Our land typifies the condition of the vast forests of the American West, where increasingly crowded undergrowth has fueled the huge fires of recent years. It's the old story of human interference. In ancient times, fires sparked by lightning and Indian hunters periodically cleared the forests' dense understories and left the large, fire-resistant trees—massive western larches and ponderosa pines, in the case of our ridge's north face. But loggers felled the old trees in the late 1800s and sawed them into mine-shaft timbers and boomtown houses.

On our land, I found evidence of that century-old slaughter in the form of huge, rotting, sawed-off stumps hidden like giant toadstools. After the clear-cutting, the north slope germinated a thick mat of young Douglas fir and larch. Had nature been allowed to take its course, low-intensity fires over the decades would have pruned and opened the mat into something resembling the original stately stands. But starting in 1910, the newly born U.S. Forest Service and other government agencies declared war on forest fires.

Like millions of acres in the West, our north slope during the 20th century sprouted into the equivalent of an unweeded garden—choked, stunted, and, if it were to catch fire, prone to burst into a tree-top conflagration instead of a low-level, understory-clearing blaze. Fire is a natural part of the western landscape, ecologists have argued for the past several decades, and slowly the Forest Service has retreated from its stamp-it-out-at-all-costs fire policy. Now that most everyone agrees on the need for a thinned—or "restored"—forest, the big hang-up comes over where to thin, how to thin, and how to pay for it. Some environmentalists don't want any restorative thinning at all except by nature's hand—lightning-caused fires. Some in the timber industry would like to clear-cut vast swaths in the name of forest health (not to mention industry profit). Between these two positions lies a spectrum of options, including the use of hand or mechanical thinning, human-set prescribed fires, and Forest Service timber sales designed to restore the forest.

The Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative is, in theory at least, designed to address the overcrowded western federal forests. It authorizes Congress to allocate as much as $867 million—the amount designated for 2006—to reduce hazardous fuels and protect wildlife on 20 million acres considered in danger of "catastrophic" fires. Many environmentalists have savaged key components of the Bush plan as giveaways to the timber industry, objecting to the way it allows approval on a fast track, without as many environmental reviews and public appeals. Professional foresters, meanwhile, have said that the measure's ultimate impact would depend on exactly how the Forest Service implements each project.

As for pruning our own choked forest, Amy and I could have simply tossed in a match on a hot, windy July afternoon, but the neighbors probably wouldn't have appreciated the 100-foot wall of flames roaring toward their homes. This left us the option of mechanical thinning, which is expensive—up to $1,000 an acre, or closer to $2,000 for full restoration work, twice what we paid per acre for the land in the first place.

The problem is that, unlike a commercial logging site, the small-diameter trees taken from the restored land sell for a pittance, not nearly enough to cover the labor and equipment costs of culling them. Skinny trees have historically had various uses: Until the late 1800s, settlers notched them together for log houses and outbuildings, bridges, and corrals. After World War II, manufacturers in Germany—where the big trees had been felled centuries ago—shaved small trees into wood flakes and compressed them into something called flakeboard. American researchers turned this into the stronger oriented strand board, or OSB, which hit the U.S. market in the 1970s and is becoming ubiquitous on today's construction sites. Big sheets of glued-together wood chips are now replacing plywood for house subfloors and walls. Other products, from paper pulp to veneers, are manufactured from small-diameter trees, but for the most part, the U.S. timber industry's sawmills have long been dominated by big-log equipment and mired in a saw-it-into-two-by-fours mind-set that is only now beginning to change.