D Gary Young: The Essential Oils Baron Founder of global company has deep roots in North Idaho Out there in the British Columbian wilderness, out among the towering hemlock and tamarack where he felt at home, a logger named Gary Young labored happily. The year was 1973. Maneuvering atop 12 feet of snow on showshoes, Young plied his trade meticulously, using a cutting method that would create a domino effect of falling trees, calculated carefully to crash directly away from him. One did not. “A tree came back and drilled me through my snow shoes like a post,” Young says. “Later they told me that when they found me, the snow shoes were up around my crotch.” There the unconscious Young was encased in Canadian snow, dying. And there Young Living was being born.It was a painful birth. According to Young, his spinal cord had been broken in two places. Sixteen vertebrae were crushed, along with 11 ruptured discs. That damage was complemented by 19 broken bones, he says, and three skull fractures. “I spent three weeks in a coma, four months in intensive care and a year in a rehab center,” he says. “Then I spent 13 years learning to walk again.” But he did a lot more than re-learn the art of walking. He learned about essential oils and what he and many others claim are their curative powers. “I did my own research because there were no books written about it, no other research being done,” he says. “It was a feeling. I had such a strong feeling about the potential of the blood of the plant, which essential oil is.” Embarking on paths of alternative medicine, Young’s research ultimately took him to Europe and in 1989, after a decade in France distilling lavender and seeing what it could do, Young settled on a quarter-acre near Spokane to build his own distillery. He fashioned it by welding two pressure cookers connected with copper wire and began his own experiments by using steam to draw essential oils out of various plants. That initial feeling, which grew to confirmed belief, was fueled by personally experiencing the oils’ ability to stimulate cell regeneration, he says. Along the way he says he found powerful applications for treating burns, headaches, joint pain, even cancer. In 1992 Young purchased 160 acres just outside St. Maries, Idaho, where fields of lavender and Melissa now flourish around a large distillery, and a year later Young Living Essential Oils with its multi-level marketing sales approach was established in Riverton, Utah. With it came controversy. Lina McNab, from Lethbridge, Alberta, helps unload a batch of wood chips after the oil was extracted at a facility in St. Maries.
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