REDWOOD RESCUE: I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life right smack in the middle of Redwood country on the coast in Northern California.  You sort of never lose the wow factor when going into the redwood forests.  The history of the logging of the trees began in the mid 1800s and continued up until about the 1970s when people started to realize the old growth trees, or what is left of them should be protected.  Most of the local forests were logged to build the city of San Francisco....twice.

Up until the 1970s you could find the true old growth lumber in virtually every lumber yard and back yard on the north coast.  Over the last thirty years is has all gone away.  All logging has virtually ground to a halt.  What you have on the market now is second growth redwood or farmed redwood.  Not even the same material and I won't use it.  There are some backyard mills cutting up old stumps that they have, but are  few and far between and horribly expensive.

The true old growth is over 2000 years old.  Tight grained, deep coloring in it's natural state, burled.  It is just truly a unique and beautiful wood.  No two pieces alike.  Bugs don't like it, it never seems to rot.  And....it gets better with age.

What you are going to find below is my effort to preserve some of this old wood when I run into it.  Often I find it in piles from old fences or barns being torn down.  You can pick through a hundred boards and only find one or two that can be salvaged, worked,  and made into something.  You just can't get the old growth redwood in any type of quantity to produce something regular.  So what I do is look at a couple of boards I get here and there that I can salvage.  I then decide what will fit on them and what might go well with the individual grain and coloring of the natural wood and make something.  Mostly, these one of a kind pieces.

Something fairly new is also happening.  Logs and old growth stumps that have been submerged for over a hundred years, or due to erosion being exposed on the beaches, are being reclaimed and brought out of the river bottoms and sand.  Some of this wood is just striking and I am looking forward to getting some of it and you will be able to see pictures and items for sale here in the future.  - Visit our Lumber Yard for Availability of Raw Redwood Woodworking Stock -

I call this page, or section, of the site  Redwood Rescue for a reason.  There is just so little of this wood left and available that it is a shame to condemn the odd pieces I run into for the eventual turning into firewood kindling.  I'm not kidding.  That is what people do with it.  So find below my effort, small as it might be, to save some of this history.   Tom