HYLA WOODS

We are a multi-generational experimental forest business based in NW Oregon.

Scroll down to learn more about our forests, forest stewardship and wood products.

What We Do

Hyla Woods stewards four experimental forests in Oregon’s coast range. We approach our stewardship as a set of responsibilities. In total, these responsibilities guide every decision that we make, from growing seedlings to harvesting and milling trees. We also provide forest management, consulting and contracting services through Springboard Forestry LLC.

Responsibility to Climate

Our management prioritizes both mitigating climate change, by sequestering carbon, adapting to climate change, through the development of diverse, resilient, and healthy forests, and decarbonizing our operations, through electrification and renewable diesel.

Responsibility to Species

Diverse and healthy forests serve as anchor habitat for a range of native fish, mammals, and invertebrates. We have a responsibility to retain and improve the habitat that our forests provide, while monitoring the success of these species.

Responsibility to Communities

Our forests provide jobs, education, research opportunities, recreation, and non-timber forest products to a range of local and regional communities. We do this through forest stewardship and access, employment, and re-investing in our local community.

Responsibility to Clean Water

Creeks and streams that flow from our forests provide reliable quantities of clean, cold water. This water supports habitat and drinking water to downstream neighbors.

Responsibility to Wood Products

Our forests generate a reliable supply of high quality logs. We sell logs and lumber, and operate our own sawmill able to manufacture a range of beams, timbers and finished lumber.

Responsibility to Innovate and Experiment

Hyla Woods exists as an experiment in better models of forestry, from silviculture to manufactured wood products. We are committed to long-term improvement while also having a good time.

ABOUT HYLA WOODS

We strive to steward forests that are ecologically complex, economically viable, and socially engaged.

ECOLOGICALLY COMPLEX

  • Guided by our knowledge that this lands are capable of growing ecologically complex and rich forests we continue to work to help the forest rebuild the complexity that it once had.  This complexity of composition, structure and processes makes the forest more adaptable to and resilient to the changes that it is increasingly experiencing and is the basis of the long term success of our family business.

ECONOMICALLY VIABLE

  • Our forests need to earn their keep for a number of reasons.  Like most family forest owners, we depend on reliable income from our forests.  Secondly, our aim is to explore models that inspire others to own and grow ecologically rich forests.  For these models to be useful to others, they must be sufficiently profitable.

SOCIALLY ENGAGED

  • Just as forests have ecological and economic potential, they also have social potential.  We define this as the ability to add important value to the human communities in which the forests are located.  Hyla Woods reaches toward that potential in a variety of ways, including actively cooperating with a large number of schools, teachers, and students, hosting a wide range of visitors, choosing management approaches that prioritize regular use of local labor, freely sharing information about what we do and learn, and being members and/or leaders in many local, forest-related organizations including the Build Local Alliance and the Forest Stewards Guild.

““The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.””

Aldo Leopold

A Sand County Almanac

Hyla Woods on Oregon Public Broadcasting…

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