The treasure that others think is trash

Dead balsam with missing bark is what I want

I haul the wood out of the bush by using two snow scoops

Necessity may be the mother of invention but it is also the father of discovery.
For 20 of the 33 years that we have lived in Nolalu we heated our home with firewood that I cut from our property. In our first home, the old squared timber house built 75 years earlier, there was a single woodstove. In our present home, which Brenda and I and our two children, Matt and Josh, built ourselves, we installed an outdoor wood furnace which we used for 13 years before switching to a propane furnace.
We had no sooner bought the property and moved in when the entire region was hit by a spruce budworm outbreak. The spruce budworm is a tiny caterpillar that eats the new growth needles of its host tree. Despite its name, the favourite host of the spruce budworm is not the spruce but the balsam fir. After eating the new soft green needles the budworm makes a cocoon and re-emerges as a moth which lays its eggs in other balsams. The next spring the cycle repeats.
Balsams naturally shed one-fourth of their needles each season; so, after four seasons of having their new needles eaten by budworm, the trees die of starvation since they have nothing left to produce food. The budworm outbreaks cover enormous areas at one time. They are often the size of many European countries. They leave behind forests of grey, dead trees, devoid of needles. And that is the end of the outbreak because there is nothing left for the budworms to eat. But it is not the end of the balsam fir nor even the end of the budworm.

Primo dry, solid, white balsam is surprisingly good wood

Although every growing balsam is killed by the budworm during the outbreak, the mature trees left so many seeds on the ground before they died that new seedlings will sprout for the next 10 years. And since the budworms will also have died with the demise of the mature trees, the seedlings will grow like mad in a pest-free environment for about 40 years. Then the few budworms that are always present, nibbling on spruce as well as balsam, also go mad and the whole thing starts over.
This cycle has been documented in the Boreal Forest in Canada since the very first explorers started recording history and was undoubtedly well-known to First Nations people before that.
The only thing that can interrupt the chain is forest fire that simply burns up the balsam seeds on the ground. Other trees like jackpine, red pine and white pine have cones that open after a fire and also benefit from the fertilizer effect of the ash. So the pines take over.
Balsams are unique in Northwestern Ontario in that they are the only conifer that is truly shade-tolerant. In areas that burned many years earlier and are covered by large spruce or pines the balsams will eventually get a foothold again just from seeds carried on the wind. They become the understory, waiting for a storm or disease to topple the big trees. This is especially true on clay or loamy soils. On sandy soils only the pines with their taproots that can dive down to the deep water table can survive.

Large birch logs serve as a sawhorse

In Nolalu the budworm outbreak hit about 1985. About half of the trees on our 65 acres were balsam and it was obvious that within a few years they would all be dead.
Commonsense told us that since we heated with wood we should use the balsams but there was only one problem: they suck as firewood and are absolutely miserable to cut. Nonetheless I put up many cords of the stuff for the first few years, cutting the trees green while they were still solid and getting covered with sap in the process. The sap is impossible to get out of clothes. I split and dried the wood for a summer and burned the limbs in immense brush piles. My guess is that 50 per cent of the weight of the tree is in the limbs, far greater than other species.
And for my effort I was rewarded with wood that barely generated any heat in the stove.
I learned what everybody else already knew: balsam sucks.
Balsam firewood has such a poor reputation you can't even give it away.
Then we built our new house and installed the outdoor wood furnace about 100 feet away. (Outdoor wood furnaces heat water that is delivered to the house in underground pipes where it is either circulated for heat in room radiators or as in our case, in a large radiator with a massive fan as part of a forced air heating system.)
The furnace and house were surrounded by dead balsam trees. I had to get rid of them anyway so I just cut them down and fed them into the outdoor stove despite their low heat value. It took an awful lot of them but then there were an awful lot. It took me years to clean them up and over that time I gradually became aware that it was taking less and less wood to heat the house. In other words, the wood itself was producing more and more heat as the years went on! This wood was far superior to that which I had cut green and dried years earlier. What was going on?
Eventually I depleted the nearby supply and had to start roaming deep into the bush looking for more. I couldn't afford any machines for a long time and had to carry or pull the wood out by hand. That is when I developed an expert eye for the wood that would generate the most heat for the least effort.
First, the trees must be upright. Fallen-over trees are always wet.
The trees must have been dead for several years. Not only must they be devoid of needles but also largely of branches. The bark must be either split or missing. Without the bark the tree dries rapidly and that appears to be the key. Trees with intact bark are rotten inside.
When cut the wood should be white, not red. This white wood is sound and tinder dry. It produces good heat and burns about as long as jackpine which is one of the favourite Boreal firewoods. In fact, in some areas it is THE favourite although in Nolalu people think paper birch is best.
Balsam must always be kept covered. It absorbs water like a sponge. Even a light rain or melting snow ruins it.
We are installing a wood stove in our new sunroom and I have spent the past week hauling in dry firewood for it. The only trees that fit the bill on our acreage are still balsam which now are few and far between. It took me about three days to put up a cord.
Balsam has a lovely smell when burned. It smells very much like sandalwood incense.
Starting tomorrow I will start cutting green birch which I will split and stack for next winter. Green birch is far heavier than the dead balsam but fortunately I now have a tractor to move it around. I have kept a road clear all winter into a birch stand.

Wood is split and stacked and will later be covered, ready for new stove