It’s the very best reason to stay in Alleghany County. You’ve likely suffered it more times than you’d care to count. Heavy fog settles in unexpectedly and your schedule’s tight. Miles of highway separate you from an appointment in Elkin or far beyond. Under those circumstances, what’s more predictable than having to follow an 80,000-pound logging truck as it pokes cautiously down the mountain?

One caught me again, but this time our destination was the same: Weyerhaeuser’s Eastern Oriented Strandboard plant near Friendship Speedway. The driver’s objective was unloading logs; mine was learning how trees are turned into panels that are so useful in construction. The Elkin facility began in 1986, and has grown non-stop. Many of their 163 employees have worked there since the first logging trucks rolled in. The production numbers are amazing!

That division can produce 360 million square feet of 3/8-inch thick panels per year. Nationally, the company’s total capacity for oriented-strand boards is 4.4 billion square feet, enough to cover two-thirds of Alleghany County! In 2003, Weyerhaeuser planted 132 million seedlings to replace the 1 percent harvested on their 38 million acres of tree farms.

On an average day, the plant’s woodyard holds roughly 64,000 pounds of logs stacked in a dozen or so “tiers” 30 feet tall and 300 feet long. In two weeks of nearly around-the-clock work, that many tree trunks will become sheets of flooring and trusses. Those logs will be replaced as if overnight.

The sprawling facility’s bywords appear to be safety, environment, efficiency and production, pretty much in that order. The mill safety team takes its responsibility quite seriously, as does their environmental team. If an employee discovers a safety or environmental hazard, management will see that it’s quickly corrected. Carol Cleary, the company’s utilities leader, and Susan Larkin, their corporate communications manager for the Carolinas and “both Virginias,” were my tour guides. Carol gave me a mandatory safety lecture and written quiz. Failing means a re-test or no tour. Passing the quiz earned me the use of earplugs, safety glasses, a hard hat, and a bright red vest.

Logs we’ve followed down the mountain are first stripped of bark, which is sold as mulch. Then they pass through a series of industrial-strength knife blades that reduce them to thousands of random-width chips about four inches long. Those move slowly through cylindrical dryers 20 feet in diameter, where heat beginning at 1,000 degrees removes contaminants and cools slowly toward the other end, 60 feet away. These paper-thin flakes are routed to blenders where they’re tumbled and sprayed with a mist of resins and wax. The coated chips are then mechanically oriented into crosshatched layers that provide overlapping strength, while still allowing limited flexibility. Ragged-edged mats of woodchips nearly a foot thick and 16 feet wide move in spurts along a broad conveyor belt. They stop briefly to be sawn into panels 8 feet long, then hustle to the next station where they slide into alternating racks on an elevator nearly two stories tall. Compression occurs at the elevator’s top. From start to finish, this step takes about 20 minutes per panel. In the control room, a man carefully monitors the process where each stage appears as a brightly colored video display of assorted details. One level down, the finished panels are stacked, labeled, and have their edges painted Weyerhaeuser’s familiar dark green. The 300-pound bundles are then loaded onto waiting flatbed trucks already pointed toward Interstate 77.

The employees’ attitude toward safety showed quite clearly as the 90-minute tour wound down. Our little parade was always single-file with Carol first, this questioning and note-taking visitor next, then Susan. As we walked along a broad yellow band painted on the warehouse floor, I stepped aside to look at something. Susan promptly nudged me back onto the stripe, gently emphasizing its purpose. Though the nearest threat was a huge fork-lift 30 yards beyond, safety rules, but never bends. Obviously, her primary tour responsibility was to keep me from wandering into potential trouble.

As we walked toward the door, I asked Susan what brought her to the oriented strandboard business. Her reply came with a smile.

“Marrying a man with two degrees in forestry.”

Dense fog was waiting as I headed home. An empty logging truck led a string of five cars up the mountain. That figures.