The unincorporated community of Naukati Bay is home to less than 150 people. But for those who live here, it’s one of the last places in the nation where residents are able to hunt and fish to fill their freezers and sustain their families. The town has no post office and almost no cell phone service. Residents affectionately refer to the “phone booth” — a small turnout near the top of a hill a few miles outside of town, where a few signals sneak through.
Naukati Bay sits in the upper half of Prince of Wales Island, part of the archipelago that makes up Alaska’s southeast panhandle. Surrounding the town is Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, nearly 17 million acres spread across 1,100 mountainous islands. There’s not much to see in town, except the marina and the old steam donkey on display, an antique powered winch that was used in the early 20th century to help gather logs.
Nearly 2 million people visit the Tongass every year, coming from all over the world to marvel at the vast swaths of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and red and yellow cedar, some towering as tall as 200 feet. They also come for the wildlife. Black and brown bears swat at spawning Pacific salmon and Dolly Varden char. Bald eagles and ravens feast on the leftovers. Humpback whales scoop up thousands of herring that spawn each spring as orca stalk Chinook salmon in the waters that divide the Alexander Archipelago. The forest is also the historical home of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people, whose lands were stolen and then used to establish the national forest.
The Tongass has been the heart of the logging industry in Alaska for decades, starting in the 1950s with the arrival of pulp mills. It was at its zenith in 1990, employing crews in the thousands to clear-cut old growth trees. But attitudes were shifting. In the late 1990s, the federal government declined to renew a 50-year contract with a pulp mill in Ketchikan, which, along with tightening environmental and production standards, dealt a fatal blow to the largest consumer of Prince of Wales Island’s timber.
In 2001, in the waning days of his administration, President Bill Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Policy, also known as the Roadless Rule. The directive was designed to restrict roadbuilding, and by extension large-scale logging and mining, on 58 million acres in the country’s national forests. For more than two decades, industry interests and resource-heavy states have challenged the policy. But the Roadless Rule has largely always prevailed, and long been heralded as a major win for conservation, helping to protect the United States’ few remaining wild places.
Except, that is, for the Tongass.
The policy’s legacy is being challenged in Alaska, where resource extraction is a key driver of the state’s politics. Governors from both parties have fought the Roadless Rule in federal court. Now, Naukati Bay and the other communities nestled within Tongass are on the front lines of the debate over clear-cutting old-growth trees in the 21st century.
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