spotlight

Glenn speaking to students about active forest management Glenn Poxleitner has been involved in the industry for many years. His first day working in the industry was when he was around 6 or 7 years old. His dad, Norm Poxleitner, ran a sawmill in Keuterville, Idaho and Norm needed a Pond Monkey one day when someone did not show up for work. So, he recruited his son who was playing with tonka trucks on the dirt pile. A pond monkey is someone who uses a pike pole to push logs from the pond onto the bull chain that brings them into the mill. When he was around 12, he started working at the mill pulling green chain, which meant stacking the lumber on stickers as it came out of the mill. Most of his high school years he ran the 4-saw edger which had to be manually adjusted. In general, they cut a lot of 2x4 and 2x6 boards, but he was responsible for deciding what lumber to cut to get the most out of each piece.  His first job in the industry after college was doing timber appraisals for the Idaho County Assessor’s Office. After a few years, a forester from Shearer Lumber (owned by the Bennett family) approached Glenn to tell him that he was retiring. Glenn took his resume into the office in Elk City before work and sat down with the mill manager and he immediately told him no. The office phone rang, this gave him the option of either leaving or generate a sales pitch. When the mill manager came back into the office and asked him why he was still there, he asked for a minute of his time and...

Marie on fishing boat in yellow rain gear The outdoors has always held a special place in Marie Price’s heart. So, it should come as no surprise that for eight summers she spent her days working on commercial fishing boats cruising for salmon in remote waters off the Kodiak Island, the Alaska Peninsula - King Cove, Port Moller, Cold Bay, Sand Point, and southeastern Alaskan waters near Craig and Ketchikan. Price, who is IFG’s Director of Training and Development, lived and worked on the vessels in the 1980’s to earn money for college. Price also admits the idea of spending summers prepping nets, checking gear and harvesting wild salmon was also a way to spend time with friends on the docks in her hometown of Seattle. As a deckhand, she set nets, helped bring nets back on board and offloaded salmon. Her favorite task was cork piler, which required her to pile the corks at the top of the net on the back of the boat in such a way that the nets could be cast out without getting tangled. She also helped navigate and at times cooked meals for the crew (her specialty was wild berry pies). “Working on fishing boats in Alaska was not always fun, but it was a great experience. I worked with people from all walks of life in confined conditions and remote locations. We worked long hours, got little sleep, and had to get along to get the job done,” Marie said “This type of experience prepares you to...

Josie Knapp and her family "There is so much innovation happening in our sawmills.” Josie Knapp says. She is currently working on designing an App using RFID tags to store GPS locations so finished product can be located more easily. Josie graduated from the University of Idaho in 2016 with a degree in Biological and Agricultural Engineering. She grew up in Clarkston, surrounded by agriculture, which was a major contributor to her degree choice and where she hoped to live after college. When she started job searching before graduation, she learned about Idaho Forest Group through a friend whose mother-in-law worked in Human Resources. She had not heard of IFG before but gave Grangeville a call and went for a mill tour.   “When I arrived at the sawmill, I was expecting it to be like the old-style mills but when I toured, I was so impressed by the technology and machinery running in the sawmill.” She started in June after graduation under project management at IFG Grangeville, where she worked scoping out improvement projects for the mill and in production analysis.  One of her favorite innovative projects as an Engineer in Grangeville, was redesigning the log yard sprinkler systems. The previous method was to walk the log decks, moving around regular sprinklers but after they completed this project, water cannons took care of watering the log decks. She said, “I liked that I got to see this project through from start to finish.” Safety of our employees is huge and thanks to the team’s work, this project made watering the log decks safer for our log...

Tera King pictured using forestry tools to estimate the size of a tree (while working as a Forester for the USFS) Tera King, the Resource Analyst for Idaho Forest Group, works for the resource team monitoring log deliveries, analyzing prices, quality, and purchases, and communicating with landowners to make sure IFG has a short- and long-term timber supply. She also supports the management of our fee lands, approximately 70,000 acres that IFG owns and manages in our wood basket area. She also works on the annual wood basket analysis which requires evaluating the entire wood basket area and analyzing what species are growing and how many board feet of timber are available and the sustainability of harvest operations into the future. To complete the analysis, IFG uses various high tech remote sensing techniques, estimating growth and harvest levels, and talking with IFG foresters and all types of landowners in the region. She says it is quite the process.   Tera has been working for IFG since January of 2020 after working 17 years as a consulting forester for Northwest Management in Moscow. She grew up in Grangeville, so she was always surrounded by the industry. She received her degree in Forestry Resources from the University of Idaho and worked to achieve her MBA online in Business Administrations and Corporate Finance in 2013 from Norwich University in Vermont.  “Coming from a small family company, my concern was that I was going to be lost in the crowd. It has been neat to not be lost, IFG...

Pictured is Eddie Gordon working in the Laclede Log Yard Eddie Gordon is a well-known team member at IFG Laclede due to his easy going temperament and humor. Eddie Gordon started at IFG 25 years ago. His first position was in the sawmill on a swing shift, where he stood in front of the board edger and twin saw and removed the board edger pieces. He did this job for a couple of years and then worked in the filing room. He said he could see the log yard from the filing room window and thought to himself that the Letourneau drivers had a pretty sweet job. Eddie began coming in early so he could learn about daily log yard operations and would then finish his day working his job in the sawmill. A bid came open for swing shift driving the Letourneau and Eddie got the job because he was already trained. He learned quickly that operating the Letourneau was not as easy as it looked and was a lot more stressful. Unloading logs was tricky, especially in the spring when the logs were slick. Eddie explained while laughing that when he first started operating the Letourneau he would unload a truck and get back to the log decks with only about 2 logs left and the rest a mess all over the log yard, and truck drivers honking at him to hurry up because time is money for them.   As he was operating the Letourneau, he mentioned that he could see the...