In Corrales, a father and son find new life in fallen trees

Rick Thaler hated to see the death of two giant sycamores at his daughter’s Corrales home, so he did what many woodworkers only dream of: he bought a portable sawmill. That sawmill has evolved into a full-time business — Dendro Technology in Corrales — with a studio and large-scale equipment. Thaler, who has been in the business for 50 years, now has a co-owner and fellow woodworker: son Jacob Thaler.

The Thalers have saved all kinds of downed trees from the scrap heap by selling the planks or turning them into painstakingly made tables, benches, kitchen islands and other fine goods. The process — from drying the timber to adding the final furniture touches — can take up to a year.

It’s clear that both Thalers love trees, even Russian olives and salt cedars that look “pretty gnarly” on the outside.

Both species are considered among the bosque’s most invasive species, but Rick Thaler says Russian olives are his favorite to work with because “they’re so humble. They’re considered a junk tree, but we make beautiful things out of them.”

There’s also a surprise factor because you never know what you’ll find when you make the first cut. Once, deep inside a Russian olive’s rotten spot, they found two lizards curled together — dormant, but still alive.

Some of Dendro’s customers have an affection for a particular tree.

Although the Thalers don’t like working with cottonwoods because the interior is “weak and it cracks,” they did agree to make three benches out of a well-loved tree that had been climbed on for years by a couple’s young children.

“Every time you make a (cut), there’s something spectacular inside,” Jacob Thaler says. “You’re the one who can make it look better, but the beauty is inside of the wood itself.”

Tell me about a piece you’re proud of.

Jacob: I did this kitchen island that had a waterfall edge (where the surface flows down to the floor at a 90-degree angle). It was kind of a pain in the butt, and it took a long time. But it’s funny because I keep doing all these projects, and I think this one is the best and then I do something else, and it’s just as cool. It’s a progression.

Rick: A recent one we just did for the Durango Coffee Company was super simple, but these planks had (holes) in them. I said, “This plank is the perfect thing for the back of your bench, but it’s got this big hole in it.” She (owner Katherine Walker) said, “How about filling it with coffee beans?” So we poured a little floor with epoxy and filled it with coffee beans. What’s on top is more clear epoxy. It sits in front of her store. It was exactly what she wanted.”

What first got you into woodworking?

Rick: I was a reluctant college student in the early ‘70s — kept dropping out of school, and I read about carpentry work in the Whole Earth Catalog. I thought it was really cool, so I got a job in upstate New York with a framing company. It was a horrible place to work. I was just a suburban, middle-class kid, and these guys were hard, hard guys and they were abusive. Then I was a house painter for a while, and I worked on a farm. I came across this magazine called Fine Woodworking, and there was a picture of this guy named George Nakashima, kind of an architect and designer and a woodworker. He found these gigantic planks from all around the world, and he had a sort of art factory. High-level, not your ordinary stuff. It was really inspiring.

Jacob: As a young kid, I worked for my dad a little, and I didn’t like it because it was mostly cabinets. You know, spraying glue on laminate and gluing it on and stuff like that. That kind of killed it for me. I moved away in my early 20s to Colorado and I had a business there, a vape shop. But once my daughter was on the way, I realized that it’s not really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I moved back, and my dad had bought a sawmill. And then COVID happened, and we were really kind of locked down here. Luckily, we had a sawmill to mess with, and I enjoyed it. Maybe because I was older, and I learned to appreciate things more.

Where does most of your wood come from?

Rick: Almost all of it comes from trees that needed to be taken down. Yard trees from around here. There’s a lot of stuff from Oklahoma’s road-clearing projects. We got some from California. We kind of started as urban loggers. We just found people had dead and downed trees that needed to be removed, and I had bought this sawmill as a hobby idea when I retired. Very, very little of what we sell was commercially grown to be harvested. It’s all salvage.

Any plans for the future?

Rick: One of the things we really need to become is better marketers. It’s a good living for my son, but if I had to make a living from it, too, it would be a struggle. And in order for it to really become a thriving business, we need to just generate more business. The only way to do that is by letting people know we're here.

What do you find satisfying about this work?

Rick: First of all, it’s giving a second life to these incredible trees that otherwise would just get ground up and sent to the landfill. And the other thing is, it’s sequestering the carbon. You know, I haven’t ever really done the math, but this shop is all solar, and our electric bill is seven, eight bucks a month. Even though we have all these giant machines … I think we’re probably pretty close to carbon neutral, with all the carbon that we sequester and all the trees we save from being burned or pulped. That means a lot to me.

Jacob: I grew up here in Corrales, so I was always in the bosque, always playing. There were always trees around me, but as a kid you don’t realize — you’re just running and playing and stuff. It wasn’t until I actually started doing this that I looked at trees in a different light. I really started to appreciate them because when we mill them and actually look inside — wow, there's all this incredible stuff going on. And it’s almost like there’s a story inside every single tree. You know, I feel lucky that I’m able to actually salvage some wood because a lot of it just goes to the landfill or is chopped up.

Ellen Marks, a former Journal editor, writes One-on-One profiles and Scam Watch. You can reach her at emarks@abqjournal.com.