Gravina Island Mill Owner Hardened By Hardship

By Paula Dobbyn, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

Jan. 29–KETCHIKAN — Steve Seley leaves home in the cold darkness of a winter morning and briskly walks to the water’s edge. Chilly fog envelops a fleet of tugboats moored to a dock at the back of his house. Seley, 52, hops into a skiff and motors across Tongass Narrows to his sawmill on Gravina Island.

It’s time for work.

On the opposite shore, Seley, an Alaska entrepreneur who dodged disaster in an industry that has toppled most others, ties up the boat and slides into a pickup, his dog beside him. Wearing hickory shirt and suspenders — the logger’s uniform — Seley steers the truck up a muddy hill to his mill.

Giant piles of old growth logs lie stacked across the 30-acre site. Back in December, men were driving loaders, plucking and moving logs like toothpicks to different sections of the mill where others transformed the spruce, hemlock and cedar into lumber products, including railroad ties and boards for doors and window frames.

Twenty-three people worked at the mill — one of the few left in Southeast — up until Christmas. It’s closed now, the latest victim of Alaska’s bitter logging wars.

For more than three decades, Seley has made his living off the Tongass National Forest, a 17 million-acre temperate rain forest and national headline grabber for its vicious timber fights.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the Southeast logging industry thrived. Thousands worked in the woods as loggers or skilled laborers at two big pulp mills.

Then the ground shifted.

In the last decade, market forces, political pressures and environmental lawsuits have whittled Alaska’s timber industry to its hard-luck status of today.

Until recently, Seley survived through risk-taking, hard work and vision. He gutted it out through rocky periods, executed dreams and branched out into other businesses to keep his cash flowing.

But Seley’s company, Pacific Log & Lumber, hit bottom in early January. After two years of losses, a crucial timber sale he was counting on didn’t come through on time and Seley decided to close his sawmill, maybe permanently. He blames it on red tape with the U.S. Forest Service, the agency that manages the Tongass, the nation’s biggest forest.

“The situation is so damn bad,” Seley said.

The closure of Seley’s mill took politicians, environmentalists and industry supporters by surprise.

Seley’s reputation is that of someone who can pull things off when few others can.

A timber guy who grew up in Southeast logging camps, Seley is known as an innovator and maverick. He develops unique products with Tongass wood and finds new markets across the globe. Seley was one of the first Southeast timber operators to buy a dry kiln and start making lumber and other niche products after the pulp mill closed.

Unlike others in his industry, Seley gets things done by courting bureaucrats and environmentalists alike.

“He’s an exceptional deal-cutter,” said Tim Bristol, head of Trout Unlimited in Alaska, who has hammered out compromises with Seley on thorny timber fights.

“He knows how to reach out to all the interested parties out there: from the real, died-in-the-wool, cut-it-all-down types to people in the conservation community.”

He also plays hardball.

Seley said he hopes the recent mill closure will pressure the Forest Service to get out the cut so he can reopen.

“Our industry has been Mr. Nice Guy for too long,” he said. “We’re part of the problem.”

Seley’s roots in the Southeast rain forest run deep.

He was 2 when his parents moved to Hollis, a remote hamlet on Prince of Wales Island near Ketchikan.

The family moved up from Morton, Wash., a logging town in the Cascade Mountains.

It was 1955 and Gerald Steve Seley accepted a job as a road construction supervisor for Ketchikan Pulp Co., whose big new mill would turn Tongass trees into pulp for Asian buyers and help build a new industry for the territory. Hundreds of people were flocking to Southeast for logging and mill jobs.

The family moved to Thorne Bay around 1961 because the pulp mill needed a logging camp there and Seley’s father helped build it.

Seley always had a knack for making money, according to his 82-year-old mother, Jan Seley. He ran a trap line to help pay for school clothes. He delivered newspapers and groceries and hauled garbage in a flatbed truck. “He’s always been all business,” said Jan, who lives next door to Seley about five miles from downtown.

Seley grew his businesses with his wife, Lin.

“I cut timber. She ran the yarder and did the bookkeeping,” Seley recalled.

The two were sweethearts in tiny Thorne Bay. When she got pregnant, the couple wed in 1972. She was 17. He was 19.

“Lin was pregnant and out there in the skiff pushing the logs around,” recalled her mother-in-law. “She worked with him every day.”

The Seleys built a business servicing floating log camps owned by the pulp mill.

“We would travel from camp to camp,” maintaining and repairing the floating structures, Seley said. “If we were short on money, I’d fall timber for six or seven hours in the day and work on the floats at night.”

