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Since the remodeled Portland International Airport was unveiled in August 2024, reviews have been effusive.Enter the first major U.S. airport with a timber roof and the wow factor is everywhere.Undertaken at a cost of $2.1 billion, the four-year PDX remodel uses 3.7 million board feet of wood. It features a nine-acre Douglas fir roof, Oregon white oak flooring and expansive ligneous detailing everywhere in between.Its latticed ceiling includes 35,000 individual three-by-sixes, alongside 2 million board feet of arched glulam beams. Tree-adorned wooden concessions, sky-lit oak flooring and seating, and decorative wood walls are as un-O’Hare as it gets.Even the terminal’s wood-slatted TSA screening booths have been described as “ease-inducing” and “biophilic.” (Well, okay …)All very Oregon. The remodel has been touted as the largest public works project in state history.Now there’s a new feature that helps those with an abiding interest its construction gain an even greater appreciation of all that wood.One of the project’s more ambitious (if less obvious) achievements was its effort to keep track of where all the wood it uses comes from.Trace elements: Wood origin signage is found throughout Portland International Airport’s main terminal. Chuck ThompsonTelling that story are new signs scattered around the terminal titled “Where’s the Wood From?”“EVERY BOARD COMES FROM WITHIN A DAY’S DRIVE,” notes a wooden sign in carved caps in the mezzanine near the Loyal Legion beer hall in the upper level. “WE SET OUT TO SOURCE THE WOOD AS LOCAL AS YOUR FARMER’S MARKET, SO WE KNOW THE FORESTS LIKE WE KNOW OUR NEIGHBORS.”Translation: the airport’s wood-sourcing efforts are worth marveling over, too.If the heritage of Colin the Chicken can become an international sensation, why not wood?The wooden signs, which weren’t ready for the grand opening last summer, were installed over the winter.They’re worth seeking out. How do you trace wood, anyway?Every piece of wood in the main terminal comes from Oregon and Washington, within 300 miles of the airport, according to airport operator Port of Portland, the project’s architectural firm ZGF and conservationist wood consultant Sustainable Northwest:Most eye-catching of all on a self-guided PDX “Where’s the Wood From?” sign tour is the wood’s traceability.COQUILLE INDIAN TRIBE GREW THE DOUGLAS FIR FOR THE DOUBLE BEAMS IN THE OVAL SKYLIGHT ABOVE YOU.ZENA FOREST GREW THE OREGON WHITE OAK FOR THIS BENCH.COW CREEK BAND OF UMPQUA TRIBE OF INDIANS GREW THE DOUGLAS FIR FOR THIS WALL.About 30% of the wood in the PDX remodel can be traced to its specific forest of origin.While that may not sound like a high number, it represents a huge amount of traceable timber in an industry that doesn’t do that sort of thing.“The current, opaque supply chain makes it difficult to know how wood is harvested, exactly where it is harvested, who owns the land and the values that drive the forest’s management,” co-wrote ZGF Principal Jacob Dunn and Sustainable Northwest Senior Director of Wood Markets Paul Vanderford, in a blog outlining the PDX project’s multi-year efforts to engage with landowners and mills across the Pacific Northwest, and shift the usual timber production protocol.Once it was decided that the PDX remodel would be done with wood that was both local and sustainably managed, tracking where that wood came from would be the biggest challenge of all, according to Dunn and Vanderford.It would also become a touchstone for the entire project.“It was the first attempt at anything like this,” they wrote. “And while we didn’t achieve it all, we reached targets no other projects have.”One million board feet in the airport terminal’s roof can be directly traced to wood from 13 regional, tribal-owned, family-owned, community, public and nonprofit forests, according to a sourcing chart by Sustainable Northwest that’s reminiscent of a farm-to-table menu detailing the origin of every item on a plate.“If salmon that we consume can be tracked back to its source of origin, and our coffee traced back to the farm where it was grown, why can’t we know where our wood comes from?” asks ZGF’s Dunn. The project’s traceability effort reimagines “farm-to-table” as a new tagline: forest-to-frame.