Lynn Miner (b. 1951) is a retired physicist who has spent the last 30 years rehabilitating a former dairy farm into a healthy 100-acre forest in the foothills north of Chewelah (Stevens County) with his wife, Becky Miner (b. 1952). They have been recognized for their work with a number of awards, including most recently, the 2024 Washington State Tree Farmer of the Year. The Miners are donating their forest land to Washington State University for the use of students and teachers from K-12 schools and universities in order to leave a "legacy of learning." Lynn Miner talked with HistoryLink’s Jennifer Ott on June 9, 2025, about his experiences restoring and managing Casa Becca del Norte. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A Steep Learning Curve
Lynn Miner: I'm a tree farmer. I used to be a research physicist, and I started out as an aircraft mechanic and then I became an aircrew member in the Air Force. And that's how we ultimately wound up here, because I flew over this place every weekend for three years. I was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base, and I worked for the survival school. And the survival school is just to the northeast of this property. It's just a couple miles north on the next ridge over. And I flew up there every weekend for three years to support the survival school. One Saturday morning I just mentioned to my wife, "You know, we ought to go to a foreign country." We grew up in Iowa. We'd never been out of the country. We got on Highway 395 and, as we came down that big hill into the valley, I said, “Wow, this place is beautiful. We ought to retire here someday.”
Anyway, life happens, and she [Becky Miner] went on to school. She got a degree in nursing, and then she got her master's degree, and then she ultimately became a professor. For 25 years we saved every penny she made. We lived off of my income and for 25 years, we saved all the money that she made so that in 1992, I came up here and looked at properties all over Stevens County that were available and I found this one. [We] paid $100,000 cash for the land and then [we] built that big shop out there and we lived in that shop while [we] built the house.
Of the 100 acres, only about 20 acres of it was actually forested when I bought it. And my wife and I knew absolutely nothing about forestry. Nothing. Zero. In fact, we had the attitude that thou shalt not ever cut down a tree. Now, I don't mean that to the extent [that] we were tree huggers. We knew that trees were a crop and you cut them down to make lumber, but you don't just cut them down willy-nilly just to clear an area. You just don't do that. So, we were very conservation-minded in that sense. We were so ignorant about it that we thought this place was just absolutely beautiful, and we had areas that had dog hair. Dog hair is an area where there's just hundreds, or even thousands, or tens of thousands of tree stems that are three inches, four inches, five inches apart, and it's so thick you can't even walk through it. We saw that and thought, “Wow, this is great! Look at all these trees! This is going to be beautiful.”
Of course, we didn't realize that a tree that's sitting next to another tree that's six inches away is never going to do anything. We learned. And then we started cutting down some of this dog hair and we were finding trees that were an inch and a half in diameter that were 35 years old. It should be 12 inches in diameter by then.
With our involvement in DNR [Department of Natural Resources] and NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) and all these different stewardship programs, in working with those guys, they started to teach us about releasing trees, getting some separation and thinning and pruning. And that's what we did. We started on a mission to make this place a healthy forest.
Wildlife Restoration
LM: When we moved here, there was total silence. There were no birds, none, nothing. When you have an unhealthy forest, you don't have wildlife. There was nothing here. There was nothing. The field up there to the left, that was a barley field. It was completely barren. There wasn't a single tree on that hill. Down at the bottom, that was a barley field. There was not a single tree on that whole section down there. We've spent 30 years restoring it.
From the very beginning, we put up wildlife cameras. We were both educators. We were both scientists. And we did the whole citizen scientist thing. Not only did we put up cameras, but we made logs. We made diaries of what we saw, where we saw it, when we saw it. And, “Oh, look, gosh, I've never seen a moose out here before.” Now we've got moose all the time. And we never saw elk. Now we have 50 or 60 of them every spring, parking their butts on that field down there. We never saw cougars. Now we see cougars all the time. Becky has always been a bird watcher and amateur ornithologist. She's logged 70 different species of birds on this property, over 70. We never saw wolves. Now we see wolves all the time. We had one come across the driveway just last week. There were two of them that were about to take out my dog a couple years ago. So, they're definitely here.
I developed a technology that's used to track the wolves, to scare them away when they approach an area where there's calves or ponies or sheep. It's actually pretty sophisticated. It's called a RAG box, radio-activated guard box. It triggers on their collars, and it makes a bunch of flashing lights and a bunch of noise. And then it downloads GPS coordinates. It's got a built-in computer, solar charging controllers. They're now used in Washington, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Arizona. Until the Trump administration came, it was planned to go nationwide. But they got their budget hammered, so it's just in the western states at this point. But it works really well, saves a lot of calves and ponies, and it works against cougars as well.
