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News+Views

September + October 2010 Washington Trails

Trail Briefs
Gregoire Declares First
Roadless Recreation Week
To encourage Washingtonians to get out and
enjoy Washingtons 2 million acres of roadless
forest, Gov. Gregoire joined several other governors across the country in proclaiming August 7
through 15 as Roadless Recreation Week. Stewardship events held during the week highlighted
the importance of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, a policy that protects nearly 60 million
acres of pristine forests across the country. t

State Trails Conference to

Explore Connection Between
Backyard, Backcountry
The 2010 Washington State Trails Conference will
be held October 22-23 in Tacoma, Washington.
The conferences theme is From Backyard
to Backcountry and the Trail Between and
the event is structured into three tracks. The
backcountry topics include sustainable trail
construction methods and planning for heavy
recreational use. Backyard sessions focus on
active transportation, trail projects that get
people from home to work and school. The Trail
Between sessions focus on those issues that
relate to all trails, whether they are paved urban
routes or dirt paths in the wilderness.
WTAs youth programs coordinator, Krista
Dooley, will be one of three presenters leading a
session titled, Listening to Young People: What
Brings Them Outdoors and onto Trails?
The conference draws trail advocates, planners,
funders, builders, recreationists and volunteers.
Anyone with a zeal for trails and the opportunities they afford is invited to attend. t

www.wta.org

Trail Book
From Fish to Forest
by Stephen Tan

Life, death, renewal. Its a principle

were introduced to at an early age
and one that aspiring earth scientists
learn, with increasing complexity,
again and again. Food chains evolve
into energy pyramids, which give
way to nutrient cycles and ecological
networks.
The connections between living
things in even the simplest of ecoSalmon in the Trees
systems can be stunningly intricate.
by Amy Gulick
So when in the late 1990s a research
($29.95, 2010)
scientist from the University of Alaska
discovered high levels of marinederived nitrogen in trees standing
miles from the sea and a thousand yards from any stream, she might have
conjured some fanciful hypothesis to explain why. But the reason proved
simple: salmon feed the forests of southeast Alaska. Plucked by predators
from the tributaries of the Chilkat, Taku, Stikine and Unuk Rivers and
hundreds of other streams, they are carried into the forest and dropped
there, often intact but for the skin, roe and brains favored by bears. The
nutrients their flesh releases to the soil reemerge in the foliage of the
western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and western hemlock that dominate this
biome. Fish to forest in a single step.
Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaskas Tongass Rain Forest (Braided
River, April 2010) draws its name from this discovery. While it offers images of mountains, glaciers, bears, and eagles and elegant accounts of
natural history that would be expected from any photologue of the Alaska
panhandle, its richness arises from its willingness to look beyond natural splendor and from its ambition to paint an accurate portrait of life in
this region, particularly human life. How tempting it might have been for
photojournalist Amy Gulick (who lives in North Bend, Washington) and
her collaborators to ignore the 75,000 people who live and work here, to
retreat with camera and journal to the remote forests, ice fields and fjords
and the hundreds of uninhabited islands of the Alexander Archipelago. In
so magnificent a place, they could hardly have gone wrong.
That book has, of course, been photographed and written before.
Whether in Alaska or anywhere else some sliver of unspoiled terrain still
remains, someone has managed to capture it on film, erase any sign that
humans have been there, and package whats left with the musings of
philosophers and poets.
Vast, remote, ecologically intact and exceedingly photogenic, the
Tongass would appear ready-made for this approach. But while this 17
million-acre temperate rainforest may dazzle, it bears the scars of misuse,
mismanagement, and exploitation. The serial plunder of its resourcesfur
in the 1700s, gold in the late 1800s, fisheries and timber in the 1900s
has given way to new threats. And although we might like to imagine
it differently, its human residents dont always live in harmony with the
natural environment, or, for that matter, with one another.
Yet amidst this tumult and imperfection, and in part because of it, lies
something vibrant and beautiful. This vitality is clearly revealed through

Continued on p.46

46 Backcountry

September + October 2010 Washington Trails

www.wta.org

From Fish to Forest

Continued from p.10

the essays and the profiles of Tongass residents. Their stories and perspectives differ, but one essential aspect of their lives binds them. All live close to the land, as much by design as by necessity.
Whether naturalist, seaplane pilot, miller, fisherman, guide or biologist, their livelihoods are rooted
in this place and tied inextricably to the natural resources that seem, impossibly, at once inexhaustible and imperiled.
Abundance and vulnerability are reflected as well in Ms. Gulicks photographs, the most satisfying of which do not depict grand vistas or wildlife in action but images more elemental: the fresh
imprint of a grizzly paw, a deer skeleton on a gravel bar, a salmon carcass draped over the trunk of
a fallen tree. More startling than awe-inspiring, these images reveal the primeval nature of the Tongass. They assure us that there are places on earth that, despite our best and worst efforts, remain
untamed.
Salmon in the Trees doesnt fully realize its goal of a true-to-life portrait, however, because it
sidesteps one dimension of southeast Alaskan life that cant fairly be ignored. Today, 9 out of every
10 visitors to Alaskas capital come by cruise ship. In a mere three decades, the cruise industry has
transformed the regions economy. In southeast Alaska alone, the industry now generates $1.35 billion in annual offshore revenues and is directly responsible for nearly 15,000 jobs. Like the extractive
industries that previously drove the regional economy, it has also had impacts on the environment
and, more noticeably, local culture. Concerns about these impacts led residents in 2006 to pass a
ballot initiative imposing new fees and taxes on cruise operators. Hundreds of towns, cities, chambers of commerce and civic groups opposed the initiative. Their fears that it would cause tourism
revenues to stagnate appear to have been well-founded as the State projects a 14 percent drop in
cruise passenger travel this year, with losses in visitor spending of $150 million.
However Alaskans decide to meet this challenge, another will almost certainly rise to replace it.
It seems the nature of this place that life here is uneasy and precarious. In a letter to contributing
illustrator Ray Troll that closes the book, novelist John Straley proffers this hopeful plea for the Tongass: Long may it last: the big old trees still standing, the bugs, the fish, the bears, and the flawed
and saintly people who want to live a sensual life in this everything place. For those who have ever
wondered about that life, Salmon in the Trees offers a taste. t
Stephen Tan is WTAs vice-president of advocacy.

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