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“We give you a rack of wood a week and we’ve measured it to be a seventh of a cord,” said Paul Mumm, secretary and treasurer for the Oversized Heart Foundation that runs the wood bank. “I have several people who will get a little over three cords per year … at $250 a cord they’re basically getting about $750 of free firewood.”
And that’s exactly the point for Mumm and co-founders Kelly and Nick Norris, president and vice president of the foundation and Joe Landsiedel, a local logging contractor, who with Kelly Norris first tested the wood bank concept in 2022.
The motto of the wood bank is: “Ensuring no one ever has to choose between heating and eating.”
Kelly Norris, who is also the State Forester for the Wyoming State Forestry Division, said the idea came to her after helping lead the local food bank during the pandemic and seeing needs. She read an article in the Washington Post about a wood bank in Maine or Vermont.
She also knew that locally, people were scrounging for wood.
“I personally had heard stories at that time of people coming and taking wood pallets from local stores just to keep their homes warm during the winter,” she said. “My home at the time, it’s in downtown Buffalo, and we had a fence at the time that was made out of split firewood, and it was getting stolen.
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Landsiedel said in addition to hauling for the wood bank, his company does a lot of hauling of firewood logs for regular customers in the region. He estimates two out of three homes in the area use wood stoves as a primary or supplemental heat source.
“Last year, I hauled over 250 loads of firewood on my log truck,” he said. “That doesn’t include all of the saw logs and everything else we hauled.”
As forester, Norris said there is plenty of wood in the mountains and the wood bank uses logs from managed timber sales or from private forested lands that have forested management plans written by Wyoming State Forestry.
“So, it’s all in very good faith of forest health and it’s looking at the forest in a sustainable manner,” she said. For instance, if a tree is destined for the sawmill, but is found with rot, instead of putting it in a pile to burn, it’s now coming down into Buffalo to be cut into firewood and given away.
Great!