Five years after buying our land, and still trying to figure out how to deal with our trees, we finally pulled the plug on our ridgetop dream house—we'd go bankrupt if we built it, I realized. A few weeks after our first child, Molly, was born, we bought an old fixer-upper in town. Our son, Skyler, was born three years later. It was about then, in 1997, that I first heard of a young entrepreneur named Matt Arno, the son of Stephen Arno, a nationally recognized authority on the role of fire in western forests. With his forestry degree, Matt, 35, had founded a Montana-based company, Woodland Restoration Inc., that thinned forests to restore their health. I'd heard that he sometimes worked on a break-even basis—paying his crew by selling logs, the skinniest ones going to the pulp mill and the fatter logs going to the plywood or two-by-four mills.

Several times over the next few years, Arno drove his pickup up the road in the bottom of Sawmill Gulch and inspected our north face. But he couldn't make the economics work.

"I keep thinking there's got to be some great undiscovered use for all this straight, tight-grained wood," I remarked with frustration during one of his visits. "Something that would pay a lot more money than pulp or studs. Like violin necks. Or Japanese post-and-beam houses. Or chopsticks!" "Well," drawled Arno, staring up into the thickets as his mutt, Kootenai, sniffed about, "they'd better need about a billion chopsticks." He looked again. "No, make that ten billion."

Three years ago, Arno finally agreed to take a stab at our forest restoration—at least as much as he could afford to do. He and his crew trailered in a used $80,000, Swedish-built piece of equipment called a cut-to-length harvester. It resembled a small bulldozer, but instead of a blade it sported a powerful hydraulic arm that gripped a standing tree by the trunk, whipped out a chainsaw, and sliced it off like a switchblade flicking open. Then it flipped the entire tree sideways like a hollow soda straw and shot the trunk through its mechanical fist to strip off the branches, as if peeling back the straw's wrapper, while sawing it into computer-determined lengths of log.

The Scandinavian space alien gobbled its way across a level triangle of our ground in Sawmill Gulch, and a few days later the result looked beautiful—like a real forest, not a commercial logging site. I gave Arno the go-ahead for the steep north face, but the space alien, it turned out, couldn't handle the terrain. So he brought in a 30-year-old entrepreneur, Dyrk Krueger, who had built his own take-it-anywhere line machine called the "Excaliner." Like a chairlift without the chairs, the contraption amounts to a suspended cable that hauls wood uphill. Because it lifts most of each log (cut by goat-footed, chainsaw-toting sawyers) off the ground, it avoids the deep, nasty skid trails that scar so many logging sites.

The thickets vanished. In their place stood well-spaced larch and fir and a few pines. Surveying the stumps, I noted that Arno and Krueger had felled some larger trees, too; where three bigger trees crowded one another, they had removed one. After they'd tackled about a third of our north face, the slope grew too steep and the thickets too labor-intensive to be cost-effective. Still, the thinning had produced 17 truckloads of wood at 25 tons per load, or nearly a million pounds of timber. The crews also burned about half a million pounds of lopped-off limbs gathered in slash piles.

I was more than pleased with the work. Every day, dozens of hardcore enviros—fierce protectors of the Rattlesnake Wilderness and National Recreation Area—came up Sawmill Gulch on foot, mountain bikes, and four-wheel drives en route to the trailhead and got a perfect eyeful of our thinning. I printed up signs explaining what we were doing and why, listing all our names and phone numbers. I expected at least a few angry calls about our "logging." Not a single one. Instead, the local chapter of the Sierra Club sponsored a media tour of our land as an example of fuels-reduction work done well and done in the right place—on the "wildland-urban interface," the juncture between city and forest where letting natural fires burn is too risky to homes and property.