NPR’s Christopher Joyce embarked on a National Geographic Radio Expedition to the Tongass trying to find the biggest and oldest trees in this last American rain forest. (SOUND EFFECT: BOAT MOTOR IDLING)

Joyce: They call them landmark trees because they’re the biggest living things on this rocky landscape. They’re very hard to find, though. Even the [United States] Forest Service, which oversees the Tongass, doesn’t know where many of these last cathedral-like stands are.

Sam Skaggs: It is one of those things where you kind of know that there is something here and it is greater than all of us—but you don’t know quite what it is yet.

Joyce: Sam Skaggs wants to find those stands. Every few weeks he heads out from Juneau [Alaska] aboard his 30-foot [9-meter] boat, Magister.

Skaggs: (SOUND EFFECT: BOAT MOTOR ROARING) We are off like dirty shirts as my grandmother would say.

Joyce: Skaggs and his colleague, Richard Carstensen, are freelance naturalists who are hunting for Alaska’s rarest old-growth stands of Sitka spruce and hemlock. There are bigger trees in North America, but these are the last giants of the American rain forest, and they’re vital to many kinds of wildlife. The two tree hunters measure and map these trees so that all can see there’s still some ancient rain forest left in North America.

Skaggs: We have about 40 miles [65 meters] to go before we go into the Tenakee Inlet. We have a nice northerly blowing behind us, so we get a little push from the wind. (FADE OUT BOAT SOUND, BRING UP MARBLED MURRELET CALLS)

Joyce: We motor into the interior of Chichagof Island. On the steep slopes above, tall spruce alternates with fan-shaped groves of pale green alder where old growth was logged. Whales and dolphin break the deep-blue mirror of water. We stop to watch hundreds of tiny birds float on the surface, diving for fish. For Carstensen, these marbled murrelets draw a clear line connecting sea and old-growth forest.

Richard Carstensen: The marbled murrelet needs a big tree because it is not a very agile flyer. It can’t take right-angle turns through dense foliage. These adults are feeding their babies fish 100 feet [30 meters] up in the air on a mossy limb in a big tree.

Joyce: (SOUND EFFECT: ATTEMPTING, BUT FAILING, TO PLAY A KELP HORN, LAUGHING) We find another kind of tree. Well, you could call it a tree. It’s bull kelp, floating lengths of tubular seaweed that grow up from under the water. We’ve cut off 4-foot [1.2-meter] lengths of it to make Alaskan music.

Skaggs: You blow down like a trumpet. You’ve got to purse your lips.

Joyce: (SOUND EFFECT: FAILING TO PLAY KELP HORN AGAIN) There’s definitely a knack to it, but with coaching from Skaggs—

[To Skaggs] I’ve never had to blow on a vegetable before.

Skaggs: It’s like kissing your wife.

Joyce: We play. (SOUND EFFECT: HORN CALL)

[To Skaggs] That’s beautiful.

Skaggs: We could say it is the call of the wild.

Joyce: (SOUND EFFECTS: DRAGGING KAYAK ONTO BEACH, WALKING ON GRAVEL, SALMON JUMPING) After five hours of motoring, we pitch camp on a wedge-shaped beach bordered by forest and a slow-moving stream. We’re hours from any human settlement. Salmon leap almost within reach. Aerial and satellite photos indicate there’s a stand of landmark spruce two miles [three kilometers] inland. But Carstensen’s first concern is grizzly bears.

Carstensen: What’s this here? Oh [laughs]! Standing right on it—that’s our big brown friend.

Joyce: Bear scat.

Grizzlies have left paw prints seven inches [18 centimeters] wide in the gravel. We have two rifles, but our guides counsel prevention: No food in the tents tonight, walk loudly-and this bit of useful advice-don’t look like prey.

