Why are mills so far from the trees?

[David B]

In the southwest it seems the trees are up in the mountains and the mills are down in the valleys. Lot of wasted trucking it seems. Can commercial sawmills not be semi trailer mounted like a giant wood mizer?

[Ljohnsaw]

But it's all down hill, so it's all free.  ;)

[beenthere]

In the southwest it seems the trees are up in the mountains and the mills are down in the valleys. Lot of wasted trucking it seems. Can commercial sawmills not be semi trailer mounted like a giant wood mizer?

:D :D :D
Are you for real, or just from CA ???

[Ianab]

This is a modern commercial sawmill.

Google Maps

It's not exactly portable, and includes a 28 mW co-gen plant. But you can see the size of the place, although there is a lot more going on than just a sawmill. Kilns / treatment / wood pulp etc.

This is a smaller local mill, about as small as it's economic to run these days. But you can still see the size of the overall site.

Google Maps

A reasonably productive mill can be made portable, but all the support equipment and the site itself is more difficult. In days past mills were actually designed to be "transportable", that is they could be broken down and moved to a new site in a couple of days. Log that area for a few months, then pick up and move a mile further down the line and repeat. But with modern machinery / roads / trucks it's just more efficient to bring the logs to a central location with all the facilities on site.

[twar]

Lot of wasted trucking it seems.

The products and by-products of the mill also have to be trucked. Speaking from observation and not from experience, logs can be stacked or even scattered about until the weather allows them to be brought to the mill on an open logging truck. Once cut, however, everything is sorted, graded, stickered. covered and even packaged for delivery. All of that would be a pain out in the woods here in Norway (think West Va's topography with S. Alaska's latitude and climate).

[customsawyer]

The mills already cut the trees close to them.  ;D

[Magicman]

Got any level places for the sawmill in the mountains?  Then you have to load and haul all of the lumber down the same distance.  Lumber handling would be a nightmare.

[charles mann]

It would be safe to say, just from Ca, which explains it.

[B.C.C. Lapp]

Back in the day that is what they did. The mills and logging camps were built where the timber was or as close as possible.  But then it was all huge tracks of timber that took years to cut off.   Now a piece with 200,000 bdft is big.

However, here in Pa there are some guys taking the mill to the woods and that's becoming more popular.  I myself know two crews doing that and oddly enough I've been talking with a local mill  owner about trying to take a mill in to a few larger pieces and see how it goes.   Its just talk now but when this was brought up several years ago we all dismissed it without a whole lot of thought or discussion.  Now with trucking being so expensive and log and lumber prices low it seems like it makes a lot of sense.    If we do try it Ill certainly post about it.

No way it could work on some tracks and some landowners would object but for the right pieces and the right equipment it has merit.   

The first guy I ever logged with had a family owned mill that went to the woods. He did it all his life.  That crew could break down a Frick circle mill and move it and set it back up faster than you would believe.

[DanielW]

+1 to what others have said. Plus (as also mentioned), you wouldn't exactly find room on a mountain top for a production-sized mill. And then if you did, it would only take a few weeks/months to clear out all the trees in the nearby area, then you're trucking everything else uphill to the mill or breaking down all the equipment to move again. And the lumber and all other byproducts still have to be trucked away, so all the material is being trucked down anyway. Full-scale mills don't have any waste - they don't just leave the dust, bark, and slabs in the bush like we do - it all has value and all goes somewhere. And these large production mills are a far cry from portable. Apart from the primary log breakdown, you need room for grading, trim, stacking, gangs, sorters (very large), optimizers, and a stupidly large electrical service to supply all the equipment.

Though I own, use, and love all my mills (two of which are portable), I also work for a company that makes large production-scale equipment, and thus I have no illusions about how small of a drop-in-the-bucket any portable equipment could be. The mill at a job I was recently at covers an area just under 130 acres. That's just the area for all their equipment, kilns, and log storage. They knock out about 900,000 bd feet a day on their green line, about 600,000 bd. feet a day on their dry structural grading line, and they're by no means the largest operation of their kind (not even close). You're not going to compete with those kind of numbers with anything even remotely-portable.

