State seeks to expand logging in Haines State Forest, some question economics
- Chilkat Valley News
- 21 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Will Steinfeld
Chilkat Valley News
Proposed changes to Haines State Forest management could roll back restrictions on logging across wide swaths of the Chilkat Valley. But some say economics — not just government regulation — is preventing large-scale logging returning to the area.
It’s been a half-century since the Chilkat Valley’s timber boom, which spiked in the early 1960s before dropping off a decade later into a long, slow, tail of limited harvest that continues today.
Under the current management plan, the forest is split into 30 subunits, each with its own set of allowed uses — some with commercial timber harvest, some not.
The state’s proposed changes would upend that section-by-section regulatory framework, allowing multiple uses, including timber harvest, across all land in the Haines State Forest.
That would erase current logging restrictions in three main areas. For one, the entire section of the forest on the western side of Chilkat Inlet is currently designated as land for wildlife habitat and public recreation. Those wildlife habitat and public recreation areas are the primary areas “considered for timber harvest in the new revision,” the state’s Coastal Region forester Greg Palmieri said this week. That encompasses tracts of forest around the Takhin River and south toward the Davidson Glacier.
Also opened up for timber management would be recreation land around Chilkoot Lake.
Even prior to the recent management plan discussion, state managers have tried to bring large-scale timber harvest to the state forest in recent years.
Four years ago, the “Baby Brown” timber sale sold 1,000 acres of Haines State Forest land containing an estimated 23 million board feet of timber to an Oregon company for $423,455.
Two more major timber sales are proposed in the state’s five-year plan for the forest — nearly-adjacent parcels along Chilkat Ridge totalling an estimated 35 million board feet of timber.
Both Chilkat Ridge and Baby Brown are of a size not seen in decades in the Haines State Forest. But the increased opportunities to log haven’t yet resulted in actually increased logging.
Going on five years after the sale, Baby Brown remains untouched, and no infrastructure to date has been built to access or export logs from the site. And while Palmieri said there is general interest from the commercial timber industry in the local state forest, he also said no companies have specifically expressed interest in the Chilkat Ridge area.
That could still change. But some, like longtime area logger Scott Rossman, think it’s unlikely major timber harvest will happen any time soon.
According to both Rossman and Palmieri, the economic calculus of timber harvest has two main components: how much it costs to access and remove the timber, and how much the timber brings in when it sells.
Right now, the loggers in the state forest are small, some times one-person crews like Rossman, who logs about half a million board feet per year, he said. Those half-million board feet are cut largely around areas logged in the boom days, accessible by logging roads built in the boom days. Working through those areas is what Rossman calls “picking up leftovers.”
“Back in the day they hit the spruce pretty hard, because that’s what was worth the money,” Rossman said. “For almost forty years, that’s what we went and did — pretty much hammered it — and I’ve been picking up leftovers in the last 25 years.”
Accessing Chilkat Ridge, for instance, would be a different kind of proposition.
The “skid roads” built by local operators for the current harvest are small enough that they “typically disappear soon after the sale is over,” Palmieri said.
Roads to a wholly new areas like Chilkat Ridge would have to be far larger and up to state specifications for width and drainage. The state’s five-year plan estimates 13.4 miles of new road would have to be built east of Chilkat Lake to access the Chilkat Ridge sale, including bridging the Tsirku River. Add in tough terrain, and the site “might as well be on the moon,” Rossman said.
That takes financial firepower beyond what currently exists in the valley. “Roadbuilding is expensive,” said former Mud Bay Lumber Company owner Sylvia Heinz. “If you don’t have roads you can’t log for local loggers.”
Case in point, the last major logging road built in the state forest was in 1995, near the Kelsall, Palmieri said, apart from one spur road built in 2003.
The high costs raise the required payoff, in terms of timber value, to make new roads worthwhile for outside firms.
At Baby Brown, access could be easier than Chilkat Ridge, though still requiring 12 miles of new road. But the prize at the end of the road might also be less valuable. The timber is largely western hemlock, with some small pockets of spruce mixed in — much like the rest of the state forest, Palmieri said, but different from the old-growth spruce that, according to Rossman, remains on Chilkat Ridge.
As Rossman sees it, getting western hemlock to market faces a number of challenges.
For one, he said, shared medium-scale infrastructure to move timber to regional markets — like log raft and barge companies — has almost completely disappeared. And harvesters can’t compete with timber prices down south. That leaves only operations large enough to stand up their own export infrastructure and fill ships bound for Asian markets.
“Nobody can solve the problem of moving this low grade wood to somewhere they can sell it and have anything left over,” Rossman said. “It’s as simple as that.”
Would opening new areas to logging, as the management plan amendment proposes, help loggers even out that math?
Palmieri acknowledges that the Haines State Forest is lower quality wood than the southern Southeast forests that fueled much of the state’s historical timber harvest.
“To the south of us there’s larger timber and higher quality grade, and we have a little less average volume per acre,” Palmieri said.
But, Palmieri argued, what might seem like a poor economic calculus up-front could pay off in the long run.
“Initial entry into any part of a forest is challenging economically, and those costs make the economics of a sale more challenging to work out,” he said. “But once you have the infrastructure in place, long term management becomes much more economical, and it gives you the opportunity to manage a particular stand for specific markets.”
Still, it’s not clear how to overcome those initial costs of entry, even if there could be money to be made down the line.
What is certain is that if large logging outfits do start developing the state forest’s more remote areas, they’ll face staunch opposition, including from conservation groups.
“There’s no question this community, broadly speaking, supports local operators supporting local needs, like firewood, house logs, things like that,” Lynn Canal Conservation executive director Jessica Plachta said this week. But a bigger export industry, Plachta argued, would threaten areas made more valuable by prior decades of timber harvest.
“Even if it wasn’t the best recreation and most crucial habitat originally, it has become that by virtue of inaccessibility,” Plachta said.
Plachta also argues the Division of Forestry is underestimating the ecological impact of logging. The state’s model for the Haines State Forest puts the regrowth period — the time it takes for a clearcut stand to grow back to harvestable size — at 120 years, a figure used by the division’s models across Southeast.
Plachta said her organization’s on-the-ground ring counting puts the regrowth period at between 300 and 400 years, a discrepancy caused by Haines’ colder climate compared to the Tongass farther south.
“Those clearcuts that were done 60 years ago, are they going to be harvestable trees in 60 years?” Plachta said. “No, they’re not. In some cases they’re big blueberry fields choked with alders and devil’s club.”
As for whether there’s a middle ground between large-scale clearcuts and the current logging regime, Heinz, the former Mud Bay Lumber Company owner, thinks there is. For instance, she said, grant funding could help small, local logging outfits build new logging roads, rather than being limited to the “leftovers,” as Rossman called it.
“I still believe with a coordinated effort it’s possible, but it would require grant funding and it would require less controversy over timber cutting,” Heinz said. “It would require a solutions oriented approach with people on all sides of the issue.”
• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
