The faint smell of burnt wood permeates Finland. The likely culprit: with a population of about 5.5 million, it is estimated there are four million saunas. Much of that forest is owned privately and managed intensively for sawlog production, which makes the quality and price of saw logs significantly higher than in Canada. “The philosophy here is to use every part of the log. …European sawmills are also challenged to cut for a diverse market of countries that have specific product requests. …To some extent, Canadian sawmillers can learn from the Scandinavian/Baltic sawmilling philosophy. That is the idea behind HewSaw’s annual sawmill safari, which this year took North American sawmillers, consultants and engineers to two top-producing mills in Estonia and four in Finland.