About
Erik Snow
Consulting forester, Missoula. Twelve years of production forestry, three of them running federally funded forest programs on national forest land.
Erik Snow is a consulting forester in Missoula. Twelve years in, most of it outdoors. He has cruised timber, laid out and marked harvest units, written prescriptions, run fuels projects and administered logging contracts, on ground that ran from industrial coastal timberland to federal forest in the southern Rockies.
He's a Registered Professional Forester, license number 3101, which took a forestry degree, documented experience and a state exam. Montana licenses nobody, so it came from a state that does and it carries no authority here. What it tells you is that somebody other than Erik has checked his work.
Where he’s worked
2023 to present
Forestry Coordinator, National Forest Foundation
Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests
Designing and running vegetation management on national forest land, alongside Forest Service staff. Timber sales, fuels reduction, habitat work, stewardship projects. He also ran the program itself. Budgets, invoicing, capacity, fundraising, and keeping agency people and private contractors pointed the same direction.
This is the part that matters most in Montana. The biggest and fastest-growing pool of money in forestry here is public money. Federal and state grants, cost-share, Good Neighbor Authority work. Almost no solo consultant has run the administrative side of it from the inside.
2022 to 2023
Professional Forester, Crane Mills
Company timberlands
Managing timberland with a team of foresters. Sale preparation and inventory were the bulk of it. Also silvicultural prescriptions, reforestation, contract administration, road layout, prescribed burning.
2019 to 2022
Professional Forester, then Forestry Team Lead, Jacobszoon & Associates
Private consulting practice
Working for landowners. Harvest permits, prescriptions, timber appraisals, inventories, management plans, logging contract administration. From 2021 he ran the forestry team, which meant assigning work, hiring, project budgets, client relationships, and bringing in new contracts.
2017 to 2019
Assistant Forester, Jefferson Resource Company
Private land management
Supporting the professional foresters across a mixed portfolio. Mostly silviculture and inventory. Marking timber for fuels and harvest projects, running plots, laying out logging units, collecting data, and putting together the permits and GIS mapping behind it. He ran the field crew often enough, and trained the new hires.
2014 to 2016
Seasonal State Forestry Aid, Cal Fire
Jackson Demonstration State Forest
Three seasons of field work. Marking, cruising, harvest plan layout, invasive species control, road and culvert damage assessment, sample plots, directing crews.
Why western Montana
Erik is a heritage Montanan. He didn't pick western Montana off a map after a good week here. He's from here and he's come back, to country he cared about long before he made a career out of looking after it.
He hunts and fishes the ground he works. He's a member of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and that's a good part of why he came back.
Montana is also short of foresters. Nearly everyone doing this work is twenty years or more into a career, and there is very little coming up behind them. At the same time the Forest Service is being asked to do more with fewer people, and is filling the gap with partners and contractors. That is the arrangement Erik spent three years working inside.
Start with a conversation about your ground
Erik Snow will ask what you own, what's worrying you, and what you want the place to look like in twenty years, then tell you what he'd want to look at first.