The Tongass National Forest is a place of broad scale where mountains rise up from the sea and whales breach and spout in the frigid waters. Photo © George Wuerthner.

By Drew Cherry
Forest Magazine, Winter 2002

Never before this had I been enbosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description…in these coast landscapes there lies such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all pen-work seems hopelessly unavailing.” — John Muir on Alaska’s Inside Passage, Travels in Alaska

It is a place of superlative numbers. At17 million acres, the Tongass National Forest is our nation’s largest, encompassing roughly 80 percent of Southeast Alaska. Within its borders are 2,000 islands; two national monuments; thousands of acres of glaciers, icefields, and watersheds; and 400 miles of trails in nineteen wilderness areas. It is home to thirty species of fish, including all five species of Pacific salmon. Eighty-three species of mammals, including humpback, blue and killer whales, black and brown bears, wolves, moose, deer, elk, sea lions and otters, live on the Tongass, which also supports more than 300 hundred of species of birds, among them the rare golden eagle and marbled murrelet.

The Tongass, with its wealth of water sources and its rich, glacial-fed soil, is the lush garden of the northern Pacific coast. With an average rainfall upward of 100 inches a year, the climate of Southeast Alaska is temperate and conducive to the growth of countless species of plants. Western hemlock and Sitka spruce reign over the landscape, giving it its unmistakable skyline. The undergrowth is the stuff of fairy kingdoms—bright-green sphagnum moss clings to rocks and fallen trees, ferns and devil’s club fan out across the forest floor, sedges and muskegs blanket the forest clearings. Dense growths of alder, birch, cottonwood and dwarf willow crowd the mainland coast and outlying islands. Delicate stands of brightly colored columbine, lupine and fireweed contrast the innumerable shades of green. It’s said that a person can wander for days through these forests and never want for food or water: blueberries, bog cranberries, currants, salmonberries, fiddleheads and wild chives are plentiful.

Though the southernmost tip of the Tongass is closer to Seattle, Washington, than to Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage, it is millions of years away from the comparatively smooth-edged mountains of the Northwest. Geologically speaking, the Tongass is young. The vast glaciation, jagged volcanic peaks and steep-walled passes are the result of powerful tectonic plates that clashed in the formation of the Rim of Fire only a few million years ago.

Perhaps more violent even than the geologic forces that shaped the land are the forces of industry that have exploited it. Not long after Europeans arrived, the rich resources of the Tongass were converted into big-money commerce. With the establishment of Russian trading companies in the mid-1800s, fur trading, whaling and fishing began in earnest, and mining and forestry followed soon after.

The old-growth timber harvested on the Tongass was once one of Alaska’s biggest money-producing exports, but with diminishing returns on exorbitant government investments, many mills have closed in recent years. In March 2001, U.S. District Judge James K. Singleton Jr. halted logging in the roadless areas of the forest, ordering managers to rewrite the current plan. The most recent plan keeps 22 percent of the forest’s 17 million acres open for harvest, of which, the U.S. Forest Service insists, less than 10 percent will actually be cut. Despite these assurances, conservation efforts to preserve the Tongass are relentless. Last spring, donations from environmental groups secured an additional 155 acres on the West ChicagofÐYakobi Island Wilderness Area for protection.

Declining logging revenues and a troubled commercial fishery have forced local residents to find new ways to make a living off their land. The gold, it seems, is no longer in the hills and streams, but in the tourists’ pockets—Alaska’s tourism industry brought in over $1 billion from 1.4 million travelers in 2000, with thirty-two percent of these visitors arriving by ship. Along with the state ferries, hundreds of cruise ships move along the Inside Passage each year, carrying boatloads of sightseers to thirty-two ports of call, including Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg and the state capital of Juneau.

The trip is a memorable one. The landscape along the Inside Passage is striking, at times rising from sea level to heights of more than 3,000 feet within a mile of the coast. The Juneau Icefield is one of the world’s largest at 1,500 square miles, and the New Eddystone Rock and Blue River Lava Flow geological areas include some of the most unique geological features in North America. Year-round, ships run regularly to Glacier Bay National Park and the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area, the forest’s crown jewels and two of the world’s most visited glaciers.

The Tongass struggles, as it has for thousands of years, against tectonic forces and against the advance and retreat of behemoth glaciers, but now too against the continuing flood of people, against untempered development. The remaining wilderness is a living testament not only to John Muir’s legacy of conservation, but also to the coastal peoples and the efforts of other responsible stewards at work today.

By the time Muir returned to Southeast Alaska in 1890 for a second visit, the gold rush had come and gone; the uncharted glaciers, streams and sleepy villages he first encountered ten years earlier forever altered. Wide-eyed tourists and pushy souvenir peddlers crowded the streets, and cruise ships clogged the ports and passes. The rich culture of the Alaska Natives he so admired, like everything else, had been ruthlessly exploited. But once in camp at Glacier Bay, Muir rediscovered a splendor that still remains and hopefully, always will:

“I saw three huge bergs born. Spray rose about two hundred feet. Lovely reflections showed off the pale-blue tones of the ice-wall and mountains in the calm water …Yesterday and to-day a solitary small flycatcher was feeding about camp. A sandpiper on the shore, loons, ducks, gulls and crows, a few of each and a bald eagle are all the birds I have noticed thus far. The glacier is thundering gloriously.”

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