Questions
Frequently asked
What this is, where the numbers come from, and what we will not say.
What is this?
A running board of public timber-sale results plus always-current pages: one page per completed sale, rollups by region and forest, by county and by species, an upcoming-auction calendar, and a premium-over-minimum scoreboard. Built for mills, loggers, timber buyers and forestry consultants who would rather read one board than check a state DNR site, a Forest Service page and a BLM notice by hand.
Where does the data come from?
Public government sources only. Washington DNR monthly and annual timber-auction result sheets, US Forest Service Region 6 per-forest sale-results and advertised-sale tables, and BLM western Oregon sale notices. Every figure traces back to one of those documents, and we keep the raw document for each sale we publish.
How do you turn a PDF of auction results into a table?
We fetch each agency's published document, pull the text out of it, and use a language model to read the sale records into a fixed set of fields: sale name, agency, region, county, species, volume, minimum bid, winning bid, bidder count, winner, date and status. The model is told to return a blank field rather than guess when a document does not state something. A null is always better than an invented number.
How do you keep the model from making numbers up?
Two ways. The model is instructed never to infer or compute a figure a document does not state. And every extracted sale passes an extraction QA gate before it is published: a sold sale whose winning bid is below its minimum, or a sale missing a critical field like its volume or its date, is routed to a review log and left off the site rather than published. The methodology page lists every gate rule.
Why do some prices say $/MBF and others $/CCF?
Because the sellers scale timber differently. State agencies quote volume in thousand board feet (MBF); the Forest Service quotes hundred cubic feet (CCF). They are different units, so a state price per MBF and a federal price per CCF are not directly comparable. We label every price with its unit and never blend the two into one average.
What is a no-bid sale?
A sale that was offered but drew no qualifying bid. It is a real result and a useful signal about demand, so we show it as a no-bid, never as a zero-dollar price. A run of no-bid sales in a region says something a run of low prices does not.
Is this bid advice?
No. We report what public timber sold for and what is coming up for auction. We never tell a reader what to bid, which sale to chase, or what a tract is worth to them. The appraisal and the bid are the reader's call, made with their own mill, haul and market numbers in front of them.
How current is it?
Every sale is dated to its auction date, not to the day we read the document. Results appear as agencies publish them, which for a state monthly sheet is shortly after the auction and for a federal page is on a rolling basis. The calendar shows advertised sales that have been noticed but not yet auctioned.