All of us that live in Boreal forest regions of the world our primary tree is spruce then popel then white birch. In my area white spruce is 98-99% then 1-1.5% people and the remainder white birch. I burn 15-25 cords of spruce a year. If I could get birch that would be cut by40-50%.
John D Rope Hi friends! Thanks for pointing this thread and article out to me. I’ve been on a 72 hour shift. I’m just catching up now. I agree with you guys. As most of you know, I live at 9k feet. My brother lives just south of me at 11,600 feet! He also burns local wood for heat. As you can probably guess - not much hardwood up here. I have a good stockpile of hardwood that I’ve scrounged in the Denver metro area, on my way home from work. But the vast majority of the firewood that I burn is local softwood. Ponderosa Pine Limber Pine Lodgepole Pine Douglas Fir Spruce Rocky Mountain Juniper Aspen Those are the vast majority of what I burn. There is an endless supply of all of those softwoods here, and I feel very fortunate about that. I will never run out of firewood. I’ve been burning softwoods my entire life. I clean my chimney twice per burning season. I hardly get any soot at the bottom of the pipe when cleaning. As everyone else here has mentioned, the key is to properly season your firewood prior to burning. The climate here isn’t nearly as cold as Rope’s, but I’ve weathered my fair share of below zero, whiteout blizzards - with the power out. My family and I haven’t frozen to death yet!
I am in Cote Nord Quebec and in the Boreal. Here we have a ton of black spruce which is decent. But we also have a lot of white and yellow birch, yellow is excellent firewood. We are not allowed to cut coniferous trees for wood here, only deciduous, so while black spruce is easy to come by we mainly burn birch, which I won't complain about
