It’s a rare glorious Saturday in south-central Alaska, all blue sky and blue water and gray-green mountains and brilliant blue-white glaciers. Business is booming for the charter outfits that shuttle kayakers from Whittier into the sheltered coves of western Prince William Sound.

The Honey Charters launch motors up a slender saltwater inlet called Blackstone Bay. Skipper Scott Gilbert, a man jaded by too much stunning Alaska scenery, eases up on the throttle as he approaches Seventeen-Mile Beach. A party of campers has staked out the drop-off point. Dome tents bloom at the tree line, each party looking for a little privacy and natural screening on a beach that quickly feels crowded on a busy weekend. Even the black oystercatchers object, screeching frantically as humans approach their nests on the rocky shore.

Blackstone Bay is a quick forty-five-minute run from Whittier. Completion of a two-and-a-half-mile-long car tunnel from Portage Valley through the mountains in 2000 put it within two hours of Anchorage. Motorized shuttles arrive throughout the day, delivering and picking up kayakers and their gear. The lull between boats is broken by the whine of Jet Skis.

Close your eyes and you could be on the shore of a reservoir back home rather than exploring a fjord in the Alaska wilderness.

Welcome to the Chugach National Forest, 5.5 million acres of jagged peaks, ice fields, black spruce, forests, remote coastlines, islands and world-class salmon streams.

The Chugach is Anchorage’s playground and the largest patch in a public lands quilt that covers most of south-central Alaska. It encompasses three distinct regions: the eastern Kenai Peninsula, the 700,000-acre Copper River Delta and the lands bordering Prince William Sound. Bordered by two national parks, a national wildlife refuge and a state park, it’s also dotted with Alaska Native corporation inholdings containing timber and coal and oil and gas reserves, to which the U.S. Forest Service is legally required to provide access.

But those political boundaries are invisible to the brown bears and wolves and sockeye salmon that inhabit south-central Alaska. The paradox of the Chugach is that despite its vastness, humans and fish and wildlife all hang out in the same accessible places, and those places are getting more crowded all the time.

The Chugach is the nation’s second-largest and arguably wildest national forest. Ninety-eight percent of it is roadless. But not an acre is protected as congressionally designated wilderness.

Last May, after a five-year planning and public involvement process that drew 30,000 comments, the Bush administration released a new Chugach management plan. The Bush plan proposes setting aside 1.4 million acres as wilderness, 65 percent of it rocks and ice. It replaces a 1984 plan that protected 1.6 million acres in the western sound and the eastern delta as wilderness study areas. The lands dropped from consideration are among those that environmentalists fought hardest to protect.

About forty groups and individuals filed formal appeals of the Chugach plan by the October 24 deadline. Many argue that the plan threatens wildlife and wilderness qualities such as silence and solitude by leaving 87 percent of the forest open to snow machines. Some focus on unexplained discrepancies between the final environmental impact statement and the record of decision that reduced protection for fish and wildlife.

“The final plan is an example of final-hour political maneuvering from individuals outside of Alaska and within the Bush administration who hijacked a plan that was otherwise part of a legitimate public process,” the Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation and Alaska Center for the Environment said in a forty-one-page appeal.

Chugach forest planner Steve Hennig denied the administration inappropriately tampered with the plan to achieve political ends.

The Forest Service released the plan abruptly after a five-month delay. In a bit of inspired political strategy, its release was timed to give the administration cover for its simultaneous release of a supplemental draft environmental impact statement for Alaska’s other national forest, the 17-million-acre Tongass, where the administration recommended no additional wilderness.

Releasing the two Alaska plans at the same time allowed Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey to portray the Bush administration as the best friend of wilderness since Ronald Reagan. The Chugach plan, Rey says, “will be the largest administration wilderness recommendation since 1984 and is justified, we believe, because the areas that we’re recommending are world-class scenic and ecological treasures.”

Alaska forest activists cried foul. On the Tongass, they had seen their hopes for protection of all roadless areas dashed when President Bush walked away from the Clinton administration’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule. They pinned their hopes on a federal judge’s ruling that the Forest Service must prepare a supplemental Tongass plan because it failed to consider any new areas for wilderness in its 1997 plan. With the roadless rule in limbo, Tongass managers are now laying out roads and preparing timber sales in twenty-seven roadless areas.

