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Treadlight™ Flooring

Treadlight™ Trim

Dimensional Lumber

Treadlight™ Larch Windows by Clawson

Treadlight™ Picture Frames

Is it Larch or is it Tamarack?

Actually, it's both.

For Treadlight flooring and trim we harvest a remarkable tree – the Western Larch.  Known in parts of its range as Western Tamarack or Mountain Larch, the species Larix occidentalis grows only in the Northern Rockies and nearby ranges (see map) but has close cousins in other cool, moist regions of the Northern Hemisphere – the tamaracks or hackmatacks of Nova Scotia, New England and the Upper Midwest, the larches of Siberia, the Himalayas, and of Japan.  An exceptionally beautiful tree, the larch's needles turn yellow in autumn and drop to the ground, creating a golden carpet on the forest floor, and regenerate each spring in tender green bundles.

For North American Indians, the larch possessed mystical properties offering medicine, nutrition, and resilient building materials.  Ojibway used crushed leaves and bark of the Eastern Larch for poultices to treat wounds and headaches, and inhaled the larch's resinous vapors.  Other Native Americans chewed its sweetish sap like gum, gargled its tea for sore throats, and ate its boiled spring shoots.  Native Siberians ingested its sap to fight the effects of scurvy.  Its tough fiber had many uses, from making goose decoys among the Cree near Hudson's Bay, to crafting toboggans and snowshoes.  In the Abenaki language, the word “Hackmatack” – later Anglicized to “Tamarack” – means “wood used for snowshoes.”  “Larch” is its European name, deriving from old German.

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