It’s a sun-splashed morning at the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California’s wood yard, a patch of land about the size of a football field, tucked in a valley about 20 miles east of Lake Tahoe’s south shore.
Magpies, black-and-white birds with blue-tinted wings, land on stacks of lumber and dig for insects. Chainsaws rev and roar and wood-cutting machines crank and squeak. A mist of sawdust hangs in the air.
Foreman Kenneth Cruz, wearing a white hard hat and neon yellow jacket, is watching crewmember Jacob Vann use a chainsaw to cut up logs of thick Tamarack pine.
“That looks dense,” says Cruz, craning his neck to look at the center, or heartwood, of the log Vann is working on.
“Yeah, it is — it’s really dense,” Vann says, tilting up his hard hat to wipe his brow. “You can tell the difference between this one and that cedar. Cut right through that cedar, but when it comes to this Tamarack? It takes a lot sometimes.”
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