stuff is essentially priceless," says TerraMai co-founder Richard McFarland. "A hundred years ago, it was the best stuff on the market. Now you can hardly find it anywhere."

When Sebastiani, a Sonoma family winery, decided to dismantle and sell its venerable redwood casks (to replace them with modern stainless steel), TerraMai managed to corner the entire supply of nearly 100,000 board-feet.

The expertise and savvy required to do so has been laboriously built up by this firm, which opened in 1991.

The "Aha!" moment that inspired its founding happened when McFarland, now 45, and his wife, Erika Carpenter, 35, had to buy some beams to shore up their McCloud home. They managed to locate a deal on Douglas fir timbers gathered from a dismantled mill, and had them resawn.

"It gradually hit us, O my gosh, these things are beautiful,' " says Carpenter.

They realized that many other home builders might find such high-quality, old-growth wood desirable. They started Jefferson Recycled Woodworks with a small-business loan from a Siskiyou County foundation, added an old Ford flatbed truck donated by their parents, and invigorated the mix with a ton of optimism. Suddenly, this pair of former professional whitewater river guides found themselves nearly over their heads in a whole new realm.

Luckily, they located a ready market for their initial buy of 90,000 board- feet of the fir beams. Thank California's fascination with timber-frame homes - a sort of rustic "chalet" look first championed here decades ago by the architecture of Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck.

McFarland soon realized that a portable bandsaw in his backyard would not suffice as a physical plant. He also saw that the rope-and-pulley system used to rescue whitewater rafts was a poor substitute for a forklift. But the couple persevered and gained experience, gradually adding equipment and employees.

They teamed up with Don Banducci, former owner of the Yakima roof-rack company, and launched AsiaRain in 2000, a companion firm to distribute the tropical hardwoods - acquired from far-flung sources such as demolished South American buildings and old Thai railroad ties. In 2002, Ken Westrick, a former Silicon Valley executive, bought out Banducci's share of AsiaRain. It and Jefferson Recycled were soon folded into TerraMai.

Now the company operates with a dozen employees on an 8-acre site in McCloud, part of the former Champion International timber mill. They use metal detectors to extract bolts and nails, then saw and plane the wood. McFarland estimates an annual churn of 500,000 board-feet (one board-foot is a chunk of wood 12 inches long, 12 inches wide and an inch thick) through the site. About 40 percent of it is old redwood that comes from demolished buildings, wharves and abandoned logging decks out in the forest.

About 30 percent is tropical hardwood. This material, from a wide array of species, is sorted by color and density, to be marketed under labels like Rose Mix, Gold Mix and Cinnamon Mix. Only the recycled Burmese teak is held apart as a unique, unmixable resource. (Teak is in special demand for boat deck, boat trim and other high-exposure uses.)

I found TerraMai when I was on the hunt for reclaimed wood to replace tottering fences around my home. Redwood is by far the best material to use for Northern California fencing, but I refused to participate in the death of any old-growth trees - and most of the fencing currently sawn from third- growth trees is so loaded with white sapwood that it barely has the beauty of redwood, let alone its durability. TerraMai found me some resawn, reclaimed second-growth. I pronounced myself satisfied.

At least, until I saw the fine-grained Sebastiani cask planks. Then I dreamed up a whole new project: paneling a bathroom in this gorgeous stuff and using it to put up bookshelves in my home. The most attractive aspect? It was practically guilt-free.

TerraMai's new co-owner, Westrick, 46, is a Midwesterner with a Stanford MBA who's a veteran of the dot-com boom/bust. After he escaped that industry in 2001 with a nest-egg somewhat intact, he spent nine months searching for his next professional act.

An ardent hiker, Westrick found himself wondering how wood got saved from old structures he passed on his outings, like country barns. A stint of Web-surfing led him to TerraMai's site, where he was especially impressed by finding that McFarland and Carpenter had even figured out how to recycle railroad ties from Thailand.

"I thought, these guys have got to have an adventurous spirit, as well as environmental ethics. They must be good entrepreneurs," Westrick said.

So he signed on to the mission of helping deliver the best woods available, while sustaining all respect due to the natural world. From a management perspective, Westrick believes that using reclaimed wood is a trend that can sweep the nation, becoming a highly visible segment of the forest products industry in about four years.

From their perspective, McFarland and Carpenter proclaim themselves pleased to have gained Westrick's business expertise, as well as the debt-relief scored when he bought up his 50 percent share of TerraMai. But they realize they have their own unique role in the enterprise.

"There's eight other firms about our size competing with us now in the West, where there used to be just one," says Carpenter. "Our edge is that we're really way out there, sourcing. Other buyers may always try to get things arranged in advance, from a distance. We're far more willing to just drop ourselves into a location and start looking for wood. That ability, that attitude is directly related to our old river guide spirit. It's funny how it's all worked out."