During the winter off-season, the couple would go to Ketchikan and build houses. “All we had was the ability to think and work hard. That’s how we got started,” he said.

Lin Seley declined to be interviewed. People who know her say she is extremely private.

“She’s always in the background,” said George Lybrand, 83, a Ketchikan road-builder and assemblyman who has known Seley for more than two decades. “She’s the steadying influence. He’s more flamboyant.”

Before it closed, Seley’s mill produced lumber for doors and window frames made in the Lower 48 and sailboat masts in Europe. His lumber was also made into siding, decking, rail ties and even hot-tubs.

This winter, before the shutdown, Seley was planning a business trip to China to open a new market.

“We have agents everywhere,” Seley said.

A pipe-smoking Dutch wood importer spent several days in mid-December inspecting and purchasing logs at Seley’s mill. He’s been buying wood from Seley for several years now and is completely enamored.

“We opened up a log today and my heart started beating,” said John Lammerts van Bueren.

The grain was exquisite.

Van Bueren buys kiln-dried Sitka spruce from Seley and sells it in Europe to boat builders who make masts and spars from the wood. The Dutch yacht racer said he contacted several log sellers in Southeast but Seley was the only one interested in working with him.

That’s typical Seley.

“He has a completely different marketing strategy than the others,” said Owen Graham, executive director of the Alaska Forest Association, a trade group.

But recent times have been tough. In 2005, Seley estimates the sawmill lost $800,000 on $8 million in revenue. He also lost hundreds of thousands in 2004.

The latest blow was a timber sale Seley had expected the Forest Service to release months ago. The agency, for a variety of reasons, has yet to offer it.

“The last 14 months have been the worst I’ve ever been through,” Seley said.

Although the sawmill is in the red, Seley wants to keep it alive.

“I’ve been in timber all my life. It’s a pride deal,” he said.

Logging and mills once employed thousands of people, making timber a cornerstone of Southeast’s economy.

It’s largely dead now.

In 2005, about 50 million board feet were logged off the Tongass, about a tenth of the volume in the pulp mill era.

A new industry — one that manufactures lumber and other wood products, and not pulp — has struggled to take shape.

Besides Seley’s operation, there’s only a medium-sized sawmill in Klawock and another in Wrangell. There’s a smaller one in Hoonah and a few tinier ones yet scattered on Prince of Wales. About 400 people work in timber now compared to nearly 10 times that number in 1990, according to state labor economists.

As the industry he grew up in withered, Seley maneuvered around obstacles. He transitioned from cutting logs and repairing floating camps to running a sawmill in Wrangell and branching out into nonlumber businesses.

He ran the Ketchikan shipyard for a while, developed real estate and ran barges and tugs. He built a sportfishing lodge, Salmon Falls Resort, to teach his sons construction skills.

But timber is his first love. And Seley was one of the few to embrace “value-added” processing as his industry’s future — a mantra of politicians and environmentalists in the late 1990s. Instead of selling large volumes of logs as a raw commodity to be processed out of state, the strategy was to cut less and turn it into products that would create more jobs for every foot of timber cut.

Seley realized he needed to adapt.

“We couldn’t stay in the Dark Ages,” Seley said.

He secured a $800,000 loan from the local borough, put up $800,000 of his own money and built the Gravina mill in 1997, the same year the big Ketchikan pulp mill closed. Between land improvements, equipment and other assets, Seley figures the mill is an $8.6 million investment.

“He’s incredibly visionary,” said Bill Green, operations manager who has worked for Seley for nearly 30 years. “He’ll make a major capital expenditure based on things he sees in the future.”

As he walks around the mill, Seley’s 2-and-a-half-year old border collie, Byrde, follows him everywhere. She sprints around the heavy equipment, as if herding the big machines.

A typical border collie, Byrde is constantly moving and thinking, plotting her next move.

Seley’s the same, people who know him say.

“He has to have a project,” said Green, standing in the cold December drizzle he’s been working in for hours. “He doesn’t like to be idle.”

Seley stays up late and gets up early, Green said. He works weekends, too.

“He hates holidays,” Green said.

Why? No work.

But Seley doesn’t view what he does as work.

“It’s what I like to do,” he said.

Some who have done business with him say he’s a penny-pincher. Larry Jackson, a crab fisherman who also runs a small sawmill inside an old Ketchikan Pulp warehouse, said Seley once called him up to get a quote on some lumber.

Jackson had bought the wood from Seley and had run it through a planer. Seley was apparently thinking of buying and selling the finished product. Jackson came up with a rough estimate, one Seley thought was too high.

