By Southeast Alaska Watershed Commission (June 18, 2024)
The Tlingit people of Angoon have been intimately tied to Admiralty Island since time immemorial. Today the health and success of the community remains tied to the health of the lands and waters of Admiralty Island.
A partnership between the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition (SAWC), US Forest Service, Kootznoowoo, Inc., and the National Forest Foundation (NFF) will restore habitat for fish, including coho and kokanee salmon, coastal cutthroat trout and Dolly Varden char, in five watersheds. The Cube Cove area is located on Admiralty Island, 20 miles north of Angoon, AK and 30 miles south of Juneau, Alaska.
Today, Admiralty Island is a unique natural area with unmatched wildlife values. It supports the highest density of brown bears in North America, hundreds of streams that fill with spawning salmon each summer, lofty peaks and the largest reserve of old-growth forest in Southeast Alaska. These natural resources have helped sustain the native people of Angoon for thousands of years.
Resource development has threatened Admiralty Island. In the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the US Forest Service proposed cutting most of the productive old-growth timber on the island. After strong opposition from the community of Angoon and others, the Forest Service dropped their logging plan, and President Carter designated the Admiralty Island National Monument in 1978.
In 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act designated the Kootznoowoo Wilderness. This same legislation transferred ownership of the Cube Cove area to private ownership. While in private ownership, Cube Cove endured extensive logging and road-building from the early 1980’s to the early 2000’s. Eighty percent of the 22,890-acre area was clearcut.
In 2020, the private parcels in the Cube Cove area (shown in pink at left) were returned to US Forest Service ownership. Upon purchase, Cube Cove was re-incorporated into Admiralty Island National Monument and Kootznoowoo Wilderness before road decommissioning was completed.
Our partnership will rehabilitate fish habitat which will restore wilderness values and re-establish natural processes to help heal the land.
What’s on the land?
- Fish – 100 miles of fish bearing streams and 1,500 acres of fish bearing lakes.
- Wetlands – 4,134 acres of wetlands provide important habitat for wildlife.
- Timber Harvest Areas – 18,312 acres logged. Harvest units now contain extremely dense stands of even-aged, young-growth forest dominated by Sitka spruce. In an old growth forest, large trees occasionally fall into streams, providing critical habitat for fish for many decades. Streams that have been impacted by logging, are straight and uniform. They lack large wood to break up the flow, make pools, and provide places for fish to hide. Banks are covered in small second growth, so it will take many years for this stream to recover on its own. Until old-growth conditions recover, which can take hundreds of years, these streams will lack large wood, and fish habitat will suffer.
- Roads – Logging left behind 214 miles of roads, shown in white. Roads have blocked fish passage, altered natural drainage patterns, disconnected side channels from mainstem streams, and prevented the natural migration of some channels.
- Culverts – 89 known abandoned culverts remain on the landscape. Six of these culverts block upstream fish passage; 9 more culverts will likely become barriers if they are not removed. Numerous sites have been identified as having potential to divert streams resulting in long term impacts to water quality and fish passage. Roads with inadequate drainage, plugged culverts, and clearcuts on steep slopes all increase landslide risk. Landslides eliminate regenerating forest, scour away topsoil, and impact downslope aquatic habitat and water quality.
- Ward Creek Bridge – A long steel and creosote timber bridge, will likely fail and fall into a productive salmon stream. Creosote timbers will pollute the water and the massive structure will likely divert the stream, cause bank erosion, and mar the landscape for many generations.
Time does not heal all wounds.
Without action, culverts will fail and block fish passage; roads will continue to interfere with natural hydrologic processes, landslide risk will increase; and fish habitat conditions will decline. In short, the hand of man is still active at Cube Cove and impacts are severe enough, and the infrastructure is permanent enough that natural processes alone will not restore the site.
Natural hydrologic connectivity in a watershed ensures fish have access to habitat. In Cube Cove, road prisms block normal drainage in many areas, which will worsen as culverts become plugged and fail. This photo shows a fish stream that has been “captured” and diverted by a road.
Taking Reasonable and Appropriate Actions
While timber harvest in the Cube Cove area ended almost two decades ago, without intervention, infrastructure will persist and continue to degrade fish habitat. Accordingly, the Forest Service, SAWC, and Kootznoowoo are implementing a Cube Cove area fish habitat restoration plan. Because the area is now within the Admiralty Island National Monument and Kootznoowoo Wilderness Area, we have carefully designed the plan to minimize short term negative impacts on the land and wilderness values.
