- Oh, look how light that is.
Oh, yeah.
Today we're gonna see how charcoal is made.
I'm here in Picuris Pueblo in New Mexico,
where I've been staying for the past two months, ish,
waiting out this whole virus situation,
and I just learned that they have
a small charcoal production operation.
So I'm off to meet Luther with the Forestry Department
and see how that all works.
Hey there, how's it going?
Loading up huh? (man humming)
This is what you'll burn in? - Yeah.
- That's great. - To make the charcoal.
We try to utilize the small diameter stuff
that people don't wanna pay for for firewood.
Then some of the scrap, lumber,
kind of like the edge of the logs,
those ones we'll just chop up.
- [Scotty] And so where are those coming from?
Do you guys have a mill on site?
- We have a portable mill at the fire station.
- [Scotty] And that's what these come from?
- Yeah. - Oh, wow.
- [Luther] We have a Lucas portable sawmill.
- [Scotty] So you sell that or sell the lumber that's there?
- Yeah, it was just a way to utilize small diameter,
'cause normally we would leave it all in the woods.
And then when they burn it,
they'll broadcast burn for fuel reduction.
(man mumbling)
- [Scotty] So, what's the process here?
I see you guys are stacking it pretty tight.
- Yeah.
Well, oven's four by four by eight,
holds a quart of wood.
So pretty much pack it as tight as we can get it
so that when we burn it,
the heat will transfer from one piece
to the other, to the other,
and it'll burn through the whole thing.
- [Scotty] And then you cover it up?
- Yeah.
- [Scotty] That's what causes it
not to just all burn off, right?
- Yeah.
We're just gonna fill in these gaps here.
It don't take a genius to do it,
it just takes a lot of labor.
- Yeah, it looks like you guys been working hard
to get it all (laughing) stacked in there.
- Yeah.
- How long does it take you to fill this up?
- [Nate] If we have the wood right here,
maybe, like, an hour?
- But we've been averaging maybe about
30 bags.
- Per container, yeah?
- Nobody likes to do it, 'cause it's labor-intensive,
and then when you're unloading it,
it's real dirty.
So my guys, even myself, I'll admit to you,
I don't like doing it. - Not your favorite.
(Scotty laughing) - Yeah.
- I can understand that.
- We're trying to keep with a concept of 100% natural,
so the trees that we're cutting to get the wood,
it's all coming from fuel reduction projects,
you can see in here how it's real thick and stuff,
so we go in there, create space in-between the trees.
- [Scotty] And then where do you sell it?
- The charcoal?
Cid's in Taos, La Montanita Coop in Albuquerque.
- [Scotty] So selling people for,
like, their barbecues and stuff?
- Yeah, pretty much it's just been for barbecuing.
Been trying to get about a dollar a pound,
but that's been hard to get.
People don't want to buy it.
- [Scotty] So, is that it?
You cover it up now?
- No, we need to burn it first.
- Oh, I see, yeah. - When we burn it,
you're gonna get a lot of heat and flames,
and won't be able to move this.
(mechanical whirring)
We're gonna stay with 100% natural.
We're using what we call pitch wood,
and it's sort of like a little petrified with the sap,
and it gets real pitchy.
- [Scotty] That burns real well, right?
- Yeah. - Oh, yeah.
- So this is how we'll start it real quick.
So, this is what we use to light it up with.
Spanish people call it (speaking Spanish).
We're not adding no gas, no chemicals.
- Yeah. - No nothing to the wood.
- Yeah, so that doesn't get into your food
when you're barbecuing.
- 'Cause I know with propane I can taste propane.
When I eat my steals or, I don't know,
propane grill, I can taste the propane.
And we usually contact our local Taos dispatch,
the fire dispatch,
'cause it's gonna put a lot of smoke,
and people will get calls.
Once they see smoke, they start running.
- So that way, nobody thinks
there's a forest fire or something going on?
- Hey, Ryan, this is Luther calling from Picuris.
It's going good.
I'm calling to let you know that
we're going to be burning our charcoal ovens this evening,
so just in case you get some reports
of smoke here on the east side of Picuris Pablo,
it's gonna be our charcoal ovens.
They'll burn throughout the night,
and then we'll shut 'em off tomorrow morning.