Learning to Steward the Forest
LM: So, I saw a sign, a DNR sign on another piece of property that said on the sign: "Stewardship Forest." And there was an 800 number at the bottom of it. So, I wrote it down and I got home and I called that 800 number, which was up in Colville, and I talked to a guy by the name of Brian Vrablick. He had just graduated from WSU [Washington State University], and he came out and he said, "Well, we can sign you up for some stewardship programs and you'll get paid for doing this work." And he said, "But one of the guys you need to talk to is Bob Playfair. Lives just down the road. He was the president of the Washington Farm Forestry Association and he was the Washington Tree Farmer of the Year many years ago and he can come and help you."
Bob was our mentor. He's got 8,000 acres [of forest]. That is how he supports his family. He taught me how to prune. He taught me how to thin. He taught me how to walk through the woods and say, "That tree's got to go. That's got a disease. It's got armillaria or it's got pine beetle. In three years, that tree is going to be completely brown from the ground all the way to the top." And he was right. He taught me how to deal with that and how to mitigate those problems. He taught me how to use herbicides in a responsible way. Everything related to forestry. I mean the guy was just a wealth of information, and he's the one that convinced me I needed to join the Washington Farm Forestry Association.
The first thing I did was look at a dog hair patch under the mentorship of Bob Playfair, where he taught me how to determine which trees are the ones you want to keep. That's the first thing I’d do: tag the tree, or trees, that we wanted to keep. We had areas that were as much as an entire acre of dog hair: 15 to 20,000 stems in an acre. You couldn't walk through it or anything. So, what I did was, I went out and I bought an industrial weed eater and took the head off of it and put on a circular chainsaw blade. I just walked into the area and just mowed it down and just kept going until I could keep moving forward, moving forward. Becky would be behind me picking up the stems and piling them so we could burn them later. And then we would leave the ones that we wanted to leave.
We had a number of cost share programs with DNR to do this cleanup of the dog hair. The rule was: You clean up the dog hair, and the leave trees had to be no less than 14 feet apart. We did that for two years. And something I noticed was that, if they're 14 feet apart, the leave trees, in one winter, the top just curves right on down to the ground. It's because their little buddies all around were helping to hold them up. So, I contacted DNR I said look, “I'm doing these cost share programs, and you're paying me to do this. But you have a specification that's killing everything because the leave trees are dying because they're falling over. I'm changing the rules. I'm not going to have them 14 feet apart. I will go in, and I'll pick the ones we want to leave, and I'm going to clean them up to where there's a tree that's three feet over here and maybe three feet over there. And I'll come back in two years and I'll take those three trees out. But I'm not taking them out now.” Brian Vrablick - he was the first person I dealt with one this - says, “You know, that’s a pretty good idea.”
That’s one of the things we learned.
Living with Fire
LM: One thing I did when we first moved here is I realized that fire danger is bad. It's really bad. What can I do about that? I don't know anything about fire. I don't know anything about how to fight a fire. Well, I'm going to learn how to do it. So, I joined the fire department. I became a volunteer fireman, and my specialty was wildland fire. I worked my way up to where I was just a wildland firefighter, and then I became a crew boss, and then an engine boss, and then a strike team leader and a task force leader. I was in charge of as many as 100 other firefighters out on the scene. I did that for 15 years, and I became a station captain with the fire department, the county fire department here.
I learned how to deal with forest fires. Doing that firsthand and seeing how these things just explode all around me. I mean, I'm lucky to be alive in some situations because some of the things that I was in just exploded. It taught me how to deal with my own property and how to get rid of the ladder fuels. Now, if you have 80 mile an hour winds and you have a crown fire, this house is gone. But if you have some relatively light winds and you have a ground fire that's six or seven feet high, you can deal with that.
I've made wildlife corridors, but they're also fire breaks all through this part. There's a maze of them. And what that's ended up doing is: I've got neighbors that have snowmobiles, and they come up here in the winter and they drive all these trails with their snowmobiles. Then we have other people come up here and do cross-country skiing on the beat-down trails that the snowmobiles make. And then of course in the summertime they’re fire breaks and wildlife corridors. Every year, we have a herd of elk that comes here in the spring. There's about 50 to 60 elk and they use those corridors I made.
Teaching with Fire
LM: TREX stands for Training Exchange, and it's run by the Nature Conservancy. What they do is: They've got a guy that's a fire boss, an instructor, and they go out to different properties, and they find people that are willing to do fire on their property. And there's not many that will because the liability is massive. Then they send a burn boss out to write a burn plan. It's 100% free, doesn't cost anything. Then, once they get their burn plan all set up, then they put out the word, not nationwide, continent-wide. Last fall, I had firemen from the Yukon, from British Columbia, from Alberta. We had a crew from Mexico. There were two crews from Texas, two crews from Florida, a crew from Georgia, and one from Massachusetts. These guys come from all over North America to learn how to put out wildfires. They do a prescribed burn, and after the area's burned that they want to burn, then they get to put it out. Last fall when they were here, there were 50 firefighters, six brush trucks, a structural engine, and a tender. If I had paid for that crew to come out here to burn this property, it would have been nearly $300,000.
