NPR’s Christopher Joyce visited the Tongass and prepared this NPR/National Geographic Radio Expedition.

Joyce: (SOUND EFFECT: AMBIENT RAIN) Nature never conceded defeat in the city of Juneau [Alaska]. Whales breach along the waterfront, and bald eagles quarrel in backyards. People plan their days around the tides and the weather, their only gesture of protest to paint their houses in parakeet colors to hold off the rainy sky.

That rain—and the gravelly soil left by ancient glaciers—are what created the Tongass National Forest. (SOUND EFFECT: SLOGGING THROUGH SQUISHY, BOGGY GROUND) It’s 17 million acres and swallows up southeastern Alaska. But the Tongass is hardly monolithic. Protected old growth butts up against logged clear-cuts, and the state, private companies, and Native Americans share rights to it. The patch we visit lies along the Swizer Creek Trail, just outside Juneau. Wildlife biologist John Shane knows the place well.

John Shane: We’re right on the edge of this old growth with a stream running through it, and looking up from ground level, you have a shrub layer. You’ve got logs with their own microhabitat of small mammals and insects and fungi. And you look up and you see the ragged canopy of this forest, and in an old-growth forest you get this tremendous amount of sidelight coming though.

Joyce: These are living canyons of spruce, hemlock and cedar—here before the 1600s. But old growth is more than age. It’s variety: saplings next to 200-foot [60-meter] giants, berry bushes where dead trees have fallen. In the summer the bear and deer and other mammals feed on the shrubs. In the winter the big trees intercept snow, and animals feed underneath them. Shane drops to his knees to show how. (SOUND EFFECT: DIGGING IN THE SOIL)

Shane: This is the forest duff, the organic soil in the forest, and it’s very thin. And many of these plants have underground stems or rhizomes, so they’re branching out. And you have these great carpets of bunchberry, ground dogwood, trailing raspberry, and goldthread.

Joyce: You can stick your fingers way down in here and feel all sorts of roots underneath there.

Shane: That’s right, and in the wintertime, when there’s snow on the ground and the deer have a hard time finding food, they move around the bases of the large trees. And they feed on these little green plants, and these provide very important winter nutrition.

Joyce:(SOUND EFFECT: WALKING IN STREAM) Diversity is what makes old growth the best place for wildlife. But farther along Swizer Trail the trees close in on us. Here the old growth was cut. The new, second-growth trees all grew in at the same time, as uniform as a platoon of robots. Now their tentlike canopies have knit together, and they blot out the sun. It’s not much good for wildlife.

Shane: You can see why, if you were walking through here as a deer, you would have to carry a sack lunch if you wanted to eat something. Virtually there’s nothing here for a deer to eat. This is essentially growing trees; it’s not a forest.

Joyce: What is good forest and what isn’t? That question has become a big part of the debate over the Tongass. Though maps of the Tongass show mostly green, less than half is forested, and only 4 percent of that is the kind of old growth that’s best for wildlife-and for logging.

(SOUND EFFECT: MOTOR BOAT) Cutting down old growth has sustained many of the people who live in the Tongass—people like Steve Seley. Seley was raised in a logging camp. He now runs his family’s sawmill, a short boat ride across the channel from the town of Ketchikan.

Timber isn’t what it used to be here. Logging allotments on federal lands have been cut almost by half, and logging on private land is down as well. Two years ago the pulp mill in Ketchikan closed, and hundreds of jobs were lost.

Steve Seley: I think the part of the industry that’s left operating today is a victim of right-wing industry folks who push the harvest levels on the Tongass back to 500 million board feet [150 board meters] a year and extremists on the environmental side that say, “Don’t cut any of it.” (SOUND EFFECT: SAW CUTTING INTO TIMBER)

Joyce: Seley says he’d like to cut just the newer trees—and save more old growth—to make the forest a truly renewable resource. But he says he can’t do that yet.

Seley: We don’t have enough young growth, enough second growth, at this point in time. It’s only ever been really a major timber harvest since the late 1950s. It just hasn’t had a chance to grow back.

Joyce: So some demand for old growth remains, and the debate continues: How much of it can be cut without strangling Alaska’s wildlife? And as timber jobs evaporate, what will replace them? (SOUND EFFECTS: BUS AND AMBIENT SOUNDS OF THE TOWN OF SAXMAN)

Patrick Isaacs: I am going to tell you about the chiefs’ poles, commemoration poles, ridicule poles, and memorial poles.

Joyce: We’re in the village of Saxman, just outside Ketchikan—the site of a totem pole park and a Klinket meeting house. Every 20 minutes a new busload of vacationers gets a guided tour.

Like many of the guides here, Patrick Isaacs is Native American, Klinket and Haida. Isaacs says logging made many Native Americans wealthy, but it wiped out fish and game too. Tourism is easier on the land, he says, but it too has its price.

Isaacs: The downside with the tourism industry right here in Saxman—me being a local native, I can’t go into my longhouse, nor can I go into my common house. I’m very spiritual, and it disturbs my spirit very much that I can’t go into these places here that other people have priority over. (FADE OUT AMBIENT SOUNDS OF SAXMAN)

Joyce: Souvenir shops have replaced loggers’ saloons. Cruise ships follow whales along the inlets. There’s even a new word in the local vocabulary, the “viewshed”—that’s everything you can see from a passing boat. Usually, that means glaciers, whales, and maybe a bear or two. (SOUND EFFECT: AMBIENT DOCK SOUND) Some Alaskans say that’s not enough to save the real heart of the Tongass—its biggest trees.

Sam Skaggs: I call these trees standing capital; they may be worth more left standing and visited.

Joyce: Sam Skaggs is an inventor, a fisherman, a boat captain, an investment counselor, and, most of all, a dreamer. He says the best way to preserve old growth is to get tourists beyond the viewshed—back into the woods to see the really big stuff, what he calls the landmark trees.

Skaggs: I think a landmark tree forest is deserving of the same status as a destination to come and see. Some of these incredible cathedral-like stands of trees that are left in the Tongass—you walk into them and it is a transforming type of experience. These are old souls—400, 500 years old—living statues, if you will. (SOUND EFFECT: LOADING BOAT AND MOTORING OFF)

Joyce: Skaggs and a small band of like-minded adventurers use aerial and satellite photos to locate these giant trees. They load supplies onto his 30-foot [9-meter] aluminum boat and motor as close as they can get. Then they hike, no matter how rugged the terrain, to find the landmark trees, to map them...and measure them. And to show anyone who’ll come along what the Tongass once looked like.

For Radio Expeditions, this is Christopher Joyce, NPR News.

Morning Edition host: Tomorrow Radio Expeditions takes a trek into the Alaskan wilderness to find the biggest trees in the last American rain forest.

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