“When I came to Cortes, I imagined just making boards is a great thing to do. I’ve had a number of years to assess and reassess that reality. It’s possible as a one man operation for me to do okay at that, but it’s a subsistence business not a business model. It’s not a business plan,” explained Aaron Ellingsen.

His company, Ellingsen Woods, is about to go through a relaunch. 

Part 1 of this business profile is intertwined with the story of of one of Cortes Island’s older families, and the dream of bringing value-added industry to the island. Part 2, to be aired on March 9, deals with an unfolding vision.

In 1977, Aaron’s father, Andy Ellingsen, moved to the Lower Mainland where he became a professor at BCIT. His family followed.

AE: “I grew up mostly in the Lower Mainland, but with a strong connection here.  I spent  a number of stints here after high school in my early twenties figuring out if there was a life for me on Cortes. I didn’t really end up feeling like there was at that point. Life took me off in other directions,” he said. 

That would change because of a business venture that his cousins undertook. 

AE: “While I was here, Trygve, who was a builder at the time, and his brother Tor, who lives on Quadra now, bought a sawmill from Murray Ray. Trygve and Tor ran that for a few years, then Trygve decided he was focused on building and Tor went into the forest industry.”

Their father, Bruce Ellingsen, bought the mill and moved it down to Reef Point Farm.

He had enlarged it through the acquisition of a second mill by 2016, which was when Aaron re-entered the story.

AE: “Bruce was getting into his late seventies and the family was starting to make rumblings about maybe he should get out of the saw milling business. That happened to be a time when the stars aligned for me to be thinking about coming back to Cortes. I was able to get the house that I’m in now, which was my grandparents’ (Elmer and May Ellingsen’s) house, which had been sitting on the market for about six years.  God knows why, it’s a great place. Bruce was thinking about selling, so I bought the sawmill from him.” 

Aaron was living in Victoria at the time.

AE: “I had already been involved with the Cortes Community Forest, doing a little bit of editing and writing for some of their documents. I was just getting to know a couple of the board members.  I had my eye on the community forest because I felt like it offered a kind of opportunity on Cortes, which hadn’t previously been available, in terms of creating the space where a value added wood industry could exist in a way that would allow for Cortes Island producers to build things for a broader market.” 

“Aside from a few passes in the early 20th century and then again in the fifties, where logs were logged and then taken off Cortes, I don’t think it had really ever been historically the case on Cortes Island.”

“I felt like the Community Forest offered an opportunity for locals to get ahold of some of the logs and use those logs for things for a higher purpose,  which is what I see the value added windows industry on Cortes Island as.”

“This is close to my heart  and a big part of the reason why I was watching over the last 20 some odd years. I feel like the province has managed its renewable resource in a non-renewable fashion. Some people, probably in the industry, need to demonstrate that there’s more money to be made from logging in BC than just cutting down all the trees and sending them all away in the form of logs.”

“In 2016, the stars aligned for me. I had a place, I had a sawmill and I knew that the Cortes community Forest was up and running.  It was only the second harvest when I moved back. There was a cut in Squirrel Cove where I purchased the first logs that I ever bought from the Community Forest.”

“So I came from my job in Victoria,  launched myself into cutting boards, and jumped into a marketplace with others doing the same thing on Cortes Island. Henry (Verschuur) up at Blue Jay; Kevin (Peacey) was running the mill at Klahoose; and Ron (Wolda) was milling pretty regularly.”

“It’s an island environment where there are a number of builders who like to work with local materials, as well as a number of builders that don’t find it convenient to work with local materials for a number of reasons.”

“That got me thinking about what that convenience is, and what would make the wood more usable for people here.”

“That led me towards trying to figure out ways to produce a more refined board product. So a couple of years into it, I bought myself a molder, which allows me to plane materials on all four sides at the same, in one pass. I’ve done a range of materials with my molder.“

“I’ve also got a small lumber drying kiln that can do about 2000 board feet at a time, which hasn’t been in operation for a while, but it was running for a couple of years before I lost the location that it was at. I’m currently in the process of setting it up at a new location.”

So my business started out as making green boards. Eventually I built a shed so that I could produce boards and then keep them undercover so that hopefully they dry to some extent. Then I developed the capacity to plane the boards, and dry the boards before planing.”  

“In theory, I can make products for inside — where people want a moisture content somewhere between 8% and 20%, depending on what they’re doing with the products.” 

“Then I thought I was set up. I was like, ‘well, I’ve got all this stuff. I can do these things.’  It wasn’t as simple as that, but I thought that I was  in a pretty good stead  to differentiate what I was doing from what some of the other producers on Cortes were doing.”

“It wasn’t so much a matter of me not being able to scrape by, but I felt like there was just more to be done with the logs that I was buying and that I should be able to create higher value and a better living for myself.”

“The complication that pretty immediately became apparent to me is that the marketplace on Cortes is very small. In the wintertime, there’s between 800 and a thousand people here. In the summertime, there are substantially more people, but what we really have is a very small marketplace, with a small number of contractors, building a small number and renovating a small number of places.”

“As I said a little earlier, there are some builders that do everything they can to work with local materials wherever possible. I completely understand why there are some other builders that, because of the processes that they use and the logistical needs for their businesses,  have a hard time working with small suppliers that don’t necessarily have the capacity to provide things  today, or tomorrow, or the next day, or predictably in a week and a half or something like that.”

Ellingsen said this is an issue that was mentioned at the recent Value Added Wood Products Workshop, and usually comes up when island producers talk about making a space for value added on Cortes.”