On the Chugach, activists and federal biologists fought hard for designated wilderness in the eastern delta, the entire wilderness study area surrounding Prince William Sound and the roadless heart of the Kenai.

It’s true that by the standards of the lower forty-eight states, most of the Chugach is wild. But Alaskans, who are surrounded by millions of acres of wild country, have a different take on wilderness.

Michelle Wilson, conservation director for the Alaska Center for the Environment, contends that the Forest Service unfairly uses a stricter definition of wilderness in Alaska than in the rest of the national forests. Wilderness doesn’t have to be remote and inaccessible, she says. “Alaskans want accessible wilderness. The wilderness we want is not rock and ice.”

Sue Aspelund, executive director of Cordova District Fishermen United, opposes wilderness designation for the Copper River Delta for the opposite reason. She believes it might mislead tourists who visit expecting to find a primeval paradise. The delta is a working fishery, Aspelund says. “People who have spent their life savings to come to Alaska don’t understand the distinction. They may not appreciate the noise of a tender running its motor in the slough.”

In 1904, three years before President Theodore Roosevelt established the Chugach National Forest, Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot dispatched W. A. Langille to survey the Kenai Peninsula. Langille wrote that the future of this forest would not be in timber.

“Here the living forest, though small in size, is the product of many years growth, which when destroyed does not seem to thrive under the civilizing hand of mankind,” Langille wrote. “There is relatively small area of timber forest, every foot of which will sometime be needed. The forest cover in its primal state is also very essential to the prolonged existence of the living game, which represents the best type of its kind and, if cared for, will be a source of revenue to the inhabitants and pleasure to the world for many years to come.”

Langille was prescient. The Chugach has no scheduled commercial timber sale program. The only logging in recent years has been salvage logging of stands killed by a long-running spruce budworm epidemic.

As for becoming a “source of pleasure to the world,” on summer weekends during sockeye season the Kenai Peninsula is as crowded as any national forest.

Though the Chugach lacks the name familiarity the Tongass gained during a national campaign to protect it from logging, residents of Anchorage care passionately about how it is managed. “Our local users definitely love this forest,” forest planner Hennig says. “Others, including tourists, use it too, but I’m not sure they know it’s a national forest.”

Alaska snowmobile enthusiasts are a powerful lobby, and they besieged forest managers with letters demanding no restrictions on access to the Chugach. Large sections of the forest, including wilderness study areas, are open to motorboats, airplanes and helicopters as well, and will remain so under the new plan. A newly formed Alaska Quiet Rights Coalition lobbied the Forest Service to place some areas off-limits to motorized use year-round but got only one, an 11,750-acre area in the Copper River Delta. “Motorized versus nonmotorized was the most difficult issue we faced,” Hennig said.

On sunny weekends, cars, trucks and campers line up for the periodic openings of the Whittier Tunnel, though the visitor numbers that tourism boosters anticipated have not materialized.

Last August found Susie and Mike Howard of Anchorage and their party of six in the crowd at Seventeen-Mile Beach. The Howards had come from Cochrane Bay, where they’d seen only two other people during a stay at a Forest Service cabin. “We had our wilderness experience there,” Mike Howard says. As for Seventeen-Mile Beach, “it’s a big enough beach that we can live with it,” he says.

“I do worry a little,” Susie Howard says. “You have these big groups here, everyone going to the bathroomÉ” She’s dismayed at the trash she found in a fire pit at the Forest Service cabin. “If you were coming here for wilderness, you might be disappointed.”

But for the Howards, too, wilderness is relative. They lived in Denver. “The hiking trails here are lightly used,” Mike Howard says. “Some of these trails we’ve had to ourselves. A comparable trail in Colorado would have fifty cars parked at the trailhead.”

Jim Adams, an Anchorage-based attorney for the National Wildlife Federation, shared his camp on an exposed gravel bar with three other kayakers. But Blackstone Bay is big; the next day, paddling past ice floes and waterfalls and the bobbing heads of harbor seals to the toe of a saltwater glacier, he shared it with just one other party.