Horse Logging
LM: We occupied this house in 1994. And Bob Playfair, our mentor, said:
"You've got a lot of really bad trees here. You just need to get rid of them because they've got bad genetics. You've got schoolmarms, you've got gall rust everywhere, you've got armillaria, you've got bark beetles. You've just got to get rid of these trees because it's going to wreck everything. If you plant new trees, the new trees are going to get the bugs, they're going to get gall rust, the schoolmarms are going to kick off cones, and they're going to just create more schoolmarms. You've just got to get rid of these things.”
So, I had seen commercial logging operations and I thought, "Oh man, I don't want all those big machines coming in here just tearing everything up. We ought to horse log it." So, I found a guy out of Colville that had a team of horses, and he warned me. He said, "Now, you're not going to make much money here because this is expensive." I said, "Well, I'm really not interested in making money doing this." At the time, I was working as a consultant to the CIA doing counterterrorism stuff, and I didn't know somebody could make that much money doing physics. We did a bunch of planning, and it took us a couple years to get it all in place. We started the harvest in 2002. The guy did just a stunning job. It was beautiful. It was just beautiful. He cut the stumps so the brush would come in and just completely cover the stumps. You wouldn't see them. On all of his skid trails where the horses would pull the logs, he would take the branches and just lay them across the trails. And in six months, you could not tell the place had been logged. You could not tell anybody had ever even been in here.
He was a good guy. His name was Donald Johnson. He doesn't do it anymore. He had massive horses. They were like Clydesdales, eight feet tall. Huge animals. And he just talked to them in their little language. He'd make all these different sounds, clicking his teeth and all these different things. And they would go left or right and stand up and stop and go backwards. It was amazing, just amazing. So that's how we got into horse logging. Because we didn't want to tear up the land.
We harvested again in 2022. There was only one guy in Stevens County that was doing horse logging at that time. It just wasn't going to work. Logistically, it just wasn't going to work. So we hired a mechanical team. I regret it to this day. I wish we would [not] have even logged. It made such a mess.
Becky and I have been cleaning it up. This was in 2022, so that was three years ago. We usually work three to four days a week, 52 weeks a year. And we still don't have it cleaned up. They had this huge machine. It had a bucket on the front. It was like a front-end loader only it was massive. And he'd make these piles of slash. They'd be 10- or 12-feet high, but six or seven feet of it was dirt. All their machines that they brought in from other locations brought in Canadian thistle and mullein and bull thistle. It created a mess of noxious weeds that we're still dealing with. This place was pristine before they showed up. There wasn't a single Canadian thistle on the property. Now there's hundreds of them. There’s only one way to get rid of them. Pull them up and burn them. It just made a mess, and there’s one section we still haven’t done anything with. It’s a ten-acre spot we haven’t done anything with. It’s just a mess, a huge mess.
Legacy of Learning
LM: Our ultimate goal now, after all these years of doing this, is we just want to leave what we call a "legacy of learning." And that's why we've donated the property to Washington State University. They're going to keep the name "Casa Becca del Norte WSU Family Forest Research Center." That's what this is going to be. There will be classes up here. Graduate students will come up; undergraduate students will come up; grade school teachers will come up to learn about forestry and bugs.
Because of the work that we had been doing with DNR, NRCS, and Washington State University Extension for years, it just came to me one day. I thought, “I wonder if WSU would want it, and we could turn it into a research center.” A group of them came up here and they had people from the law enforcement school because they want to use it for winter survival for law enforcement guys - make them come out here and live off the land for a week or whatever. They had a professor come up that was in outdoor recreation, hiking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing. They had an entomologist come up, a bug doctor. Then they had a wildlife biologist come up. And then of course forestry, which is Andy [Perleberg]'s specialty. And they all just went, “Holy cow, this would be so cool.”
I said [that] I'm only going to have two restrictions in the contract: that [the land] can never be broken up, and the only other restriction was that they had to keep the name, Casa Becca del Norte, Becky's House in the North. And that came about because prior to buying this property, we lived in New Mexico, in Albuquerque. I worked at Los Alamos and Sandia. I had to come up with a name for this place. And when we moved up here, I said, “Well, it's Becky's House in the North.” And I did it in Spanish: Casa Becca del Norte. It's got to have that name forever.
The really cool part of it is we're doing this, and we've been able to do it while we're still alive. And we've already seen the fruits of it. We've already seen graduate students come up here and do research. And we've participated in those events. We've actually done some of the teaching. We gave a class on how to analyze poop. Scat, of course, is the actual name, but I call it poop. And I made little poop calibrators, and we give them out to everybody. We had a class here just a couple weeks ago with WSU Extension and Washington Farm Forestry Association. I taught a class on how to build nest boxes and build lots of them. And we did another class earlier this year on how to do pruning. We went out, and I taught people how to prune their trees. We've already seen undergraduate students come up, and we've seen school teachers come up from Spokane to learn about things.
