Gene Yahvah died in Libby, Montana on May 23, 2023, his ninety-seventh birthday. He was a legend among Montana foresters and a walking tree encyclopedia who also happened to be one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet.
I last saw Gene at a Society of American Forester’s dinner meeting in Libby in February. Gene was named an SAF Fellow in 1989 and a devout Christian who never met a stranger and who enjoyed passing out Gideon Bibles in his travels.
Although Gene walked with a walker that he hated he was otherwise his same smiling, cheerful self - not at all what you would expect to see in a man who would soon be 97. He reluctantly gave up downhill skiing when he was 87. Russ Hudson introduced us sometime in the early 1990s. He invited me to join him and two of his colleagues on a two-day tour of the old J.Neils Company forestlands in Northwest Montana. That’s Gene on the right in the nearby photograph. Russ is in the center and the late John McBride is on the left. He died in 2018.
In my files, this photograph is labeled “The Three Amigos.” Together, Russ, Gene and John brought about 125 years of woods wisdom to J. Neils and its successors: the St. Regis Paper Company…
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