Years ago we built a semi-portable headrig, carriage, end-trimmer, and edger unit. It was for overseas (Japan sounds familiar, but I could be wrong), and to be broken down and mounted on 3 or 4 transports and moved to different sites. That's about as large as you're going to get with any portable setup. It was lucky to pass 25,000 bd. ft a day, so it still couldn't come close to competing with a proper production mill, and that's with no provision for any of the post-breakdown equipment (which usually takes up even more area than the primary breakdown).

[nativewolf]

Yep, they would bring a trailer mounted circle saw right to the woods and setup and saw.  We will harvest on a site where they did this for 30 years.  I've seen sites where this was done as recently as 25 years ago. 

I think for pine it would be expensive to make the numbers work.  The lumber all has to get graded and kiln dried and that's going to usually take some footprint.

[DanielW]

Scroll through this for an interesting description of how it was done back in the day, breaking down a circular rig and taking it to the site:

A mobile circular sawmill for farm woodlots in West Virginia : Byers, Jack B. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

[Don P]

All the mills we run are made for this. The Belsaw was considered , and is, portable. I could probably have it up and running on day 3. The Lucas and Alaskan can go to the fallen log and be running within an hour. I've worked them both on mountainsides. Production is laughable but my plate is small, it is low overhead. There's several ways of looking at how we do things.

[sawguy21]

The profitable high production mills are huge and not portable. Too it all depends on what is available for harvest, markets change so the timber licenses issued by our provincial government are constantly shifting to new locations. An acquaintance was hauling one load a day 200 miles, I have no idea how that was profitable for the truck owner or his customer.

[Joe Hillmann]

In addition to all the other reasons posted:

Most mills get logs coming to them from every direction.  If you move closer to one source of logs you are moving farther from another.

I would imagine many large mills sites have a life span close to a century.  So a spot that made sense 80 years ago may now be in the center of a city.

Mills need employees.  It is easier to get employees to the site where population density is higher.  It would be much harder to get and keep a few dozen employees if the population is extremely scarce and requires a long commute on very bad roads.

[rusticretreater]

Big trucks and heavy loads need good roads.  Not only to bring them in, but also to send them to market.  So location and available property drives placement too.  Sometimes it might be the land that daddy left to you.

But yeah, they cut all the trees close to the mill when they started.  Kinda like an old iron furnace.  Cleared the land for miles around them.

[Magicman]

Our Brick Plant used up all of the available clay dirt around it and ultimately had to close.

In the National Forest here, you can still find sawdust piles where the "ground hog" sawmills operated and some of the "dummy rail line" ROWs can still be seen.

[DanielW]

I forgot about these guys: They make (made?) a twin cut circular mill that gets hauled to site on a couple of large transports for the kind of work you're talking about.

I don't know if they exist anymore - can't find any info on them newer than a few years old. My guess is they didn't sell many (any?) units: Too large for a small-scale operation, too small to vie with the big boys.

Davco Twin Cut Mill: YouTube

[B.C.C. Lapp]

I've seen sites where this was done as recently as 25 years ago. 

Nativewolf I can show you a site where this was done last month and another where its happening right now.    :D

Really the only thing I have heard negative from the guys that do this is that to make whole packs of lumber to go out you have to have enough of a certain species to cut a whole trailer load.   So you kind of have to cherry pick the woods which as any logger knows is problematic at best.    Its also interesting that most of the crews milling in the woods are using draft power to skid the logs.     

[stavebuyer]

This was my Meadows #2 set up in the woods sawing ERC circa 1997. I have seen and done a lot since then, but the satisfaction of buying a long abandoned farm and sawing out the lumber was without equal.



 

Sorry for the scan of a polaroid. The Motorola bag phone didn't come equipped with a camera.