“Dry storage space is a real issue.”

“I have the capacity to make the boards, I have the capacity to dry the boards, and I have the capacity to process the boards. But once the boards are processed, I discovered they don’t stay dry by themselves. If I don’t wrap every piece in plastic, or wrap bundles in plastic, they immediately start absorbing moisture again.” 

“This was a hiccup for me. I thought if I could get to the product, then it shouldn’t be a problem to sell the product. The next truth for me was that I needed to be able to sell the product immediately or else the product started deteriorating again.”

“We really need a dry climate controlled space to store that kind of stuff.” 

“I was at a place where I made paneling and I’ve had some local builders install paneling and some really great projects here but, logistically, it was more than I could produce in my kiln at one go.”

“Some of the first paneling that I made was  sitting and waiting for me to get the rest of it ready. And by the time I got the rest of it ready, I started measuring the moisture of the first batch and I was like, well, this isn’t good enough. So,  I delivered the second shipment and then ran a third through the kiln. And as soon as it was ready, I delivered that so that they went and sat inside the place where they were going to be used. They had a fully enclosed garage. We stacked and stickered the stuff after it came out of the kiln. The builder had the moisture content that he was concerned about on site there, which saved me the trouble, but it’s not always possible.”

“The builder was David Shipway. It was a renovation, but it ended up being a very sophisticated looking place: modern, pretty clean lines, pretty slick job.” 

CC: What was all this kiln dried wood used for? 

AE: “It was hemlock paneling used for the ceiling in a fairly extensive renovation.” 

“Hemlock is another whole branch  of my business because when I came back I really wanted to focus on finding ways to add value and I felt like this was the best opportunity to add value to the least desirable wood that we grow around here.  It’s proven very challenging because there is a fairly long standing resistance to appreciating hemlock on Cortes Island. People don’t really like to burn hemlock, they don’t really like to use hemlock in their houses, and they don’t really like to look at hemlock, if they know it’s hemlock.”

“The profile of our forest here tells us that we’re going to run into roughly 60% or more hemlock than anywhere that we go.”

“It’s not that hemlock doesn’t make good pulp logs. It does. So we could knock down trees and throw them in the water and send them down to Squamish and or wherever they go  and chip them up and turn them into newspapers.”

“I remain convinced that there’s an opportunity to prove the qualities of hemlock to people and develop a market for paneling, baseboards and trim around the tops of walls, corner beads, dowel and things like that.”

“We also face logistical challenges in building a market off Cortes and then creating the access to that market, which is essentially finding ways to get things off Cortes Island, with the expense and time involved, to Quadra Island or to Campbell River or beyond.” 

“(My wife) Jeramie and I have been developing relationships with UBC, which has a division called the Centre for Advanced Wood Processing,  over a few years. And we have also been having dialogue with an organization called TWIG, the Wood innovation Group.

“We made a presentation to them a couple of years ago talking about the Community Forest and what I was doing with what from the Community Forest, which was specifically (at that time) thinking about making flooring and paneling.”  

“I have made flooring for projects on Cortes here, and people have been really happy with what it was. But I think if you’re putting it into a larger marketplace,  builders really need to know about consistency of product and durability of product in a way that I don’t really have the capacity to test for or guarantee against. I don’t think that I have the capacity,  in terms of equipment or supply at this point to really move into that market.”

“While I was talking about what we could do with the Centre for Advancement Processing, they were advising there’s a great opportunity in timbers, particularly Douglas fir timbers, because there’s always a demand for it. “

“The profile of the forest on Cortes  is that there’s a lot of forest between 80 and 120 years old. This places it in a fairly large and old demographic, if you’re looking at especially what’s on Vancouver Island, and also what’s across the province. So we basically have the resource here to make large timbers that are of a quality to compete with anything from anywhere.”

“They were encouraging that because you don’t have to necessarily dry them and you don’t have to plane them, and you can make them with the sawmill. They’re fairly high value, so not a lot of cuts and a lot of value. So it’s kind of a no-brainer, I guess.” 

“We ended up, through this relationship with the Centre for Advancement Processing and through the fellow that was managing the TWIG program at the time, getting connected with Emily Carr, and a professor there who was also interested in developing the taste for hemlock.”

“We were going to provide hemlock for a design class that he runs, where people would be designing small things out of a load of kiln dried and planed hemlock that we took down to them for that purpose. We had envisaged an exhibition at the end.  It was going to happen in Vancouver and Victoria, and we were working to hopefully have one here on Cortes as well.” 

He was hoping that prototypes for furniture, or other products, might be developed and eventually be put into production. 

“Unfortunately there were some administrative problems at the university and the professor that we were working with ended up taking a leave in the middle of the project. This administrative leave ended up putting the kibosh on the whole project, as far as the exhibition side of it went. The students did get to work with hemlock and we didn’t really get to see the fruits of their work.”

“We were pretty discouraged because we put quite a lot of energy into getting that stuff down there and the professor is a very creative guy who started their wood design program, about 20 some odd years ago.” 

“We basically moved on and I just kept on producing boards and still had been selling mostly raw boards with some planing service really.”

“My kiln hasn’t been in operation for a while, but will be again.” 

“We were kind of looking for the next thing to set us on a new pathway beyond just the production of boards. What that’s been, over the last six to eight months, is looking at building small cabins.”

Coming next: Part 2: Making small cabins for the glamping market

Top photo credit: Aaron cutting a log with the circular saw blade – Photo by Jeff Waldman.

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