“I gave him a price and he read me the riot act,” said Jackson, 38.

Jackson, who grew up in Ketchikan, described Seley as “ruthless” and “a control freak.”

But like others, he admires Seley.

“He never loses.”

“He one of the most intelligent persons I’ve ever met,” said Lybrand. “There’s nothing he won’t tackle.”

“You hear a lot of people bad mouth Steve. But a lot of it is envy.”

Seley acknowledges he can be a taskmaster. The workday starts at 7 a.m. and it’s over when the work’s done, regardless of when. He also has high expectations.

“There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake. Just don’t make the same mistake twice,” he said.

Many of his employees have worked for him for decades, said Seley. He points to Green, his longtime operations manager, as an example.

“If I tell him to jab a bear with a stick, he’ll do it.”

Green said Seley’s a good boss and he’s used to working long hours. But Green draws the line at holidays and said he needs more time at home with family than Seley.

“I’ve never known him to take time off. He’s solely committed to his work,” Green said.

“He’s not much of a family man.”

There have been times, though, when family came first.

He and wife lost their youngest son, Rex, in an all-terrain vehicle accident in 1992 when the boy was 16. Seley keeps a portrait of Rex on his office wall.

The couple’s other child, also a boy, almost died four years ago.

Steve “Hap” Seley Jr., 32, had his skull partly crushed in an industrial accident at the family’s Gravina Island mill. He was medically evacuated to Seattle.

When doctors gave the young man a poor prognosis for recovery, Seley got him to respond by writing messages on his father’s hand with his finger.

When Hap was well enough to talk, Seley said, his son basically kicked him out.

“He said, ‘Dad, you got to find something else to do. You’re driving me crazy.’ “

After what he’s gone through with his kids, Seley said, Tongass timber fights don’t ruffle him any more.

“If you need something done in the timber business, I’m your guy. But I don’t lose any sleep over it,” Seley said. “I say, ‘People, you can’t upset me. To lose one boy and almost lose another, this is water off a duck’s back.’ “

Like anyone who has cut timber commercially in the Tongass, Seley has tussled with conservationists.

But he tends to use diplomacy to work things out. Unlike others in timber, who are bitter about what’s happened to their industry and deeply distrust environmentalists, Seley manages to talk to his critics, despite the different viewpoints.

“He’s one of the few mill operators who has a rapport with the environmental community,” said state Labor Commissioner Greg O’Claray, who has known Seley since the 1980s and refurbished a tugboat at his dock.

With timber politics as polarized as ever, that dialogue has made some suspicious of Seley.

“Some of them in the industry think I’m the black sheep,” Seley said.

Environmentalists started talking to Seley in the late 1990s when the pulp mill was closing and many recognized that the industry would have to adapt to survive. The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, the largest environmental group in the panhandle, began calling Seley. He listened and also talked about the ins and outs of running a logging and lumber operation, said Buck Lindekugel, conservation director of SEACC.

“We started exchanging information,” he said.

Seley has bid on timber sales that environmentalists have opposed. Instead of fighting costly court battles, conservationists and Seley on several occasions have compromised. SEACC withdrew its objections to certain timber sales in exchange for Seley walking away from other controversial projects.

He makes calculated decisions that are in his best interest financially, Lindekugel said.

Seley said his approach to logging is to work in the least controversial area.

“I hunt and fish. I love it out there and I don’t like clear-cuts more than anyone else,” he said.

Seley described some of the people he has met at SEACC over the years as “goofy.” Others he considers friends.

“They’re old hippies. They like wood.”

At the moment, it’s not environmentalists he’s battling. It’s the Tongass’ federal landlords.

The Forest Service’s inability to provide timber to the region’s few sawmills left is “deplorable,” Seley said.

Tongass supervisor Forrest Cole acknowledges that his agency has problems providing a steady supply of timber to mills like Seley’s. He cites a combination of bureaucracy, a culture that’s slow to change and a steady tide of environmental appeals and lawsuits.

Seley asks him to forecast the timber supply so he can plan and Cole said he can’t.

“Seley’s point is: ‘Tell me what the future is going to be for the next few years,’ ” Cole said. “He’s got several opportunities but the future is uncertain.”

If the mill stays closed, it’s the employees, not him, who suffer, Seley said.

“I’ll be hurt but I can live through it. It’s not going to change my way of life. My family is raised. The big impact is going to hit the employees, especially the younger ones who have kids,” he said.

“I’m 52 and there’s a lot of other things I can do.”

Such as?

“Dig up gold, or find sunken ships or fly airplanes,” Seley said.

He’s only half joking.

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