[Magicman]

I know where a portable sawmill will be set up on some Cypress logs tomorrow morning.   ;D

[dogone]

   In northern Saskatchewan the mills were built near the timber and a labor source. The few large remaining ones are near a major centre. Logs for sawing and pulp come from a radius of over 100 miles.
    Moving a mill closer to the source would bring a huge labor problem. No one wants to live in the bush anymore. Fellerbuncher operators will drive 100 miles for their shift. Then go home.

[Southside]

There were a lot of mills set up like that in Maine when the Spruce Bud Worm came through in the '70s and '80s.  You could find the sawdust piles along a stream for decades after, but that was salvage sawing everything possible as fast as possible, and the economics were different back then. It would not work today.

[Kodiakmac]

In this part of Ontario, the ever-increasing distance to remaining mills is to a great extent attributable to the provincial Ministry of the Environment's assault on small mills in the late '90s and early 2000s.  The closest bricks-and-mortar type mill is an hour and a half away, and with the insane federal taxes on fuel, most of us have given up shipping to these locations because of the prohibitive trucking costs. 

The flip side is that there has been a proliferation in backyard, portable mill operations.  But their appetite is almost exclusively white cedar, so we have a very limited market for hardwoods.

[barbender]

It is similar here- we keep losing mills (paper and osb) to markets, litigation, etc. It's not uncommon for our wood to move 120 miles one way. Most of the gate price for the wood goes to trucking on those long hauls.

[Nealm66]

120 miles wow! That would definitely make milling onsite debatable here. At least for our lower domestic. I remember a buddy of mine working for a guy that had a dimensional mill and a garret 15 for a while back in high school in the late 70's- early 80's. I suspect I owned the same skidder in the late 90's for a while but hard to say for sure and a guy I cut with bought and still owns the dimensional mill. Retail prices have dropped in 1/2 here in the last 3-4 months and mill yards are plugged. Exports down $1-200.

[Ianab]

Locally they figure that trucking much over 50 miles starts eating into the value of the logs significantly. Logs from the Whanganui area however are carried by train ~100 miles to Port Taranaki for export. Once a log is loaded on a train, then an extra 100 miles doesn't matter. For a boat it's a few thousand miles.

[Autocar]

I remember a mill north of me that sets in flat farm county and you could see a mile vor more and not see a woodlot and I asked the old fellow why he set it up in that area. He moved his arm across the land scape and said when I came here form Kentucky there were trees as far as you could see, [ With a smile from ear to ear  :D ]

[Kodiakmac]

Trucking Costs! It's enough to make a guy go back to log drives on the rivers.  Now, if I could only get logs to float UP river, I'd be all set.

[barbender]

 Here, it's usually not far out to a highway. The longest off highway woods roads I've worked on were probably 7-8 miles. But once the trucks get out to the highway, it's flatland and smooth sailing for them.

The NE part of the state known as "The Arrowhead" has more rugged terrain and mountain like roads. There is a mill up there that buys pine logs, and trucks do not like making that run from our area as it is a one load day. There's not many places to pass on highway 61, that is the main artery up the North Shore on Lake Superior.

[stavebuyer]

There really isn't much "waste" anymore. Bark, dust, chips, and lumber all go back to town so what you save on log freight you pay for on processed goods. Only real benefit used to be that you could find labor that wasn't allergic to labor. Those days are gone.

[teakwood]

that you could find labor that wasn't allergic to labor.

😂😂 good one, allergic to labor!

[SwampDonkey]

The camp life in the woods business mostly died out in the 80's around here. We still had a couple contractors with camps in the bush in the 90's-early 2000's, but I know a lot of those guys travelled home and never lived in the camp. Most fellas lived within 50 miles anyway. I know those camps in the upper Miramachi weren't 50 miles from home for most. The Miramachi was once the forestry hub of the province, that slimmed down in the 90's and early 2000's and probably will never return to the glory days. In my area there is only one family run mill that has been around longer than anyone else. Not Irving, they never had a mill here in the two counties as it is mostly private land. They have rail road land and some traded lands for crown land over the years, but no mill sitting on any of it.