Adams organized the Quiet Rights Coalition to argue for those who seek silence in wild places. In comments on the draft Chugach plan, he wrote, “It is especially sad and ironic that in a state that is perceived worldwide as one of the last great, wild places, natural quiet, unless one charters a plane to be carried far into the bush, can be even harder to find than in the tamer wildernesses of the lower 48.”

Highway 1, the two-lane road that crosses the Kenai Peninsula, follows the swift Kenai River through a valley walled in by mountains. In summer, it’s choked with traffic as campers, rafters and anglers converge on the peninsula. Last summer, three brown bears on the Kenai died in collisions with vehicles.

In August, the Kenai River and its main tributary, the Russian, run thick with sockeye. The Forest Service’s Russian River Campground gets 44,000 visitors during sockeye season. Anglers in hip boots crowd the shallow river; many catch their daily three-fish limit by 10 a.m.

Brown bears are after the same fish. Forest Service bear biologist Bill Shuster has seen them amble down to the banks and help themselves to fresh-caught sockeye. “In a human-free environment they would not be down here, but the fish that are caught here attract them,” Shuster says.

A stroll along the Russian River shows the impact of combat fishing: denuded banks, severe soil erosion, black cottonwoods tilting precariously over the river with their roots exposed. Many of the big trees have toppled into the river, taking chunks of the bank with them. “People are like livestock,” Shuster says. “They have hammered this river bench.”

The Forest Service has spent millions of dollars restoring the banks. It has built an elevated walkway of fiberglass grating, fenced off the stream banks and built stairways to the river.

Forest Service managers try to limit human-bear contacts as well. Fish must be cleaned in the river. A rule prohibiting leaving unattended food in camp is strictly enforced.

Brown bears and wolves on the Kenai are isolated by the narrow neck of land that connects the peninsula with the rest of mainland Alaska via Highway 1. That means they can’t replenish their numbers naturally through migration from the north. They must be sustained by existing habitat.

The national forest west and north of Highway 1 is roadless, and it abuts a roadless section of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. This is core brown bear habitat, identified by an interagency committee of scientists as essential to the bear’s survival. The scientists say wide buffers should be protected on each side of major rivers and no logging of core habitat should be allowed if a proposed natural gas pipeline is built. The final Chugach plan allocates 70,360 acres for brown bear core habitat, but it prescribes narrower buffers and allows logging in future utility corridors.

A more immediate threat to wildlife is a proposed high-speed bypass that would cut into a mountainside on national forest land north of Highway 1. The Forest Service is fighting the proposed route, which also would intersect the popular forty-mile Resurrection Pass Trail.

Will Troyer, a retired federal biologist, managed the Kenai refuge from 1963 to 1968 and pushed successfully for wilderness there. “If it weren’t for the large federal land holdings, we would lose the bears,” he says. “The people and the bears all move along the same valley bottoms, these little pieces. Even though it’s a great big forest, you need these little pieces.”

The laws that govern public lands in Alaska are fraught with ambiguity, and that ambiguity played out in the development of the new Chugach plan. The proclamation that established the national forest covered “all lands and waters” within its boundary. But the state and the federal government have agreed to disagree on whether the Forest Service has jurisdiction over the waters of Prince William Sound, and the Forest Service declined to address management of the sound in the Chugach plan.

Under the Forest Service’s interpretation of the Alaska Lands Act of 1980, subsistence hunters and anglers are permitted to use motorized vehicles in Alaska wilderness areas, a use that is prohibited in wilderness areas elsewhere. The Forest Service also interprets the act to allow motorized recreation in wilderness as long as it falls in the category of a “traditional use.”

There’s also the matter of the “no more” rule. Release of the Chugach plan was delayed after Senator Frank Murkowski and Representative Don Young of Alaska asked the General Accounting Office to study whether the 1980 act prohibited federal agencies from setting aside any more wilderness in Alaska. A clause in the law prohibits “further studies of federal lands for the single purpose of considering the establishment of a conservation system unit.”

But Forest Service lawyers researched the no-more clause carefully before the agency began working on the new plan, Hennig says. They determined (and in July, the General Accounting Office agreed) that the Chugach plan did not violate the law because it was a multiple-use plan rather than exclusively a wilderness plan.

