What started as casual airplane conversation between strangers last fall blossomed into a community harvest last month that supplied Petersburg's traditional weavers with a year's supply of yellow cedar bark.

Juneau-based Alaska Native artist Lily Hope was flying from Seattle to Juneau in November when she struck up a conversation with her seatmate, Brett Martin, co-owner of Alaska Timber and Truss, the Petersburg sawmill on Falls Creek Road.

Hope recalled, "He said, 'Oh, you use yellow cedar? Well, I cut a lot of yellow cedars. You know, every year it's in the acreage of trees that we take down and mill. I'd totally be willing to give you some time on the land after the trees come down.'"

She sent Martin an email as soon as she got off the plane. "I said, 'Hey, Brett, nice to meet you on the plane. If you're serious, this is my contact information, and I would put together a team of six or eight or 12 harvesters and come out and strip your trees.'"

About a month ago, Martin followed through. "He emailed and said, early June, early to mid June, we're going to be out there if you want to come to Petersburg," Hope said.

She flew in from Juneau while local weavers and community members rallied to help. Petersburg weaver Debra O'Gara helped spearhead the effort.

Timing was crucial. Cedar bark can only be harvested in spring when sap is flowing and trees are growing new rings.

"That's when you can pull the bark off," explained O'Gara. And when a tree is felled, the window of time to harvest bark is narrow, a few days at most. "The sap stops running and the bark adheres itself like cement to the tree," she said.

After harvesting her first carload of bark, O'Gara realized the weavers needed to call in their friends for help processing the strips. "I'm going, we're going to be up all night ... so we called in reinforcements."

The first night brought nine or 10 people to process bark in O'Gara's garage. When they returned with another load, they put out another call. "All in all, we had 16 people who came in during this week to help us process it," O'Gara said.

The group included expert weaver Kitty Young from Wrangell and Petersburg cedar bark weavers Mary Ann Rainy, Stephanie Hayes, Victoria Moore, Laurel McCullough and O'Gara, along with numerous friends who were eager to help. "About half of them are weavers, and half of them just wanted to learn more, but participated in this harvest," O'Gara said.

At the logging site, the team used hatchets to score the bark, then peeled long strips by hand.

"There's this reddish ... thicker reddish layer that you have to use a sharp blade, we like fish knives, to take that red off," Hope explained. "We have to take that off within the first 12 hours of stripping, or it dries and sticks to the cambium layer."

The processing sessions lasted late into the evening. "We stayed up both nights till 10 and 11," Hope said.

The work was sticky and demanding. "You should see some of our hands. I mean, our hands were caked with pitch," O'Gara said.

Through all the work, spirits remained high. "There were so many dad jokes told. We told so many bad, bad, bad jokes ... but we also ate a ton of cookies," Hope said.

Most of the bark will be aged for a year before it can be used for weaving baskets and hats. "I've been taught to age your cedar for at least a year," O'Gara said. "The sap ... it's got to settle. ... If you're weaving it while it's still changing, (it's) sticky ... hard to weave."

This bark must be split lengthwise into extremely thin strips. "Half of the beauty of a cedar hat or a cedar basket is made in that first splitting ... making sure that you've got perfectly 1/16-inch strips," Hope said, adding a shoutout to master weaver Holly Churchill for perfecting and teaching the technique.

Some of the harvested bark will not be aged for weaving hats or baskets but instead will undergo a very different process and be used for weaving a Chilkat blanket.

Hope cooks some of the cedar bark in a crockpot for three days to remove sap, then spins the resulting fibers with mountain goat wool to use in weaving ceremonial dancing blankets.

The spinning process is labor-intensive and precise. Hope explained the traditional technique of rolling cedar fibers and wool by hand, down one's thigh to create the durable yarn.

"We're going to roll our right hand down the two roving pieces (of wool) as those individually spin with the bark, and we get our hand down toward our knee. We release the left hand, and the fibers will ply together," she said.

Each hand motion produces about an inch of finished material, called "warp."

"To start an adult-size Chilkat dancing blanket, we need 1,000 yards of Chilkat warp with the bark spun into it, or otherwise known as 46,200 spins down the leg," Hope calculated.

The cedar bark imbues the warp with crucial strength. "The structure that the cedar bark adds is enough that we can shape, you know, seemingly perfect circles and ovoids and curvilinear shapes - adapted form line design - without the warps crushing each other or overlapping one another. They really make a nice, flat tapestry," Hope said.

Out at the sawmill, Martin was glad to be able to support the traditional artists. If more traditional artists need help, "like carvers who need yellow cedar blanks to make paddles," Martin said he would be open to donating more.

For the weavers, last week's collaboration proved remarkably productive.

"In like three days worth of work and a lot of community building, we were able to harvest enough yellow cedar for the weavers in Petersburg for a year," O'Gara said.

When collecting bark from standing cedars, harvesters can only take a strip as wide as a hand and only one strip per tree to avoid killing it. "You're hiking around in the woods more than you're pulling bark," Hope said, describing how harvesters search for suitable trees that haven't been harvested before and are large enough - "bigger than you can hug."

Recent harvesting trips from living trees yielded modest results. "The last couple of times that I went out harvesting, once with Dolores Churchill and once just outside of Juneau, we came home with maybe six strips of bark," Hope said.

In contrast, the felled trees at Martin's logging site allowed the team to strip almost all the bark. "Being able to ... climb over and under a few trees off of the road and just strip them bare ... we were ... just gleeful," Hope said.

For Hope, the week represented more than just material gathering. "Really, I do it for the cookies," she laughed. "But yes, it's for the community. Yes, it's for the texture. Yes, it's for the ... smell of cedar and the good, beautiful things that we're going to make together."