Southeast timber sale needed for mill

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) Southeast Alaska’s last mid-sized timber mill is at risk of closing if a sale that would clear-cut 3,700 acres of old-growth forest stalls, according to industry representatives and the U.S. Forest Service.

Viking Lumber Co. in Klawock was the winning bidder when the Big Thorne sale was announced last year. The sale was later withdrawn amid appeals by critics, with concerns raised about the impacts on Alexander Archipelago wolves. That spurred further review by the Forest Service that led to a decision last month to go ahead with a sale.

Owen Graham, executive director of the Alaska Forest Association, said the mill estimates it will run out of logs by next spring.

Forest Supervisor Forrest Cole said the sale will go out for bid this month unless an agreement is struck with the organizations suing the agency to delay it.

Conservation groups have sued to stop the project on Prince of Wales Island, which would harvest more than 8,000 acres of old-growth and second-growth forest and produce about 116 million board feet of timber.

An agreement is in the works, with at least 50 percent of the wood going to keep the mill in Klawock open, Cole said.

The Forest Service has not been able to uphold a promise to provide mills with enough timber each year, crippling the industry, Graham said.

Cole blamed appeals and litigation, saying nearly all large sales on the Tongass in the past 20 years have been appealed, litigated or both. The agency has spent three or four years on the Big Thorne sale at the expense of other possible projects, he said. There are no backups to supply wood to processors if it fails.

Mills continue to operate off the last large Forest Service sale, near Petersburg in 2012. The state also supplies wood from its forests, which include 50,000 acres in the southeast part of the state. The Tongass National Forest covers 17 million acres.

The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council says it is suing over the Big Thorne sale to protect small mills in the southeast. Spokesman Daven Hafey called these types of large sales unsustainable, too much, too fast.

The organization would prefer sales of “similar volume of timber but spreading that over the course of three or four or five decades,” Hafey said.