Beau Blixseth, son of Oregon’s most renowned timber baron, is trying to sell his grain elevator on the Willamette River next to Moda Center for $6.5 million, according to a listing, opening a new chapter for one of Portland’s iconic structures.

Castle Arden 1 LLC, a limited liability company controlled by Blixseth and a partner, bought the concrete grain tower and the 3 acres around it for $2.9 million in February 2021. At the time, Blixseth said he aimed to restart wheat exports as prices soared during the war in Ukraine.

Instead, Blixseth used the terminal to export shredded tires to Asia, where they are burned for fuel. His partner in the venture, Chandos Mahon, owns Castle Tire Recycling in North Portland. Ships arrived more infrequently after a pile of shards caught fire in May 2023, drawing a fine from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Blixseth is the son of Tim Blixseth, a timber baron from Roseburg who used his fortune to start the hyper-exclusive Yellowstone Club near Bozeman, Mont., where Bill Gates and Justin Timberlake are members. Tim gave up the club in a divorce from his wife, Edra. It eventually went bankrupt under the weight of a $375 million cash-out mortgage.

Neither Beau Blixseth nor Mahon returned messages seeking comment on the 42,000-square-foot grain terminal, which is advertised on the real estate site LoopNet.

“This property has tremendous future upside potential as a redevelopment for mixed-use/ residential with connectivity to the Rose Quarter, adjacency to light rail and with outstanding views of the Portland skyline and Willamette River,” the listing says.

The elevator is located in Albina Vision Trust’s master plan for redevelopment of the 100 acres surrounding the property, the listing says. It also includes the largest billboard in Portland, the listing says. For years, the words “Amazon.com wouldn’t fit here” were painted on the side. More recently, it has advertised the Portland Timbers. “This is soccer city,” it says.

The Louis Dreyfus Co. (actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus is an heir) used the terminal to ship wheat from Eastern Oregon to the world. The grain came down the Columbia River on barges or rail, got piled in the silos, and then loaded onto oceangoing vessels.

In 2013, Louis Dreyfus invested $21.5 million to renovate the facility, putting in new equipment to clean grain and move it from barge to silo to ship. Then, in June 2019, Louis Dreyfus sold the whole place for just $164,000 to a California firm called Rabin Worldwide that specializes in auctioning off industrial properties and equipment.

Shortly after buying the terminal from Rabin in 2021, Blixseth learned that Union Pacific planned to modify a sharp corner near the terminal to prevent train derailments. That change precluded service to the elevator, diminishing its value as an export facility.

For a year or so, Castle Tire piled up shredded rubber around the elevator and used front loaders to dump them onto ships. One of the three-story tire piles caught fire in May 2023, spewing black smoke. It reignited three more times as the pile heated up again.

Last July, DEQ fined Castle Arden 1 LLC $13,600 for storing tons of shredded tires in open-air piles without a permit, something the state hadn’t required. In a letter to Blixseth and Mahon, DEQ compliance manager Kieran O’Donnell said the agency made a mistake by not requiring them to have a waste-tire storage permit for the site before the fires.

“DEQ recognizes that it previously communicated that a waste tire storage site permit was not required for storage of chipped tires at this facility,” O’Donnell wrote. “Those communications were in error as applicable rules do require a permit for the storage of 200 or more cubic yards of chipped waste tires.”