An apparent breather in the University of Alaska’s plans for a huge timber sale in the Chilkat Valley is an opportunity the Haines Borough shouldn’t pass up.
Officials with the university’s land office say they’re taking another six months before moving ahead with a contract to cut up to 150 million board feet of trees here in the next 10 years. On the chopping block are a swath of Mount Ripinsky hillside that overlooks town, much of the Kicking Horse Valley, and forests bordering the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve.
The university hasn’t identified the buyer interested in the trees, or the market for the wood. Haines timber suffers a relatively high rate of defect, generally making trees here less marketable than ones farther south in Alaska. Plus, reaction to recent tariffs imposed by President Trump mean that U.S. timber headed for China – one of the possible markets for the wood – just got a lot more expensive and harder to sell.
Further, our remote location and relatively high cost of labor virtually ended large timber sales in the local forest decades ago. A resurgent market for wood chips – including the potential for using them locally as a heat source – revived some hopes for larger sales two years ago with the Baby Brown sale, but that also has apparently fizzled.
Whatever the reason, there’s a gap here we should exploit.
The University has held 13,000 acres of timber in Haines for decades and not done much with it. The university’s land-grant charter dating back more than 100 years calls for the university to develop its property to benefit the college, including logging and mining.
But it’s 2018. And industrial logging of marginal timber in Haines would mean only marginal profits for the university.
That doesn’t mean there’s not value in the forest for the university.
Haines represents perhaps the biggest batch of big trees in the university’s timber inventory. Besides being shipped off to China, trees here are good for a number of small-scale uses, including for use in Alaska log houses.
Because the local forest holds the biggest logs on the Alaska road system, spruce logs from Haines are trucked all over the state for use by log-house builders. Spruce trees rot fast in the Southeast rainforest, but they last considerably longer in the semi-arid climate of Interior Alaska, making them ideal for log-house building.
Could the university start a log-house building program, akin to the training it already does for private mining companies? Students could come to Haines to learn this skill, and others such as timber-framing, using trees from the university’s forest
Or how about a university forestry program, using the state forest as a training ground to teach undergraduates about sustainable forestry management and multiple-use management? Certainly these are the forestry programs of the future, not training in preparing sales for clearcut logging.
In 1995, participants in the Haines 2005 community visioning project identified as a top priority developing a value-added timber industry here, including using trees to create such objects as guitar tops. One meeting was held on the idea, where some old loggers scoffed at the notion. Maybe another meeting should be held.
After all, Buster Benson’s one-man mill is still operating, in the person of Chad Bieberich, who mills up not only spruce beams but also birch slabs for fine, interior woodwork. Fairweather Ski Works is honing back-country skis using local trees. And there’s a factory on the west side of town building wooden hots tubs that are shipped all over the world.
There are myriad products and businesses that could be developed using local trees, and we know there is already broad public support for such an industry.
The world is full of tree farms, neat rows of trees planted like so many stalks of corn, that will provide industry with all the cheap lumber it will ever need. Haines offers a relatively intact forest, including old-growth stands, wild salmon fisheries, clear streams and potential for many people-friendly uses, including selective harvest.
To get make the best use of its sizeable forest in the Chilkat Valley, the University of Alaska should look toward the future of forest management, not the past, in deciding the fate of its 13,000 acres of trees.
A letter from the Haines Borough to the university’s Board of Regents making that case might go a long way toward a more 21st-century appraisal of this property by the governors of the university.
That might be a start to a local timber industry with university participation and full community support.