Alaska plans to burn the Alphabet Hills to grow more moose forage

Sometime in late July, weather permitting, helicopters will pass over the Alphabet Hills north of Lake Louise and start dropping fire. Deliberately setting a mature spruce forest ablaze sounds like the opposite of stewardship — but that's the point. The state wants the old forest gone so something better can grow in its place.

Aging black spruce is nearly useless to a moose in winter; there's little to eat beneath that dark canopy. Burn it off, and the land answers with a flush of willow, birch, and aspen — the young browse moose live on. The same reset helps caribou, keeping their migration country diverse and productive. The fire, Fish and Game says, is meant to "stimulate the regeneration of shrub and tree species that moose feed on."

They've seen it work here. A 2004 burn in these hills covered roughly 37,500 acres; when researchers returned in 2021 to measure how much forage had grown back, the results helped shape this year's plan.

And it's about more than wildlife counts. The moose of the Alphabet Hills feed people — subsistence and hunting families in Glennallen, Copper Center, and Gakona among them — so what regrows here is, in a real way, a food supply. Travelers should expect smoke for weeks after ignition; state officials will monitor air quality, and crews say they'll burn only when conditions keep the smoke off communities and roads.