[Ron Scott]

Mills are often located in or near large acreages of National Forest system and State Forest lands where there is a more guaranteed supply of long-term species and volume wanted.

Feasibility studies are usually done years in advance for a proposed desired mill location. Some National Forests have also entered into 25-year timber sale contracts to encourage and maintain a local mill's wood supply. 

[Firewoodjoe]

A lot of wood gets trucked a long ways around here. Over 100 miles dead head is about the cut off for profit unless it's logs. I knew of loads going from mid michigan all the way into Canada. Then have a back haul back. As long as the truck is loaded someone will truck the miles.

[Southside]

There are, or at least not all that many years ago were, White Pine logs that would travel from Ohio to Mass to be sawn.

[SwampDonkey]

Miller Veneers in Indianapolis, IN has trucked veneer all the way from NB. The veneer buyers never paid the money they do in southern Ontario, but Miller paid more than Columbia Forest Products that is 25 miles away in Maine. There's not much supply up this way, a lot of times Columbia would hire a truck to fart around with a handful of logs. Probably why they could not pay top dollar.

[peakbagger]

I had a project a few years ago back down in Erving Mass which I had to visit frequently (weekly at times) for meetings. The "fastest" way from Northern NH was to go north on Interstate 93 to its northern end and get on I 91 in St Johnsbury VT then drive south the length of VT into Mass. I saw a lot of logs headed north destined for Columbia Forest Products in Newport VT (near the Canadian border) which is another hour of so north of St J. Really nice looking veneer logs and many were going the length of I 91 in VT which is about 170 miles

When I used to work with biomass power plants, the general rule of thumb for locating them and sizing them was to look at the availability of low grade wood within a 100 mile radius. When wet green chips are trucked more than 50 or 60 miles, the price and BTU content of the chips starts to exceed the value of the power coming out of the power plant. One plant in particular in Sherman Mills Maine was the outlier, it was sited next to very old very large sit of sawmill. They ran for 20 years without buying wood, they just reclaimed all the wood from the piles of waste wood that had been dumped for nearly 100 years. When the ran out of reclaim the original owners who had long since paid for the plant, sold it to another firm for cheap and within a couple of years they shut it down. Last thing I knew 20 years later it is still sitting a field mothballed.

[Southside]

Was that one of the Beaver plants?

[SwampDonkey]

Was a successful one in Fort Fairfield operated by a Quebec firm for years. Sold it to an outfit in NY and soon closed up. Most the the fuel was hauled in from NB. I know a guy that went around chipping red pine plantations. Was old fields and the pine was as heavy as red maple, so paid good. I know red pine is quite heavy, I've burned it after it was dried a year. It was still heavier than aspen wood. Not easy split'n either.

[peakbagger]

I think Fort Fairfield may have been a sister Wheelbrator plant.  I think the firm that bought Fort Fairfield was Boralex, they also bought Sherman Station and one other biomass boiler. The plants they bought had contracts for power that were running out, they ran them until the contracts were up and then sold them. Wheelabrator had a clause in the sales contract for Sherman Mills that they had to keep the employees for a couple of years even if they did not run it, when the contracts ran out they shut the plant but paid the employees to mothball it for several months. Unlike a lot of plants where the owners just walked away, Sherman Mills was really well preserved but when I looked at the plant, it was going to need a major going over. Boralex had been borrowing parts to keep their other plants running and the entire control system was in serious need of replacement.

Sad to see how much money was invested in local biomass renewable power plants in Maine (and NH) that mostly are idled or scrapped.

[David B]

In the southwest it seems the trees are up in the mountains and the mills are down in the valleys. Lot of wasted trucking it seems. Can commercial sawmills not be semi trailer mounted like a giant wood mizer?

