By 1942 S-H harvest operations were in northern Klamath County, with a connection established on the GN main line at Freemont Siding, about seven miles due east of Gilchrist. This line extended about sixteen miles east to Big Hole, with several branches built off of this line. By 1947 operations were moved even farther south, to Chemult. The actual camp was set up approximately 18 miles southeast of Chemult, and the closest point on the mainline was Diamond Lake siding, which was on the joint GN-SP line about four miles south of Chemult. However, connecting the logging railroad to the mainline at that point would have required obtaining trackage rights over the busy SP mainline into Chemult, so to avoid this problem S-H built four miles of railroad parallel to the SP line to reach a connection with the Great Northern at the southern end of their trackage just north of the junction between the SP and GN lines.

By the late 1940s it was apparent to both Shevlin-Hixon and Brooks-Scanlon, which also had a huge sawmill in Bend located directly across the river from the S-H mill, that insufficient timber remained in the area that the two mills drew their timber from to sustain operations of both mills for much longer. Local governmental organizations and the U.S. Forest Service had expressed concerns that the two sawmills in Bend were cutting timber at an unsustainable rate for years. The Forest Service had reached this conclusion as early as 1925; a Committee of Sustained Yield Timber Operations established by the Chamber of Commerce in Bend in 1937 concluded that total potential combined output of the two sawmills in Bend was approximately 400 million board feet annually, while the surrounding forests were only capable of providing 100 million board feet annually on a sustained yield basis. By 1944 the figured sustained yield of the forests was downgraded to only 82 million board feet per year. Clearly the sawmills were rapidly running out of trees to cut, and something had to be done to correct the problem before it became more of a crisis. The end result was that Shevlin-Hixon elected to sell out to Brooks-Scanlon. The transaction became effective in November 1950, and the S-H sawmill was promptly closed, with the last load of lumber shipped from the facility leaving four months later. The end of an era was at hand.