Alaska's Mental Health Trust will log old-growth near Hollis to fund care

The Alaska Mental Health Trust is moving ahead with a timber sale on Prince of Wales Island, and the trade-off behind it is unusually stark: cutting old-growth forest near Hollis will help pay for the care of some of Alaska's most vulnerable people.

That is what the Trust exists to do. Its land office is required to squeeze long-term revenue out of Trust land, and that revenue funds services for beneficiaries across the state: Alaskans living with serious mental illness, developmental disabilities, substance use disorders, Alzheimer's and related dementia, and traumatic brain injury. When the Trust sells timber, it is funding those programs.

The catch is where the trees are. The Hollis parcel sits on land the Trust got from the U.S. Forest Service in a 2017 federal land exchange, a swap of roughly 18,258 acres of Prince of Wales national forest for an equal acreage of Trust land near other Southeast communities. In other words, this is former Tongass old-growth, the kind of forest that anchors fish and wildlife habitat and the subsistence way of life for many people in Southeast Alaska. Residents and subsistence users around Hollis could feel the harvest directly.

This is not a one-off. The Trust approved a Hollis-area timber sale back in 2022, so the 2026 decision reads as another round of a long-running effort, not a sudden shift. The board signed off on this one May 20, and the public notice followed June 11.

Two things the public record does not yet answer: how big the sale is, in acreage, volume, or expected revenue, and even what kind of sale it is, since Trust documents call the same parcel both a "competitive" and a "negotiated" timber sale. Those are worth pinning down with the agency.

For now, the comment window is open. Offers and written comments go to the Trust Land Office at [email protected], though the exact deadline and appeal rights should be confirmed from the full decision notice.