They had all tried to quit the woods, and all of them had failed. One evening after a day’s work cutting old-growth trees in the Alaska rain forest, logger Sam Parker sits in the bunkhouse with two of his coworkers, and commiserates.

In their late 20s, they are the last of a dying culture, the youngest on a crew mostly dominated by men in their 50s and 60s. The older men had gone off to their trailers—they had already had their share of late nights before four-thirty shifts—leaving Parker and his friends to sit up and rhapsodize about life in the woods.

The money isn’t great, they agree, and the job is tough, the market for old-growth timber ebbing like a slow