This partnership will employ Angoon residents to:
- Remove 80 legacy culverts and 3 bridges abandoned after the logging era
- Breach logging roads at 87 sites to reconnect and restore wetlands and streams
- Restore fish habitat in 11 streams with large wood additions
- Employ ecological thinning to enhance 950 acres of riparian forest next to lakes and streams
No new roads, no new culverts, no new bridges.
Our strategy is to use existing infrastructure to access project sites. No new culverts or bridges will be built to expand existing machine access. Blasting will be used to address road infrastructure in areas without machine access.
Using the “Minimum Tools”
SAWC and the Forest Service closely evaluated if the work could be done without machines and equipment. This included a “Minimum Tools Analysis” that was signed off by the Tongass National Forest, the Region 10 of the US Forest Service, and the national Chief of the Forest Service. Bridges are simply too large to use hand tools for removal. Culverts are too deep under road material and numerous. The scale of thinning and stream restoration requires the aid of chainsaws and motorized winches. Without these tools the work cannot be completed.
The Forest Service asked SAWC to conduct a pilot project to evaluate the effectiveness of hand tool methods for culvert removal. We learned that it’s not practical or feasible in terms of manpower, cost, or time for the vast majority of culverts on the landscape. SAWC selected the easiest culvert for this test case, a fish passage barrier near Florence Lake. With the help of the Angoon Youth Stewards crew, the process took 8 people multiple days to remove less than 1 foot of road fill and then pull the 36-inch, plastic culvert out piece by piece. The video below provides a glimpse of how strenuous the work was. The remaining culverts are buried under up to 25 feet of fill.
Stream restoration to recover fish habitat will be implemented with chainsaws, gas powered winches, and hand tools. We will not use heavy equipment for stream restoration. Crews will build log structures in the channel to store and sort sediment, create pools, and provide overhead cover for fish. Crews will also thin the existing riparian forest to accelerate the return to old growth conditions. Large trees will naturally fall into the stream over time, and diverse riparian vegetation and invertebrates will contribute to the stream food web.
Once project work in the upper watersheds is completed, heavy machinery will be used to breach the road prism and remove culverts and bridges along 9 miles of the mainline roads and select spur roads.
This staged approach will quickly and effectively reduce the long-term impacts of roads and close the area to future off-highway vehicle use.
A Legal Obligation to Intervene
The proposed Cube Cove project is consistent with Section 1315 of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act, which specifically allows fish habitat rehabilitation, including use of motorized machines, in National Forest Wilderness areas. The Forest Service is legally obligated to intervene. The degraded conditions at Cube Cove create a unique situation for a Wilderness area, which are generally undeveloped areas in a natural condition. All five qualities of wilderness character in the Cube Cove area are degraded, which in turn degrades Kootznoowoo Wilderness as a whole. Action is necessary to administer the Cube Cove lands and the Kootznoowoo Wilderness for wilderness purposes, and the Wilderness Act has a specific provision to address such unique situations, Section 4(c). The Forest Service is also obligated to act based on Forest Plan Objectives, Desired Conditions, and Standards and Guidelines in the 2016 Tongass National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan. Finally, allowing the bridges and culverts to fail would be a violation of the Agricultural Property Management Regulations, which prohibit the Government from abandoning infrastructure. Choosing to do nothing, is simply not an option.
An Obligation to Angoon
We are also obligated to act in the best interest of the people that have stewarded this land since time immemorial. It was Angoon’s advocacy that put an end to Forest Service logging on Admiralty and resulted in President Carter designating the Admiralty Island National Monument and Kootznoowoo Wilderness. Further, Angoon fought to protect the Cube Cove areas from logging in the 1980’s. Now, the community is stepping up again to steward this land.
Despite Angoon’s strong leadership and long history of stewardship, federal management of Admiralty Island has not always benefited Angoon. By working together, the Cube Cove project helps repair the relationship between the community, the Forest Service, conservation groups, and others. Kootznoowoo Inc., Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition, and the US Forest Service have worked together to hire and train five Angoon community members to participate in stewardship and restoration on the Tongass. While this crew is working throughout the region, the Cube Cove project is a tangible way to benefit the community through jobs and by helping rehabilitate fish populations that the community will use.
This is not an isolated action. Projects like Cube Cove are necessary to make the Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy a reality, and the integration of tribal and community values into Forest Service land management is the future of the Tongass National Forest.
All major environmental organizations and relevant tribal entities have come out in support of the proposed interventions at Cube Cove.
To view the original article on the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition website, CLICK HERE.