- [Scotty] So you just light it one end there?
- Yeah. - It works with that?
- Kind of the idea of like a cigarette.
You leave a cigarette there,
and it just kind of slowly burns all the way to the filter,
and then it dies out,
and then you're left with a string of ashes.
- And so the thinking is,
because the air's flowing in from this end,
it'll pull the fire into the rest of the thing?
- We get a majority of our winds from the southwest,
so that's how we line these up.
Our first idea was to turn these storage containers
into ovens like this, 'cause they were looking at
maybe, like, what, three tons of charcoal?
And the idea is to...
We have lumber in there, so while we're doing this,
capturing the heat and smoke into,
we're calling them preservation chambers,
and in there you have green lumber.
So naturally when you have green lumber in there,
you get 'em to a certain temperature, the pores open up,
and then the smoke is allowed to penetrate to the lumber
so it's curing it without chemicals.
- So you've got air coming in this side
and then you've got a pipe out the other side.
- Yeah, you can see the hole in the end.
- Oh, yeah, okay.
- So the pipe is going underground, and then it's going
into that other chamber. - Ahh, got it, yeah.
And then that just all fills with smoke.
- Yeah. - Wow.
This fire's really going strong now.
It doesn't take long.
I'm amazed how quickly that starts
just from those few pieces from that pitch wood.
And so how do you know when to cover it up?
- Sometimes you can go to the end and you'll feel the heat
at the back side of the oven.
- And so that's when you know
that it's burned all the way through?
- Yeah, we've kind of timed it.
Maybe a good 12, 13 hours.
- Before you cover it?
- Well, since now.
So, we're starting now at five,
so tomorrow about 8:00 is when I'll just shut it down.
- And you'll cover it up then. - Yeah.
- So you let it burn open for 12 hours?
- No. - Oh, no, no, sorry.
- We cover it. - Oh, I see.
- When we shut it off, we'll just cut the air off.
- Yep, yep, got it.
- I just wanna let this so we can cover it,
and then we can go-- - Okay.
- It's almost ready to-- - Oh, so just that little?
- Yeah. - Wow, okay.
- As long as you get that heat source.
- Oh, I thought we'd be sitting here for hours.
- Nah. (Scotty laughing)
(mechanical whirring)
Pull it.
Oh, the chain.
(chain rattling)
- Is it pulling? - Hold on.
- [Scotty] And so what's the goal now?
You're just trying to seal up all the cracks?
- [Nate] Yeah, 'cause we don't want air getting in.
- [Luther] Yeah, air control.
You have to control the air.
You get a hole here and you get air going through,
they're just going to burn. - Burned out, yeah.
- [Nate] Burns too hot and turns everything to ashes.
- [Luther] So with the dirt, we're sealing the edges,
but at the same time,
we're using the weight to push the lids down.
- [Scotty] Pull the lid down and seal, yeah.
Amazes me how quickly
it turns from black smoke to white smoke.
- Yeah.
I'll let it go for a while,
and then later on I'll adjust the vents a little bit,
close them a little more
so that we don't burn too hot.
So then we'll pretty much just smoke all night,
and then it'll go.
So, now we can go look at the lumber bits.
- [Scotty] Yeah, that sounds great.
- This is all after a burn.
- [Scotty] Oh, yeah.
- So, this piece is--
- Oh, look at how light that is.
(charcoal crunching) Oh, yeah.
And so will you break this up much more
before you bag it up? - Yeah.
We try to get it to briquette size,
more like this, because the bags we have
only hold eight pounds.
We have larger bags,
but the stores didn't have space
to put large bags like that.
- Yeah, they don't want to.
- 30-pound bags. - Too big.
- Yeah, I could do up to about 45 pounds in a bag.
See, it shrinks about half.
We try to fill it up as much as we can--
- I see! - About half.
- Yeah, okay. - All the pieces will shrink.
- Right, they just shrink down.
Wow, that's surprising.
I would've thought they'd be the same size, just lighter.
Oh, yeah, wow.
- So, this is all lumber that's been cut off
with our portable sawmill.
So, just different sizes.
One thing we don't have running through here is water,
'cause we should be pumping cold water
to create condensation.
With the heat, the cold water,
it's gonna turn your smoke into a liquid,
so then it'll drop on the log for boards.
