Curly Redwood Lodge

The Curly Redwood Lodge began as an idea by Tom Wyllie who owned the Redwood Room in Klamath, California. He thought it would be possible to build a lodge out of one redwood tree. He liked curly redwood and found a tree near the Klamath River from which enough wood could be used. The tree was 18’ 2" at the butt cut and curly to the tip of every branch. It was so huge, it had to be cut into 5 logs and quartered. The logs were then loaded over their own stump by smoothing the stump with a chain saw, cutting one side just the height of a truck bed and three logs were put on the opposite side of the stump so the quartered logs could be pushed onto the truck bed with a caterpillar.  57,000 board feet of lumber came from that single tree when it was cut down in 1952 and was brought to Crescent City. Many mills sawed, air-dried and cut the redwood into various different cuts for paneling, posts and doors. All the wood was cut into solid pieces; not one piece of veneer was made or used for redwood; there is enough curly redwood lumber left to build more units for the future.