 :D :D :D
Are you for real, or just from CA ???

Not everyone from CA fits the coastal stereotype. You have, ahem, geniuses in your big cities too. 

[David B]

It would be safe to say, just from Ca, which explains it.

I fail to see the humor. I'm from the PNW, lived in TX....

[David B]

The mills that are the subject of this post were small, not PNW mills. The castoffs were laying about in stacks with no apparent use, or a chipper. I was running opposite the log truck traffic, and continued to see log trucks for about 3 hours of driving time. Come to think of it, someone tried to make a go of a circular sawmill here locally a few years ago. They were milling fire salvage pine for pallets to be made just across the border in Mex. I think the distance was too great, and the sawmill should have also been in Mex...maybe too much red tape importing logs. 

I know a little about the power requirements, etc. of large plants. 

https://youtu.be/EBQaLIx2sVk?si=dTQPmyLoYdps-7wG

[clearcut]

In California at least, most of the largest mills are located near common carrier railroads. Trains prefer flat ground. The Central Valley is relatively flat. 

The lumber and wood products get shipped across the country and to nearby ports, serviced by rail. Rail transportation of finished forest products that are heavy and bulky is the most efficient and least expensive method. 

Locating in a valley facilitates a mill drawing from multiple watersheds, rather than the one they sit at the bottom of.

The bulk of logging in California from the 1860s through the 1930s was conducted via logging railroads feeding into the mills located on common carrier routes. Railroad logging continued here until the 1960s.

[rusticretreater]

I want to build a million dollar saw mill in the mountains near trees in a state known for huge wildfires every year.  Just sayin.

[moodnacreek]

The standard sawmill, if there is such a thing, was 45 ' long done in 3 sections bolted together with fish plates. The husk was about 7' long and say 10' wide and it's lower beams slid under the track ways. The carriage would be 15'. Everything was framed with wood. These mills where considered portable. Everything bolted together and advertised as easy to move!  They did move them and back then men where men but besides being strong they knew how to move heavy things with little or no machinery.

[longtime lurker]

Oh you can clear a mountain top, build roads, run powerlines, all of the things required to build a mill in a valley can be got to a mountain top.

Then all you have to do is build the camp.to hold your staff and away you... yeah nah hard enough to staff a sawline on the edge of town much less out in the boonies.

Freight is cheap, even today. Cheapest it's ever been really... compared with horse drawn sleds and wagons or river drives or building flue systems road transport is cheap as chips. And it's door to door... log goes onna truck in the bush and comes off in the mill yard and all it takes is one man to get it from A to B. More tons well send more or bigger trucks... still cheap. And it's cheap because it's labour efficient.

And because the mill is fixed it can also be labour efficient... big enough to run the saws and resaws that allow low unit costs of production and gain fibre efficiency because of it.

I've done my share of portable milling and a lot of it in places remoter than would exist anywhere in the USA.. nearest fuel 3 hours round trip, nearest hydraulic hose best pack lunch cuz you got 10 hours of driving ahead of you. And I'm telling ya I can ship a log 500 miles down unsealed roads and be more profitable than if I drop a mill beside the stump and only freight away the sawn lumber. 

Lessons learnt the hard way and alla that.

[moodnacreek]

Another thing is that the markets are often not back in the woods.  I have found that the demand here is not for the wood that grows here [excepting walnut]  . So either logs or sawn lumber has to be trucked.

[Ianab]

Webcam this morning overlooking Port Taranaki in New Plymouth. That's stacks of logs being loaded onto a bulk carrier and bound for China / Japan / India probably. The economics of shipping logs for thousands of miles must make sense to someone, although bulk sea freight is basically the most economic methods.

 

[B.C.C. Lapp]

Freight is cheap, even today. Cheapest it's ever been really... compared with horse drawn sleds and wagons or river drives or building flue systems road transport is cheap as chips. And it's door to door... log goes onna truck in the bush and comes off in the mill yard and all it takes is one man to get it from A to B. More tons well send more or bigger trucks... still cheap. And it's cheap because it's labour efficient.

