A Crossroads for Wilderness

The steelhead got spooky after they'd seen my fly swing past them a few dozen times; they shifted in the current, moving up and down the run, leaving silver wakes on the obsidian surface. Finally, I tied on a huge chartreuse fly called a Clouser and, on the first cast, watched it vanish into the jaws of a 15-pound male. In the twilight we danced up and down the river, sometimes in it, sometimes out of it, and when we finally joined each other on a sandbar it was too dark for photos. I wouldn't need them anyway. For a minute I held his head in the icy flow, then watched him rejoin the pod.

I stood and slowly turned 360 degrees, taking a long look at river, woods, meadow, valley, sea, mountains, snowfields, and glaciers. The vastness of the scene reminded me that it's not too late for the Tongass. What this forest has going for it is that it's the size of West Virginia. Parts have been stripped of magic by people who couldn't see its real treasures, but most of it still is as pristine as Port Houghton. It had been good to touch the big steelhead's wildness, and through him, the wildness of the place, good to know this piece of our national forest system when its river was clear, cold, and full of fish, when wolves ghosted through old growth and sang in the moonlight, when it had no clearcuts, no buildings, no traffic, no roads.