“I’ll go on record and say it’s possible ‘forest-to-frame’ was coined for this project. It’s the first time I’d ever heard it,” says Ryan Temple, president of Sustainable Northwest Wood, a subsidiary of Portland-based Sustainable Northwest and the wood consultant that championed the project’s traceability effort.“Wood traceability doesn’t happen on a large scale,” says Temple. “Logs come in, get mixed together and there’s no way to trace what comes out the back end—unless a mill is willing to actually separate logs from a specific forest, run that batch on its own and say, ‘Here’s your three-by-eight from the Chimacum Ridge Community Forest.’ That’s a whole different way of doing things, so it took some time, effort and convincing.”Was there pushback from the mills?“There were mixed feelings,” says Temple. “Some mills were on board from the start and thought it was really cool that people know where the wood comes from. Others were initially like, ‘This is gonna require way more work and transparency than we’re used to. Can’t we just do business as usual?’”Most of those reluctant mills came around, says Temple.As the project progressed, and sawmills and forest owners started getting more attention, accolades and positive press than they’re used to “a lot of those skeptics became believers.”Source of pride: Sarah Deumlingan and her son, Ben, run Zena Forest Products, an Oregon-based, multigenerational family business that contributed to the PDX remodel.Aedin Powell/Sustainable Northwest Tribal timber, legacy loggersAnother project goal was targeting underrepresented links in the supply chain—small mills, family forests, nonprofits and tribal nations—as well as forests from both western and eastern Oregon and Washington.Nearly a third of the wood in the new terminal was sourced from underrepresented landowners—including 16% tribal wood.“When you use traceable timber, all that wood has a story behind it,” says Temple. “One of my favorites is with the terminal’s seam wall—this grid-work of Douglas fir that kind of looks like a giant wine rack and happened later in the project.“The airport was scrambling to get it done, came to us and said, ‘Hey, we need some Doug fir, and it would be great if it came from a well-managed forest with a story behind it, but we really just need to get this thing done.’”As it happened, the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Tribe of Indians, south of Roseburg, Ore., had recently started a forest program and was stocking loads of reclaimed wood.“They were salvaging wood that was the result of a fire which had started off of the reservation and had burned onto it,” says Temple. “They lost thousands of acres, but were doing the best to try to create something out of this wood.”PDX ended up using some of that wood for the seam wall.“It was absolutely perfect for what the airport had in mind,” says Temple. “Not only was the wood harvested and salvaged by the Tribe, but it was turned into lumber at their own mill. That revenue from the Tribe’s forestry and mill operation is now being used to reacquire parcels of ancestral land.”Stories are ingrained in wood used all over the terminal.The pergola designs by the coffee shop concessions are built with beams from the Yakama Nation. They support a lattice structure of Douglas fir from JayZee Lumber based in northeast Oregon’s Wallowa County, “where fourth-generation loggers work with fourth-generation ranchers,” says Temple.“It’s local wood, it’s good wood, it’s sustainable wood, but it’s more than that—and more than just a magnificent airport project,” says Temple. “It’s a celebration of the people, places, communities, businesses and individual forests where all of that wood has come from.”Can a project of this magnitude inspire a broader forest-to-frame movement?“Our hope is that this project helps catalyze a new level of rigor and options for sourcing and tracing mass timber and other wood products sustainably,” Dunn and Vanderford wrote. “Hopefully this makes it easier for future project teams to follow suit and ask—Where does the wood come from?”Jordan Rane is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in CNN.com, Outside, Men’s Journal and the Los Angeles Times.##Columbia Insight, based in Hood River, Oregon, is a nonprofit newsroom focused on environmental issues of the Columbia River Basin and the Pacific Northwest.

New signs invite travelers to take in a self-guided, "forest-to-frame" tour before their next flight.