How This Family Lumberjack is Aiding Arizona's Fire-Prone Forests

Turning a family tradition of forest care into a thriving business

“For me, there’s nothing more important than family,” Suarez says. Although he went to college for political science and later graduated from law school, he knew all along that what he really wanted to do was start a timber business. “I envisioned it as a family company,” he says. “Being able to provide better opportunities, better pay, better benefits.”

In his final year of law school, a representative from The Nature Conservancy reached out to ask if he and his family were available to work on a large-scale forest restoration project. Suarez seized the opportunity to launch his company. He withdrew his life savings, while his mom cashed out her retirement. It was a big risk. The machinery they rented was expensive, roughly $30,000 a month, and so was the fuel to run it.

At the beginning, the going was tough but manageable—until the sawmill that TNC had contracted with shut down. “All of sudden, instead of taking logs 15 miles down the road … you have to take them 160, 170 miles down the road,” Suarez says. If not for TNC, which made sure his company continued to get paid, “we would have gone under as well.”

From tinderboxes to healthy forestland

Suarez’s company had its work cut out for it. Arizona is home to the world’s largest ponderosa pine forest, which sprawls from the Grand Canyon into New Mexico. But the forest’s enormous size belies its flagging health.

Historically, there were between five and 150 ponderosa pines per acre, says Thomas “Timber Tom” Dauenhauer, a Forest Service representative who has worked with Suarez on multiple projects. Now, after decades of wildfire suppression, that number is as high as 1,500. A decades-long drought is stressing trees even further, turning Arizona’s forests into tinderboxes.

Selective logging restores historical forest structure by leaving the healthiest and largest trees while harvesting the rest. This gives the remaining pines the room they need to thrive. “After we cut off competition, there’s more soil, more moisture, more sunlight,” Dauenhauer says. “If they’re young enough,” he says, “they’ll put on some pretty significant height.”

Forest thinning also frees up water resources, rejuvenating springs and streams that have dried up. According to TNC research, forest thinning results in up to 20% more water returning to waterways and aquifers.

Turning low-value trees into electricity

Suarez works with TNC to help implement the Forest Service’s Four Forest Restoration Initiative. 4FRI is working to restore 2.4 million acres of ponderosa pineland in four national forests in Arizona—the Kaibab, Coconino, Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto. The initiative uses a mix of tree thinning, tree planting, prescribed fire and other interventions to tame the ferocity of wildfires and fortify forests against the effects of a changing climate.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act are key contributors to 4FRI. Between 2021 and 2024, these two laws contributed significant funds to the overall initiative, resulting in a large number of acres restored in a relatively short time span.

To help finance the costs of restoration work, 4FRI is looking to create new uses and markets for the harvested trees. But there’s a catch. Ponderosa pine is a low-value wood. The logs Suarez harvests are “almost economically nonviable,” he says, and the long distances his team must haul them to sawmills sends costs spiraling.

One solution is to turn the harvested pines into electricity. In 2024, a $2 million IRA grant financed the Sawmill Springs Biomass Pilot, which gathered data on biomass removal while thinning 685 acres in the Kaibab National Forest. Rather than processing the larger trunks for timber, and piling branches and smaller trees to be burned on-site, the entirety of every tree was ground into chips. These chips were then trucked to Novo Biopower, an electricity-generating facility in Snowflake, Ariz. Suarez’s company cut the trees, while another company chipped them.

The results from the project are still being analyzed, but one finding was immediately clear: treating the trees as biomass alone saves a significant amount of time. On a project of this size, the harvesting portion alone would normally take between six and nine months. For the pilot, harvesting was completed in under 50 days.

For Joel Jurgens, the forest program director for TNC in Arizona, the project highlights the need to construct local biomass facilities, which would save the considerable expense of trucking wood chips long distances. “Building infrastructure in western Arizona to support local biomass conversion could be a game-changer,” he says.

Arizona’s forests depend on foresters. Foresters depend on political support.

Suarez emphasizes how important the IRA and other conservation investments are to his business. His message to lawmakers? “I want them to be aware of how those funds have helped,” he says.

Suarez estimates his company has tripled its capacity to thin forested acres since its launch, making it one of the top logging businesses in Arizona. But it still faces many challenges. The company struggles to retain workers who can handle the exhausting hours and long stretches of time living in RVs in remote areas. “Family members are the ones that stuck around,” Suarez says. “Everyone else comes and goes.”

At the same time, the Forest Service lacks the capacity and resources to assign work to contractors at the pace and scale needed to tackle the enormity of the forest health problem. Suarez says he’s heartened by the fact that state agencies in Arizona now have the authority to administer Forest Service projects, which will increase the rate of ponderosa restoration.

In addition, a 2024 agreement with the Forest Service allows TNC to carry out forest restoration work on all Forest Service lands in Arizona and New Mexico, as well as utilize Forest Service funds to support this work on lands managed by states, tribes and other federal agencies.

Suarez says his company is eager to help. “We’re here, we’re available, we’re ready to keep going.”