It was never my intention to own a forest. I blame it on my mother-in-law. Sixteen years ago, my wife, Amy, and I, at her mother's urging, searched for a small house to buy instead of dumping more money into the extortionate rents in our Montana university town. Paging through a Missoula real estate shopper one day, my eye involuntarily skipped over the 1930s bungalows on Cherry Street and was seized by a small ad billed "Rattlesnake Wilderness Land."

Instantly I knew the advertised 40 acres wasn't ordinary real estate. From countless hikes and bike rides, I was familiar with the address, Sawmill Gulch—a deep cleft in the high, woody hills four miles north of downtown Missoula that provided access into the 61,000-acre, federally protected Rattlesnake Wilderness and National Recreation Area. The land was amazingly cheap, even by my low-rent standards: $1,000 per acre, a tiny fraction of what city lots went for only a few miles away.

A few days later Amy and I were jouncing up a rutted track in our realtor's white sedan, the grille snagging tall stalks of bluebunch wheatgrass. We stepped out on a high ridgetop. Through gaps in the ponderosa pines, we gazed off the ridge's south side a thousand feet down to the street grid and houses on Missoula's outskirts; to the north, we peered straight into the heart of the Rattlesnake Mountains. We hadn't walked 100 feet along the ridge's spine, leaving in the dust both the agent and that 1930s bungalow, when Amy and I turned to each other. "We should buy this land," I said.

"We'll worry about the house later," she agreed.

With my family's help, we soon owned two adjoining parcels, a total of 80 acres. Our property straddled the narrow ridge and fell away steeply on both sides. (Flat and easy to build on it was not, which helped explain the price.) Still, we possessed an entire geographical feature of the earth's surface—a small, forested mountain. When, as tree-hugging, deep-breathing, cardboard-recycling eco-liberals, we began to envision the type of home we'd build, our first instinct was to not cut down a single tree. The land would remain all-natural, all-wilderness. With an architect friend, we embarked on designing a semi-underground, multilevel dwelling that sliced through the ridgetop like a concrete-and-glass arrowhead. The main level, a combination living room/studio for Amy, a professional dancer, featured spectacular views.

While the house plans took shape, I enrolled in a state-sponsored workshop that taught private landowners to develop a "forest stewardship plan." For my homework assignments, I spent numerous days traversing our ridge to count and identify trees, and used an auger to bore sample cores and count the rings. I filled out workbook tables, penciled in formulas to calculate wood volume, and crunched numbers.

What my data finally showed was this: We owned a desperately sick forest.

The ridge's gentler south face, about 30 acres, was in decent shape—large, well-spaced ponderosa pines among meadows of native grasses. But the ridge's north slope, which dropped nearly a thousand feet into Sawmill Gulch, had needed CPR long ago.

The north slope held approximately 837 trees per acre. A clothes closet would have offered more room for each tree to grow. Spindle-thin trunks of Douglas fir and western larch stood in anemic, dying thickets, toppling like the flagpoles of small, failed nations. Many larger trees showed cankered boles and parasite-bloated boughs. My core borings revealed annual growth rings as thin as sheaves of the Old Testament—I had to use a magnifying glass to see them—and they indicated that most of the trees were at least a century old.

"So what we have," I announced to the stewardship class during my presentation, "is 50 acres of steep, junky forest."

A woman's hand shot up. "Don't think that those stunted old trees are necessarily worthless," she said. "My husband knows a musical-instrument maker. People are looking for dense-grained wood like yours for violin necks."

In that moment, I stopped viewing our forest as an arboreal basket case and began to see it as a stand of slender violin necks.