Secrets of the rainforest - Alaska's Tongass National Forest

Sunset, Nov, 1997 by Matthew Jaffe

Richard Nelson guides his skiff out of Sitka Harbor, his dog Keta riding the bow. Mist beads up on the border collie's black fur, which fills with wind as Nelson opens the throttle and heads toward a nearby island. He wants to show me what a pristine temperate rain forest really looks like.

Along the way, Nelson, who makes his living as a nature writer and anthropologist, kills the engine as humpback whales glide within yards of the boat, drizzling us with spray from their blowholes. Behind us, a stubborn fog is lifting to reveal the icy mountains beyond Sitka.

Within 45 minutes, Nelson is easing the boat into a small bay near a black sand beach strewn with bleached spruce, hemlock, and cedar logs, timber-operation escapees that have washed up with the tides. As we enter the woods, the challenge is to not be overwhelmed by its chaos and details. Organisms are tied so closely to one another that the ground, a Nerf-like 18-inch layer of gnarled roots and decaying vegetation, seems to be alive. The forest itself is a grand tangle, the greenest place that I have ever seen. Water drips slowly from mosses hanging off branches. Floppy-leafed skunk cabbage and matted bunches of grasses cover the forest floor, while mosses and lichens blanket fallen tree trunks like a pelt.

Even before the dead trees decompose into the soil, young trees pull nutrients from them, as evidenced by a nurse log lined with hemlock seedlings. It is all shaded by the rain forest's classic broken canopy, created by trees of different ages and therefore different heights.

While tropical rain forests have the greatest diversity. of organisms of any ecosystem on earth, temperate rain forests (which are found in regions receiving more than 55 inches of annual precipitation, with mean annual temperatures of 40 [degrees] to 54 [degrees]) have the greatest biomass. Nowhere is there such density of life, the product of centuries of uninterrupted growth.

Clear-cutting would destroy it all in a matter of days.

For many Alaskans, the notion of logging southeast Alaska's old-growth rain forests is an affront to nature. For others, the old-growth represents a valuable renewable resource that should be developed. This philosophical schism underlies the rancorous debate that has followed the release of the U.S. Forest Service's latest Tongass land management plan.

The future of the Tongass National Forest, the country's largest, is of great regional importance, but it has global implications as well. Lying along a narrow coastal band backed by mountains that top out at 18,000 feet, the Tongass is the earth's largest intact temperate rain forest and one of the continent's great wildernesses. Never widespread, temperate rain forests today cover only about 3 percent as much land as tropical rain forests; half of the world's temperate rain forests have already been destroyed. The ecosystem is now limited to Tasmania, New Zealand, Chile, and North America - from Northern California to Alaska's Kodiak Island. The Tongass alone encompasses about 29 percent of the world's surviving unlogged temperate rain forest habitat.

Within this cover of mist and beneath ancient Sitka spruce, cedar, and hemlock live some of the world's most impressive wildlife populations - brown bears, huge runs of salmon, bald eagles, rare wolves - as well as 95,000 Alaskans.

Residents here have a far deeper involvement with their land than Americans in the Lower 48, known to Alaskans simply as "outside." In large numbers, they turn to the rain forest not only for recreation but also for work and food. Southeast Alaskans, Nelson says, have an organic link to the land.

"Nothing is missing here," he says. "Every plant and animal species that was ever here is still here. That completeness includes people as a working part of the ecosystem. It's a continuation of a tradition that goes back thousands of years. People in southeast Alaska aren't going back to nature. They never left it."

The forest that I am exploring with Nelson is filled with reminders of denizens, past and present. It has never been commercially logged. There are bear claw marks on trees and old ax marks made by the Tlingit, the rain forest's historic inhabitants.

Nelson explains that wherever the Tlingit made camp, they would chop off a section of bark on a Sitka spruce so that pitch ran down over the wood. When they returned to the camping spot, they would cut this sap-covered wood and use it to start campfires because it is more flammable than regular green wood.

Nelson then points out a bear path nearby. It consists of a series of huge paw prints worn into the vegetation, as if a bear had stepped deliberately into the exact same spots every time it wandered through the forest. Nelson and others speculate that bears actually groom these prints, as if leaving a kind of signature. "What I find intriguing," says Nelson, "is that it almost seems to be a reflection of a very ancient tradition among bears."

Our route proves less precise. After tightrope-walking across fallen logs that bridge a ravine, we emerge into a clearing, a peat bog habitat known as muskeg. In the muskeg, the soil is too wet and acidic for most of the forest's plants. The land is marked by small pools and streams flowing with tannin-tinted water.