the firewood supplier is closing

and the Interior has until the end of the year to sort out where the wood comes from now.

Aurora Energy Solutions has been the main source of firewood up there since 2020. In mid July they said they're winding the operation down, and ten people are out of a job.

The outgoing general manager laid out why. It isn't the cost of the logs. It's harvesting them, and trucking them, and cutting and splitting and drying them, and that math quit working.

In a lot of Interior houses, wood isn't a weekend hobby. It's the furnace. This is a place that plans its winter in August, long before anybody needs the heat.

There's a restaurant in town that burns through up to sixty cords a year. The owner says if he can't find another source, he has to change the core of how the place runs.

The obvious move is to swap out the heating system. Not that long ago that ran ten to fifteen thousand dollars. Now it's closer to twenty.

There are federal air quality programs that chip in on a swap like that. Not enough to cover a jump like that one. Electric and natural gas are the other ways to go, and neither one is cheap up there either.

Smaller independent wood sellers are still working up there. They're just a lot smaller than what's leaving.