In the Northwest: Trees gone, Alaska villagers look to a tourist harvest

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Joel Connelly

Friday, June 25, 2004

In the Northwest: Trees gone, Alaska villagers look to a tourist harvest

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

HOONAH, Alaska -- Used to witnessing tidewater glaciers, and watching humpback whales cavort in Icy Strait, cruise ship passengers get a different Alaska vista when docking outside this Tlingit village of 800 people west of Juneau.

A vast clearcut, rising almost from the shoreline, covers the mountainside across the bay. Miles of cutover lands can be seen looking up neighboring valleys of Chichagof Island.

"We had a petition with 188 signatures against logging over there," said Floyd Peterson, a fishing guide and Tlingit who has lived in Hoonah for 61 years, gazing out his living room window at the clearcut.

"They just ignored the petition," he added. "They never acknowledged it. The next year they wiped out the forest. ... They're through now. They're outta here. There's nothing left."

The old-growth forests were cut down by native-owned corporations of which Hoonah residents are shareholders. One is Huna Totem, the local village corporation, the other the Sealaska Corp., the regional corporation for southeast Alaska.

Over the past two decades, the corporations -- created under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act -- have razed an estimated 248,000 acres of old growth, most of it in southeast Alaska.

"They cut the most beautiful lumber you ever saw. They could have had a local industry forever," said John Erickson of Tok River Outfitters, a renowned bear hunting guide.

With the village's forests stripped, Huna Totem has turned to one Alaskan industry that is fueled by the state's natural beauty -- and which doesn't strip away a resource and then leave.

The native corporation is playing host to Celebrity and Royal Caribbean cruise ships making port calls at a converted cannery north of town. Passengers get an option of 10 shore excursions.

Politicians in the 49th state have long believed, in the immortal words of former Gov. Wally Hickel, that "we can't just let nature run wild."

They have fastened onto and wasted millions of dollars on ill-fated industrialization and development schemes.

The Tongass National Forest was to become a tree farm feeding pulp mills. Dairy farming was the planned future for Point MacKenzie north of Anchorage. A $30 million grain terminal was built in Valdez. Even today, Gov. Frank Murkowski proposes to build roads as a kind of corporate welfare for mines.

When Congress protected 103 million acres in the 1980 Alaska Lands Act, Rep. Don Young snorted that new parks and wilderness would become the domain of "jet-setting hippie backpackers." Sen. Ted Stevens denounced locking up places for benefit of the "effete rich."

Not quite. A phenomenal 675,000 ships' passengers will pass through Juneau this season. They're coming not just on ocean liners accommodating 2,500 to 3,000 passengers, but on small exploration boats that take kayakers to hidden coves.

Brown bear watching at Pack Creek on Admiralty Island is so popular that the U.S. Forest Service limits numbers. A lottery picks those who get to watch bruins feed in the McNeil River off Cook Inlet.

Remote locales are taking off in popularity. Air charters in Homer fly visitors in to camp on wild coastal bays of Katmai National Park. Rafting companies take visitors from the lower 48 down rivers to the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, coveted by oil companies.

Locals in Juneau can get grumpy when four or five big ocean liners are docked or anchored. Icefield-bound helicopters roar overhead like a scene out of "Apocalypse Now."

In Hoonah, however, even critics of the native corporation's logging have welcomed the arrival of cruise ships.

"We want this to work," said David Belton, director of cultural and natural resources for the Hoonah Indian Association, which leases a heritage center at the old cannery.

The heritage center takes visitors on a journey through time, and back to when advancing ice forced Tlingit villagers to abandon camps on what is now Glacier Bay.

The white man arrives in the person of an 18th-century French explorer with the expansive name of Jean-Francois de Galaup de LaPerouse.

A map of the cannery area has a curious notation of "Guest Boundary" where roads head out, as if to gently discourage visitors setting out toward Hoonah.

But ships' passengers aren't being penned in. Many ride the bus or walk into town. Salmon is cheaper than out at the cannery. Floyd Peterson takes clients out on fishing charters. Wife Marjorie sells native drums and earrings made of otoliths, bonelike structures found in the heads of fish her husband catches.

Locals warn on the radio of a "Code Brown!" when a bear is spotted on a road.

It's perhaps best for visitors' enjoyment that Peterson stays on the water. When he drives inland, the waste and long-term consequences of Hoonah's years of clearcutting make even the casual visitor very sad and very mad.

Huge piles of wood have been left on the ground to rot. Only the tiniest strips of forest have been left along salmon streams. Erosion from logging roads leaves cat-scratch scars down mountainsides.

"All this timber was exported in the round for Asia. It didn't sustain jobs here," said Peterson.

Sitka black-tailed deer run in front of Peterson's truck. Piles of bear scat are frequent. Perhaps not for long.

The cut-over land has not been replanted. Elsewhere in southeast Alaska, forests have grown back dense and thick. Unlike an old-growth forest, sunlight cannot filter through the canopy. The forest floor is largely barren.

Erickson, who makes a living tracking bruins, observed: "It's so thick out in some of those clearcuts that it's hard for even a bear to move around."

What of the Alaska congressional delegation, which pushed and promoted the logging? Said Erickson: "I've never seen any of 'em out here."

P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com

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