A small Petersburg timber sale is a marker of the Tongass's long turn away from old growth

The state is auctioning about 10.8 million board feet of timber near Petersburg — and what's notable isn't the size but the species story. Every tree in the sale is young growth: Sitka spruce and hemlock that grew back on land logged decades ago. That puts this modest 396-acre offering squarely on one side of the fight that has defined Southeast Alaska for three generations.

The Tongass has been slowly, contentiously shifting away from cutting ancient rainforest.

The 2016 forest plan set a course toward a young-growth industry and away from the old-growth clearcuts of the pulp-mill era — and that shift is being fought in court right now. This spring, timber companies sued the Forest Service to force more old-growth sales, and a coalition of Alaska tribes, commercial fishermen and conservation groups moved to intervene to defend the young-growth transition. A sale like this one is the transition in practice: second-growth trees, not centuries-old ones.

The mechanism behind it has its own history. The state is running the sale for the U.S. Forest Service under the Good Neighbor Authority, a federal-state arrangement letting Alaska prepare and administer logging on national forest land. It's an efficient tool — and one a 2021 federal audit flagged on an earlier Tongass sale, where the same person who appraised the timber later contracted with the buyer.

Bids are due Aug. 25, with a minimum total of $99,186. The stand sits between Thomas Bay and Frederick Sound, about 11 air miles northeast of Petersburg, reachable only by boat or plane.