(SOUND EFFECT: RAIN ON BEACH) What we are looking for is the rarest of the rare. It’s raining the next morning. Sam Skaggs consults his map, then leads us east across the beach. (SOUND EFFECTS: WALKING ALONG BEACH, WAVES, WALKING ON ROCKS) Soon enough, though, we hit thickets of alder. Carstensen chooses the route by consulting tiny aerial photos in a little plastic viewfinder.

Carstensen: Okay, here we go up into the woods. It looks like we want to go south 10 degrees, east for maybe 100 yards [90 meters]. (SOUND EFFECT: WALKING THROUGH BRUSH)

Joyce: I don’t see the path somehow.

Carstensen and Skaggs: There ain’t no path, there ain’t no path. (SOUND EFFECT: WALKING THROUGH SQUISHY MUD)

Joyce: The alder branches are as thick as cobwebs. Spine-covered devil’s club slaps at you, and the mud sucks at your feet. But then a sphagnum bog appears, carpeted in pale moss and silver lichen. Deer have rubbed the bark off cedar saplings with their antlers.

(SOUND EFFECTS: WALKING THROUGH TALL GRASS; YELLING, “YO, BEAR!”) We reach a meadow of fireweed, 6 feet [1.8 meters] high and hot pink. It’s crisscrossed with bear trails and their matted daybeds. (SOUND EFFECT: CROSSING A STREAM) Then a stream choked with salmon. The sandy banks are covered with grizzly tracks. “It’s a bear cafeteria,” says Skaggs. We hurry across.

(SOUND EFFECT: RAIN IN A LANDMARK TREE STAND) Soaked through and leg-weary, we reach the old-growth stand—truly big trees, bigger than anything we’ve seen. We mark off an acre [0.4 hectares] and find the single biggest tree—the landmark tree. The Sitka spruce is hard to miss, even from a distance.

Carstensen: I will get a distance with the laser if I can unfog it in this rain. Forty yards [thirty-seven meters] distance, then the angle to the treetop, and a few calculations—

Joyce: Equals 69.28 times 3, and we get—wow—207, 208 feet [about 63 meters], really.

Carstensen: Whoa!

Skaggs: Two hundred and eight feet, really?!

Carstensen: Wow! That is a beautiful tree.

Joyce: Two hundred and eight feet high. Almost 20 stories. And there are more almost as big. There are fallen logs as big around as a Volkswagen Beetle, and berry bushes everywhere. Skaggs and Carstensen practically run from one tree to the next like Boy Scouts on their first camping trip, measuring and marveling. (SOUND EFFECT: SOUNDS OF MORE MEASURING FADE TO AMBIENT SOUNDS OF THE BEACH ON THE NEXT MORNING)

Carstensen: The really remarkable thing about this one is the height of those trees. We had, I think, 6 trees over 200 feet [60 meters] tall, which is up there for trees in the Tongass.

Joyce: Sitting back on the beach, Carstensen logs in the measurements. It’s clear this landmark site is tall-and will grow taller still. The spruce thrives on the local limestone rock and well-drained alluvial soil left behind by glaciers and streams. Even salmon eaten by bears become tree fertilizer.

Carstensen: This landmark tree project is really bringing home for me that connection between streams, salmon in those streams, the big trees that depend on that depositional environment to grow there, the plants like salmonberry, devil’s club, [and] stink currant that grow in that type of substrate, and the bears and the eagles that feed on those things. (SOUND EFFECT: EAGLE CALL)

Joyce: Carstensen and Skaggs will share their find with the Forest Service and Interrain Pacific, a group that maps the region’s biological resources. And they’ll bring paying tourists here. They hope to make old growth another Alaskan icon, alongside whales and glaciers. They accept that some old growth will be logged, but more will be saved, says Skaggs, if more people actually see these places.

Skaggs: I don’t come out here for the risk. I am not here for the sense of adventure. I keep coming out here and putting money and time into this because it just feels that this could be the most important thing I do to give something to the understanding of my home, of the Tongass.

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