Mental Health Trust to log 1,438 acres near Hollis on Prince of Wales Island

The Alaska Mental Health Trust pays for services to some of the state's most vulnerable residents — Alaskans living with mental illness, developmental disabilities, Alzheimer's, and chronic alcoholism — and one of the ways it raises that money is by logging old-growth rainforest.

On Thursday, the Trust Land Office moved to do it again, issuing a best-interest decision for a competitive timber sale on 1,438 acres a mile north of Hollis on Prince of Wales Island, targeting an estimated 20 million board feet of old-growth Western hemlock, red and yellow cedar, and Sitka spruce.

How the Trust came to own that ground is the more revealing part.

The parcel arrived in an equal-value land exchange that closed August 30, 2021 — the final piece of a swap Congress authorized in the Alaska Mental Health Trust Land Exchange Act, enacted in 2017. In it, the Trust gave up roughly 18k acres of forested land it held near downtown Ketchikan, Juneau, Petersburg, Wrangell, Sitka, and Myers Chuck — and received timberland on Prince of Wales near Naukati and Hollis in return.

The lands the Trust surrendered were folded into the Tongass National Forest and protected; the lands it gained were designated to be harvested for revenue. As Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who authored the law, framed it at the closing, the exchange protected community viewsheds and trails while raising money for the mental health system. In effect, it relocated the chainsaws — away from the trees behind Southeast's towns and onto Prince of Wales, long the center of the region's timber industry within the largest national forest in the country.

This is not the first cut near Hollis. In February 2022 the Trust Land Office approved a negotiated sale of about 16 million board feet there for a minimum of $2.7 million; the new, larger sale is expected to exceed that same appraised value. The Board of Trustees concurred May 20. One area inside the boundary is off-limits: the Wolf Creek Boatworks Historic District, where the office says no commercial harvest will occur.