And I mean, they're still green,
and the pores open up,
naturally it's gonna want to suck in
whatever moisture and stuff like that.
So we're trying to get the smoke
to penetrate through the boards.
But these ones aren't very...
They didn't get much penetration.
That's just 'cause we don't have the water.
- [Scotty] So it's not, it's too hot and too--
- It's still acting as a dry kiln.
So we're bringing in the heat and so they're drying.
I'm still sort of figuring out
how to bond the boards and figure out
how to make it work so they come out straight.
'Cause some of them, you can tell,
when you don't bond down the wood,
they warp and they twist.
(lumber rattling)
- [Scotty] You've got the packing straps in here.
- So that's why we cut the slits in the side.
So that we can run straps-- - Oh I see, for the strapping!
- And then grab it. - Yeah, okay.
- And drag it to there.
And in between each layer,
there should be a spacer.
Spacer there, I got.
Got to get air through all around the board and stuff.
Idea is to fill these things up, both of 'em,
and just alternate.
'Cause you want a certain amount of heat and smoke in them
to start preserving them. - For sure.
- But the next thing we need to do is
run in the pipe, the water.
We have problems with it.
We couldn't get a container big enough
to where you pump in cold water.
Within a few hours, the water coming back into the pump
was heating the water. (Scotty laughing)
So the water going in-- - So you didn't have
cold water any more. (laughing)
- Water going in and going out was the same.
- Yeah, got it.
Yeah, that's a problem.
- We need to kind of figure that out.
- And I see you've got these jacks here on the outside.
- Yeah, we kind of had to rig it.
We couldn't figure out how to strap them,
and how to get it to work,
so again I had Jordan make those for us.
- Yep, weld those up. - That's how we've kind of
improvised and figured out how to do it.
We haven't got down lower,
so I'm pretty hopefully that boards
would nice and straight now. - Yeah, sure.
Once they're properly bound down there.
- [Luther] Yeah, that's what we've been doing here.
- Awesome.
- I've been at it since '02. - Yeah, nice.
Making charcoal since '02? - Yeah.
- Really? - Yeah, we got a grant.
- Nice. - A RTRL grant that was
to do fuel reduction and biomass utilization,
lumber production, preservation.
And then the kicker to it was fungi restoration.
- Oh, nice, right.
You were telling me you were growing mushrooms as well.
- So those were the mushroom lands.
But once that fungi ran out,
we tried to apply, we didn't ever get it again.
So that part of the project went dormant,
so then the hemp project came out,
so they wanted to use those,
so we just kind of took over them.
Started turning them into grow room.
But we still have the knowledge of how to do it.
The idea with that was to go into the woods,
collect fungi, figure out which ones were edibles,
poisonous, and all this different stuff.
So we did find a pleurotus oyster mushroom
that grew out of the cottonwoods,
and those ones are edible.
I don't think anybody knew.
But that one prefers cottonwood,
and it grows out of wood,
so that one was the one we kind of leaned toward to grow.
- And from what I gather, he governor's up for
showing off the hemp operation as well.
So, you guys wanna see a commercial grow operation,
I guess leave a comment down below.
(both laughing)
So, yeah, I think people'll be interested.
I'm interested, I wanna see it.
- Yeah, I've never seen it either.
We've just been waiting for something to come up.
We haven't seen nothing about it.
One more to fight. (laughing) - Yeah, right.
Are they growing over there right now?
- I think so, yeah, should be.
Yeah, they should have started.
- Is it people from the tribe that are running it?
- Yeah, there were before, but there's changeover.
So Vaughn is kind of taking over.
- Oh, got it, okay.
- He's the one that kind of-- - Got it.
- Fell into that position.
- I knew he was working on growing things,
but I thought it was in the fields,
not in the-- (overlapping voices)
Okay, okay, nice, awesome.
Well, I sure appreciate you guys
showing off the operation here.
- Yeah, no problem. - And having me out.
This is quite cool.
So, Luther, and I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.
- Nate. - Nate.
Awesome, well, thank you guys very much.
I really appreciate it. - No problem.
- Well, I hope you guys enjoyed
this little adventure from Picuris Pueblo,
here in New Mexico.
I'm Scotty from Strange Parts,
and I'll see you again soon.