The borough’s Sunny Bay property, a parcel of land on the Cleveland Peninsula about 37 miles southeast of Wrangell, is a potential candidate for a helicopter logging sale someday, though no definitive plans have been made to harvest timber at the site.
On a trip to Sunny Bay with the U.S. Forest Service in late July, Borough Manager Jeff Good learned there are valuable red and yellow cedar trees on the property. However, these trees are sparsely distributed.
Helicopter logging, also known as aerial timber harvesting, entails attaching cables to felled trees and lifting them out of the forest via helicopter. This method is most frequently used on steep terrain or in remote areas with limited road access. At Sunny Bay, it could allow loggers to harvest the highest-quality timber while leaving the rest of the forest standing.
“For helicopter logging,” explained Good, “they want your better trees. It’s really expensive to do helicopter logging, so that takes a lot of profit out of the timber.” Red and yellow cedar are popular varieties of wood, due in part to their longevity and resistance to decay, and would be the most likely to produce revenue from a timber sale.
Both Good and Carol Rushmore, the borough’s economic development director, intend to thoroughly investigate Wrangell’s options, including the advantages and disadvantages of helicopter logging, before recommending a plan for the property to the borough assembly. Neither is yet certain of what the decision timeline may look like.
When Wrangell became a borough in 2008, it was granted entitlement lands by the state for economic development purposes. In 2016, after undergoing a lengthy back-and-forth decision process, Wrangell identified a total of 8,930 acres.
At approximately 2,500 acres, the Sunny Bay property is the largest of Wrangell’s entitlement land parcels.
Helicopter logging leaves less environmental damage than traditional methods and carries a reduced risk of landslides, since only select trees are cleared. It would also allow the borough to use the land for other purposes, like recreation or development, once logging was complete.
However, the method requires skilled workers and costly equipment, which makes it an expensive option. Since the Sunny Bay timber sale would be smaller than the preferred size for helicopter logging projects, Good is not certain that the borough could get a bid on the timber.
Ideas are “just being thrown around at this point in time,” said Rushmore, who also serves as the borough’s planning and zoning administrator. Other uses for Sunny Bay could include cabin sites, recreation and commercial development.
Good said a decision on the Sunny Bay land-use strategy is still a long way off. “We would definitely go through a public review process,” he explained. “Broadly, we’re looking at a lot of different things for those properties.”
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