So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.
If there was truly a labor shortage within a free market than wages should rise until they start attracting people to fill the positions. Similarly, if wages are low in a region, then housing costs should fall dramatically to affordability levels of those local wages.
But neither is happening.
So what there really is then, is a shortage of people willing to work a particular job at that particularly low wage. Perhaps that's because cost of living out west in the pacific states is astronomical compared to the rest of the country. The prospect of earning $18/hour for dangerous work in rural areas where entry level fixer housing is $250k-300k+ (if not twice that) is not going to be particularly attractive to many people, especially since $18/hour wouldn't even qualify them for a mortgage. So wages either have to go way up, or housing has to come down. Or they'll have to import cheaper labor from somewhere else. Or perhaps what is more likely in our modern world is for the industry to simply lobby the government for subsidies (as if extracting resources from public land for private profit wasn't a big enough subsidy as is) and have taxpayers keep them afloat.
I don't know what the answer is, but perpetually increasing the minwage just so we can play catch-up to perpetual increases in cost of living is probably not it. The goal would be, of course, to examine why cost of living is on such an upward trajectory and try to stabilize or reduce it even. As to how that can be achieved? That's an open question.
At $18/hr, it's hard to argue that any of those risks are built into the compensation. That is approx. ~37,000/yr for the most dangerous job in the country, apparently.
If one is inclined towards the trades, it's not hard to see why they would pick something other than logging.
If you want low cost of living, you need to move to the midwest or south, or throughout the NE in upstate or western NY.
The pacific states are uniquely expensive. It's not at all like western NY or upstate NY, or the midwest, or the south, where everything is dirt cheap, and gets very cheap in rural areas.