Still, it’s clear from the final product that the Forest Service stepped cautiously on the issue of wilderness. In western Prince William Sound, it argued the opening of the Whittier Tunnel would open new areas to intensive recreation use, disqualifying those areas as wilderness. It justified excluding the eastern sound because many wildlife species, including harbor seals, have not recovered from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. On the Kenai, it concluded that because motorized recreation already was the dominant use, wilderness designation would be inappropriate.

And in the Copper River Delta, it bowed to the anti-wilderness sentiments of an Alaska Native corporation and a political action group that represents commercial fishing.

The delta is the largest contiguous wetland on the Pacific coast of North America. It’s the home of the legendary Copper River sockeye and king salmon and the site of one of the world’s greatest spring waterfowl migration spectacles.

In aerial photographs, the sinuous braided waters of the delta reflect sunlight and the sky is thick with migrating shorebirds that light on its mudflats in the millions each spring. But up close, the waters of the delta run gray with glacial silt. The channels move constantly, forcing the Forest Service to push up gravel berms to keep the water from inundating the fifty-five-mile-long Copper River Highway, which provides backcountry access to Cordova’s 2,500 residents. No paved road connects the gritty fishing town to the outside world.

Hemmed in by mountains and ice fields and the Gulf of Alaska, the delta is truly wild. Five wolf packs are known to inhabit it. Each spring, 16 million shorebirds and waterfowl stop to rest and feed. The delta harbors the largest population of nesting trumpeter swans in the world. Two million wild salmon, including the Copper River reds, pass through its silty waters to spawn.

The delta has a degree of protection already. In the Alaska Lands Act, Congress directed the Forest Service to manage it with an emphasis on protecting fish and wildlife.

But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service argued in commenting on the draft environmental impact statement that relying on the Alaska Lands Act protection “will disturb and, over time, damage essential fish and wildlife and their habitat.” Even wilderness designation might not be enough to protect salmon runs in the Copper and Bering rivers because it would not preclude motorized access.

Scott Anaya of the National Wildlife Federation heads a coalition that wants the delta protected as wilderness. He recalled the first time he witnessed the shorebird migration. He stood in the mudflats as the waters of the delta washed over his boots, carrying the birds toward shore. “There are so many sandpipers, they create their own gusts of wind,” he says.

But threats, some immediate, some more distant, loom. One is the Carbon Mountain Road, an inconspicuous gravel track that leads east from the Copper River Highway, bumps along through private land for a couple of miles, then ends abruptly at the national forest boundary. Grass grows in the median and the road appears abandoned, but it is never far from Anaya’s mind.

A March 2000 settlement with the Forest Service granted the Chugach Alaska Corporation an easement across national forest land that will allow the corporation to build a road to access eighty acres of timber on its 73,000-acre inholding thirty miles east of the Copper River. The road would cross 294 streams, including forty-eight fish-bearing streams. The Fish and Wildlife Service predicts that it would wreak havoc on Copper River salmon runs. The gravel track is the road’s beginning.

Depressed timber markets have put the project on hold, says Rick Rogers, Chugach Alaska’s land manager. He added that the corporation has no interest in selling the land it regained in a hard-won settlement of aboriginal land claims under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

Conservationists worked with residents of Cordova to build support for wilderness in the delta. But Cordova District Fishermen United fought back, actively opposing wilderness designation for the delta.

Aspelund, the organization’s executive director, contends that wilderness designation would make it impossible to carry out fish habitat restoration projects and research studies that require using motorized vehicles.

The Forest Service’s Hennig believes the debate over wilderness in the delta, and across the Chugach, was more philosophical than substantive. “When you talked to the groups, they were all after the same thing. Their gut-level value was always to protect the fish and wildlife, the scenery and the ecosystem.”

But the appeals serve notice that many Alaska conservationists feel the final Chugach plan flunked that test. “The sad part is that the Forest Service threw away what was a very good five-year public involvement process,” Anaya says. “Some forest planners have said to me, ÔIf this was going to be the outcome, we could have wrapped this up in six weeks.’”