And because the mill is fixed it can also be labour efficient... big enough to run the saws and resaws that allow low unit costs of production and gain fibre efficiency because of it.

I've done my share of portable milling and a lot of it in places remoter than would exist anywhere in the USA.. nearest fuel 3 hours round trip, nearest hydraulic hose best pack lunch cuz you got 10 hours of driving ahead of you. And I'm telling ya I can ship a log 500 miles down unsealed roads and be more profitable than if I drop a mill beside the stump and only freight away the sawn lumber.

Longtime lurker makes some good points.  But, like so much of what we talk about here, weather or not its accurate  or applies depends an awful lot on where your standing. In my area  there are plenty of reasons to take the mill to the trees.    On SOME  jobs.  Most jobs I'd say it wont save you money or time.  Some other jobs its the only way.  One of our biggest problems here is that every township, borough, and county has its own ideas about road bonds and what they charge and what they require.   Most are professional and easy to work with.  Some are the opposite.    They do any thing and everything they can to hold you up or stall the paperwork.    Some even try to refuse to let us use the roads with log trucks.  Which isn't even legal.  But some townships try it.    Moving in a mill to the job an using light trucks with gooseneck trailers to more the lumber is the quickest and surest way to get around these guys.  Some townships don't even require road bonds from loggers.  They are only concerned that you use common sense and if you mess up the road, why, fix it.  And we do.
 I've also done jobs with private right of ways that several land owners share.   And this can be problematic because the other land owners don't want the log trucks on their road. And sometimes the cost of having to beef up the base of a private road like this is more than a small timber job is worth.   Once again light equipment fits here.   Mobile mills are like every thing else, one more tool in the tool box.

[longtime lurker]

Those numbers are somewhat different I think, having more to do with low cost processing than cheap freight.

Stumpage, harvest and haulage price would be the same whether they go on the boat or go into a mill yard, but shipping them offshore gets them to places with low wages cost, cheap electricity, and less red and green tape. It also allows for economy of scale you can't get any other way... the mill they will go into will eat that lot and start on the next lot from North America, the Baltic, South Africa, wherever they can but it from. And when it gets to Zhangzhou or Lanshan there's not just one sawmill... there are hundreds of them clustered around the port cities and the logs are graded and sold in lots. So you've got mills that are optimised for a certain log class which enhances recovery considerably, crewed by guys working for a bowl of rice, and the world's largest domestic market on tap.

Globalisation is - believe it or not - the friend of small local mills. The pressure of having to compete with international log buyers and cheap imported lumber is felt more by big domestic operations than little ones. Small to mid sized domestic processors don't need the volume of the big guys to keep the doors open and don't have to find space in the market for the resulting huge volume of lumber.

I've been aware of that for years... all I have to do is find a couple thousand ton a year to keep the girl fed not 100,000 ton of log. And all I have to sell is the equivalent of a truckload a week regionally rather than truckloads a day nationally to keep the bills paid. Sure I have to compete with the big mill and the export buyer for logs, and I can't set unrealistic prices for my product but by staying lean and mean I can make a living on what they wouldn't be bothered with: There's gaps in every market if you're skinny enough to squeeze through them.

Really that picture of a boat loading to take logs around the world is one the perfect answer to why no-one is putting a mill on a mountain top, cuz guys with bigger chequebooks then us and all the resources that go with it are putting the mill halfway around the planet.

[longtime lurker]

Freight is cheap, even today. Cheapest it's ever been really... compared with horse drawn sleds and wagons or river drives or building flue systems road transport is cheap as chips. And it's door to door... log goes onna truck in the bush and comes off in the mill yard and all it takes is one man to get it from A to B. More tons well send more or bigger trucks... still cheap. And it's cheap because it's labour efficient.

And because the mill is fixed it can also be labour efficient... big enough to run the saws and resaws that allow low unit costs of production and gain fibre efficiency because of it.

