A Crossroads for Wilderness

There are no docks or vessels at Port Houghton, Alaska. In fact, there are no buildings, no roads, no landing strips, no people. Getting there by boat is possible but brutal. To fly there you need pontoons-heavy, rock-resistant ones of the sort slung under our ancient Beaver out of Juneau, 85 miles to the north. Snow streaked its windows on April 23, 2002, as we followed the fjord to the mouth of the Rusty River. Below us scoters billowed like diesel smoke from the waveless inlet, and sea lions stretched and rolled.

We pitched our tents on sphagnum moss under towering western hemlocks at the end of a mile-long wet meadow strewn with goose scat. As our campfire died, a waxing gibbous moon flared up from a cloud bank, backlighting long tresses of witches' hair lichen that hung from the trees, washing over the meadow's brown grass, flashing off the cans of beer I'd just stuffed into the last snowdrift. Hours later, the howling of wolves, augmented by the valley and echoing off the steep, timbered slopes, woke me from a dreamless sleep. They were Alexander Archipelago wolves-unique to southeast Alaska and endangered in fact if not by federal decree.

At daybreak my socks and boots were frozen solid, but the valley warmed fast when the sun topped the snowcapped peaks. What had looked like another cloud bank sailing in high from the west turned out to be the ice fields of the Coast Range. Mountain bluebirds wafted along the river. Gulls wheeled and screamed over the first slug of spawning candlefish. Water ouzels on rocks and logs bobbed, dipped, then marched into and under the current. Ravens harassed bald eagles. A snowy owl patrolled the meadow at high noon. Upstream there were beavers, river otters, a freshly undenned black bear, and, though we didn't see them, brown bears, moose, Sitka black-tailed deer, mountain goats, and wolverines. The river's sandy banks were littered with the spines, jaws, and gill plates of last year's spawned-out salmon-all five species. In the clear water, salmon-size steelhead trout, minutes out of the Pacific, surged from our shadows or eased through deadfalls.

If the Bush administration gets its way, the woods around Port Houghton and similar woods all across America will have roads hacked through them, much of their fish and wildlife sacrificed, and their trees cut and auctioned off to private corporations at a net loss to the federal government. The attack has been secretive, and since September 11 the public hasn't been paying attention anyway. "We're losing places like this before we even know we have them," says Marty Hayden, legislative director of Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm.

To camp here for four nights, Hayden, I, and our five companions hadn't had to pay anything, hadn't even had to get a permit. After all, it was our land-part of the Tongass National Forest, the Yellowstone of America's 155-unit national forest system and, at 17 million acres, three times the size of our next biggest national forest, the Chugach, also in Alaska and 125 miles to the northwest. From the Malaspina Glacier west of Yakutat Bay, the Tongass sweeps south 500 miles over most of Alaska's southeastern panhandle and the Alexander Archipelago. In winter it is warmer than Massachusetts. In summer it is never hot. All year glaciers melt or break away into the sea along 11,000 miles of wild shoreline, and salmon and steelhead streams, more than 2,000 of them, curl through green valleys shaded by western hemlocks, Sitka spruces, and red and yellow cedars, some of which have anchored this rich soil since the Middle Ages. Most of the earth's temperate rain forests have been destroyed by humans. Now there are only fragments in New Zealand, Tasmania, Chile, and the Pacific Northwest. About one-third of the remaining supply is in the Tongass National Forest, making it the largest relatively intact temperate rain forest on earth.

But not all the Tongass is wild and unspoiled. To accommodate private timber companies, the Forest Service has constructed or financed the construction of 4,650 miles of roads. Short of replacing forests with asphalt and concrete, nothing humans do to them, even clearcutting, is more hurtful than road building. Roads destabilize soils, setting off landslides, polluting lakes and rivers, burying spawning habitat. Road culverts block fish migration. (In the Tongass, for instance, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game estimates that 66 percent of the culverts may be blocking salmon and 85 percent may be blocking trout.) Roads fragment wildlife habitat, eliminating creatures that require big tracts of undeveloped land such as forest birds, elk, caribou, lynx, wolves, wolverines, and grizzlies. They allow easy, motorized access to people who kill fish and wildlife or unintentionally drive it off, often by their mere presence. They also provide easy access to developers who, with the blessing of the Forest Service, build major resorts for skiing and other recreation in national forests. While an element of the public sees such development as attractive, the cost in what another element values most about our forests-beauty, quietude, fish, and wildlife-has been monumental.

To facilitate the sale of timber, the U.S. Forest Service has constructed 386,000 miles of roads in our national forests, nine times the length of the interstate highway system and enough to circle the globe 15 times. The agency can't begin to take care of these roads; in fact, it has an $8.4 billion road-maintenance backlog. And, as the roads deteriorate, the speed at which they destroy water, fish, and wildlife increases. By law, these resources are to be managed by the Forest Service just as zealously as timber. But the only Forest Service chief who ever took this legal mandate seriously was Michael Dombeck, a career fisheries biologist appointed in 1996 by the Clinton administration. Among Dombeck's first words to his employees: "I want to make it clear that no Forest Service program has dominance over another. Timber is not more important than wildlife and fisheries."

Accordingly, Dombeck halted road construction in 120 national forests. Then, getting Clinton's backing, he proposed permanent protection for roadless areas-58.5 million acres of the 192-million-acre national forest system. But in deference to Alaska's powerful, ardently pro-logging Republican congressional delegation-Rep. Don Young and Senators Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens—the Tongass was exempted.