Soaring winter temperatures. An atmospheric river that washed out bridges and roads. A massive windstorm that scattered trees like pick-up sticks. Each week in December 2025 seemed to bring new challenges for Northwest Montana’s timber industry.

“This is the weirdest winter I’ve ever seen,” said Cameron Wohlschlegel, the lands and resources manager at F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Company. “It definitely impacted our operations, our ability to harvest. We were actually really concerned we weren’t going to meet our demand.”

He breathed a sigh of relief when cooler temperatures finally arrived in January. By March, Wohlschlegel said the lumber mill was on track to make up the early-season deficit.

He hoped the rash of warm, wet winter weather was a one-year fluke.

Climate scientists warn that it could be the new norm.

Average annual temperatures across western Montana are expected to rise somewhere between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming decades, according to projections from the Montana Climate Office. Winters will become wetter, while summers dry up, and climate “surprises” like floods and extreme thunderstorms will become more frequent, variable and extreme.

The bottom line for loggers, foresters and the lands they work, is greater uncertainty.

SOME FOREST plots can be logged at any time of year. In others, crews have to wait for a specific combination of weather before they can begin operations.

“We need to have enough moisture in the soil. It needs to be cold enough that [the moisture] freeze[s], and usually there’s a minimum snow depth that’s required just to be able to operate,” said Beth Dodson, the chair of the forest management program at the University of Montana.

Those mandates protect sensitive soils from compaction and erosion caused by the heavy machinery used in logging operations. In an era of warming winters, they also mean many logging crews are able to work fewer days. Even when crews can safely fell trees, they may not be able to haul logs out of the forest due to weight restrictions on dirt logging roads.

Warmer winter temperatures can also open the door to what Dodson characterized as “unintended oopsies.”

“A log truck with very good intentions goes in the morning when it’s frozen, but by the time they get back out, it’s not frozen, and that’s when there’s problems,” she said, as an example. “We probably can’t just tell the log truck and the driver to stay where they are for another few days until it freezes again. It’s got to get out and get home.”

Both Flathead and Lincoln counties are expected to gain about 40 freeze-free days by the end of the century, according to projections from the Montana Climate Office.

Steven Struck, the owner of Momentum Logging in Kalispell, said near-record levels of rainfall in December 2025 further contributed to delays in winter harvest operations this season. More than 9 inches of precipitation fell in the Flathead River Basin in December, mostly as rain that soaked into the ground, churning formerly dry soils into pits of mud.

“We try to keep everything as low-impact as possible,” said Struck. “When the ground gets saturated, it makes keeping things at its natural state harder.”

That point was proven when a windstorm blew through Northwest Montana in mid-December. The 60 mph gusts uprooted trees throughout the region, including the section of forest Struck was contracted to thin.

“There were days we couldn’t be up there because it was so violent,” said Struck. “There were trees coming down all around us.”

He kept his crew off the mountain for two days. When they returned, the lot was covered with windthrow.

While blowdowns can provide new opportunities for salvage logging, the erratic positioning of the felled trees can also slow down active forestry operations. Trees not marked for removal are often among the wreckage, requiring foresters to adapt prescriptions to ensure there are enough trees to provide wildlife habitat and other ecosystem services.

In one unit about 10 miles northwest of Condon, at least half of the trees left standing at the end of a recent logging operation were downed by the December windstorm. Mark Benedict, a resident whose property backed up to this section of the Flathead National Forest, surveyed the damage from the crest of hill in late January.

A retired forester and environmental scientist with decades of experience, Benedict had been visiting units logged in the Cold Jim Fuels Reduction and Forest Health Management Project for years to ensure the Forest Service left ample snags for a gray owl family that nested nearby. While he expressed dissatisfaction with some of the other units, he said this one, Unit 9, appeared to be well-thinned when crews wrapped up work in spring of 2024.

“Look at it now,” he said. “Look at all these trees down, my god. This is a very large percentage of the trees that were left that we’re standing in the middle of.”

One of the main objectives of the Cold Jim project was to reduce fuel loads in the forest, but, with so much debris now on the ground, Benedict worried that the area’s fire risk was higher than ever. He doubted the Forest Service had the resources to clean up the unit before summer.

Kira Powell, the public affairs officer for Flathead National Forest, confirmed that several areas of the forest under active management experienced high levels of windthrow in the December storm.

“Areas across the forest are still being assessed for the extent of wind damaged trees, if the results of the windstorm have changed the condition of the forest stands and whether the active management objectives can still be met or if a change in silvicultural prescriptions are needed,” she wrote in an email to the Inter Lake.

The relationship between climate change and wind is not well understood, but Benedict said the windstorm wasn’t the only factor in the large amounts of windthrow in the Swan Valley

“The reason we’re seeing so many [trees] uprooting here is because we had all that heavy rain immediately before the windstorm,” he said. “And the reason we had all that heavy rain and it wasn’t snow and the ground wasn’t frozen was because of climate change.”

The recent timber operations may have also played a role. Trees in thinned units were less sheltered from the wind gusts. Now, with even less of a windscreen to protect them, Benedict worries the trees that survived the December 2025 windstorm would prove especially susceptible to any future weather events.

“The issue is the cumulative nature of these windstorms and the damage that they do to these exposed units,” said Benedict. “And it’s not just the storm we just had characterized as a winter storm. We also get thunderstorms coming through in the summer.”

For Benedict, the results of the December windstorm are a reason to reassess the way the national forest approaches timber cuts.

Beth Dodson, the University of Montana professor, said contractors and managers are already adopting strategies to reduce the impact that climate change events have on forest ecosystems. Timber management plans tend to prioritize keeping drought-resistant and fire-resilient species, including ponderosa pine and western larch, on the landscape, while removing less adaptable species like Douglas fir. In those cases, Dodson said thinning can result in healthier albeit fewer trees.

“If we have fewer trees out there that are able to take advantage of the resources on the site, then they are going to be better able to defend themselves against any disease or insect that comes in, and they are most likely better able to survive a fire that comes through,” she said.

Many logging contracts already extend across several years, providing crews with flexibility to navigate unexpected weather events.

Dodson said more adaptations may be necessary in the coming decades, as managers see more impacts from changing weather patterns. Logging roads, for example, are typically constructed with drainage systems that slough off excess water, but the capacity of those systems may need to increase to accommodate more extreme storm events.

“A lot of the job is paying attention to what’s working and what’s not and adapting over time,” she said. “And so, I think I’m not seeing any big leaps in adaptation. I think it’s just a continual process that we’re all doing just in terms of watching what worked, what’s not.”

Steve Struck said he currently has no plans to change his own operations. While he believes the climate is becoming more erratic, he said loggers have always had to deal with uncooperative weather. In his own experience, the best thing to do is roll with the punches, however they come.

“The weather has changed so much over the past 20 years,” said Struck. “You have to stay ahead of the game. You’ve got to be prepared.”
  
Source: cdapress.com