I've done my share of portable milling and a lot of it in places remoter than would exist anywhere in the USA.. nearest fuel 3 hours round trip, nearest hydraulic hose best pack lunch cuz you got 10 hours of driving ahead of you. And I'm telling ya I can ship a log 500 miles down unsealed roads and be more profitable than if I drop a mill beside the stump and only freight away the sawn lumber.

Longtime lurker makes some good points.  But, like so much of what we talk about here, weather or not its accurate  or applies depends an awful lot on where your standing. In my area  there are plenty of reasons to take the mill to the trees.    On SOME  jobs.  Most jobs I'd say it wont save you money or time.  Some other jobs its the only way.  One of our biggest problems here is that every township, borough, and county has its own ideas about road bounds and what they charge and what they require.  Most are professional and easy to work with.  Some are the opposite.    They do any thing and everything they can to hold you up or stall the paperwork.    Some even try to refuse to let us use the roads with log trucks.  Which isn't even legal.  But some townships try it.    Moving in a mill to the job an using light trucks with gooseneck trailers to more the lumber is the quickest and surest way to get around these guys.  Some townships don't even require road bonds from loggers.  They are only concerned that you use common sense and if you mess up the road, why, fix it.  And we do.
 I've also done jobs with private right of ways that several land owners share.  And this can be problematic because the otherland owners don't want the log trucks on their road. And sometimes the cost of having to beef up the base of a private road like this is more than a small timber job is worth.  Once again light equipment fits here.  Mobile mills are like every thing else, one more tool in the tool box.

Here's what I can tell you right... when I was doing the remote area thing we fed in logs and shipped out boards. Average recovery of a eucalypt processor in Queensland is about 30% - 10 cube of logs in the gate 3 cube of grade lumber out - so you'd think that doing so would save a considerable amount of money over a thousand ton because that's 700 ton of waste you don't freight any further than you have to. But in fact it's cheaper to ship it to a real mill for a whole range of reasons.

See "waste" is a relative term. That waste sawdust we burnt in the bush is a byproduct I have markets for when I'm fixed. That waste trim and edging turns into  downgrade product because I am able to recover and handle it in a cost effective manner. And because I have a storefront bricks and mortar location I have customers who know where to find me, which means I can take those small homeowner type orders at a retail price point instead of having to ship all of it at wholesale price to a lumber yard.

And I don't have the headaches of remote operating... I can have 20 packs of lumber going so each piece goes into the right pile first time. I don't have to saw out logs that don't suit today's orders because we aren't leaving here next week. Need a part, drive to town. Raining... no matter we have a roof.

I also agree there's still a place for portable milling, but I think that place gets smaller every year. Even in some of the truely remote places I've operated from I still haven't seen one that was really viable without infrastructure. you just can't get the volume out of a mill without greenchains and resaws/edgers and then you need guys to operate them and those guys need to work regardless of weather. But every situation is different and there's an exception to every rule.

What I toy with now is a transportable mill rather than a portable one... truckloads of equipment and a week to set up on a prepared site rather than tow it in with a 4x4. Big enough to punch tons but able to be relocated in the off season when it's too wet to log and the road network is closed. I know a couple places where that would be a viable option 

[Frickman]

One thing that benefits a stationary mill in a fixed location is the location.  In our Appalachian hardwoods mills we sort for a lot of markets, not just lumber but logs too.  We use our log yards to sort, store, and load logs for other markets.  At my mill I never sawed 100% of the logs coming in.  Often I only sawed 50% of the incoming logs.  The rest were sold in to other markets.  So, if you park a mill out in the woods you need to be able to sort and store logs too. 

[Gary Davis]

 Its so the truckers can make money

[oldgraysawyer]

Oh! wait, wait I know this one.

It's because inflation has caused the mill prices to go through the tree tops and that's why they are out of sight.

No, that ain't it either. Shucks.