Seems to be happening more and more, but man this one hits really close to home.

Majority of this land is currently game lands/public lands managed by NC Wildlife, owned by Alcoa. It's what I grew up hunting on and land I've become very familiar with over the years.

Now it's up for sale for a total price tag of 86 million dollars. 4691 acres. Most of it will be turned into lakeside housing developments. Tuckertown Lake has about 5 boat docks on it now and is a really peaceful place to go fishing or hunting. This will be the end of that.

https://www.land.com/member/jason-blue/4325274/

Is the state interested in buying?

They have been managing most of that land for longer than I've been alive. I have to imagine they were given first rights to purchase, but unfortunately it looks like they couldn't afford it

around here is tends to be smaller chunks but counties and areas are forming non profits to take donations then buy land to keep access to things like lakes

also people make donations , we are seeing parcel size go from 40s to 5s and 10s and that is not good for management , hunting or much of anything but tax collectors.

we hunt some stuff that is in county land trust now

let me send Elon Musk and Joe Rogan an email. see if we can get the funds to keep it as it should be. Actually, I dont have Musks, but i know how to reach out to Rogan.

Musk is sometimes quite responsive to comments made to him on X......

Same type thing happened here.

Glatfelter Pulp wood company owned thousands of acres of woodlands and it was open to the public. 10-20 years ago they started selling properties off, some they kept soon got leased up.

Lots of good hunting now gone.

The opposite seems to be happening here. Couple new ares in MN acquired with different legacy funds.

https://mnland.org/2025/03/10/3m-mantrap-lake/


https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/news/20...stone-woods-new-wildlife-management-area

Here the Iowa legislature (aka the Farm Bureau) has tried to make it illegal for the state to purchase land.

By your description above, it's not public land, but private land the owners generously allowed the public to hunt/fish. Not the same.

Alabama lost Scotch WMA a few years back in a similar deal. It was private owned by Scotch Timber and had been a WMA for as long as I remember. It was about 15 miles north of my family homeplace and had been a source for deer and turkey for restocking along with Stimpson to the south.

The family heirs decided that leasing it out to private hunting clubs was more lucrative. The state of the timber market had much to do with it. The margins are that slim. Scotch was one of the first vertically integrated operations from back in the days when pony rail and mules hauled timber. They bought up the land laid the rail and built the mill. I've watched over the years as they've had to diversify into consulting, tree planting and cutting and management services. Canadian imports are are of it but the timber market has changed. More engineered lumber than full dimension.

Meanwhile others such as Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser, etc are selling off tracts.

Things are changing and not for the better.

It’s too hard to turn a profit logging toothpicks, it takes a lot of stems to add up to any board feet worth talking about, and the quality of those board feet is crap. A tree with 6 rings per inch isn’t going to create a board that’s equal to one from a tree with 30-40 rings per inch.

Yup, we've been playing the short rotation improved lobolly game all my life and driven the market down to the point that it no longer makes sense.

You’re in a rough part of the world for growing desirable wood species too, even big pine is worthless, it barely covers the logging and trucking. A land owner has to just want to be rid of it, because their piece of the pie evaporated as soon as they said the unit was pine dominant. We have some sizeable shore pine here, but we just cut them to get them out of the way, they don’t get bucked into logs or picked up by the rigging crew/shovel operator. Doug fir is what dimensional mills really want, hemlock or white fir is acceptable for B grade. Cedar is always valuable to a more niche market, but it still has to stack up and make loads

The Glatfelter co. I mentioned and some others clear cut and chip it on site. Not all tracts are done this way, they do haul poles in too.

Our state is timbering a state game lands close me and they're doing both, pole logs on the bigger trees and chipping the smaller stuff.

I’ve seen them do that on units I’ve cut in southern Oregon and Northern California, they have a biomass facility in Medford that burns the chips to make power

Glatfelter makes paper out of theirs.

Also, there's A company that makes woodstove and smoker pellets here.

Pole still brings good money, particularly big pole timber. We've resisted the recommended plant it all, cut it all at 20 regime. We've done mixed age smaller plots with focus on pole timber final. Just sent several truckloads to market and the buyer stated that he wasn't aware that anything that size was still standing anywhere in the county.

We got some 25+ longleaf that'll be the next to look at but most of it will reach 50.

CoonDagger, I would tell you to contact Sen. Tillis's office but he is useless as teats on a boar hog. Just keep hunting it like it's yours. Explain the past practice principal. In all seriousness, I do hate to hear that. You get a petition started and I'd sign it.