On Admiralty Island, undoing the clearcuts at Cube Cove

On an island the Tlingit named Kootznoowoo — "Fortress of the Bear" — a patch of old logging damage is being taken apart, and for a few weeks this summer the public has to stay clear while crews do it with explosives.

The Forest Service has closed the area around Cube Cove and Ward Creek on Admiralty Island National Monument, shutting public access to an old logging road and the surrounding drainages for safety. The reason is the work itself: crews are using explosives as part of an aquatic restoration project, pulling out the wreckage of the logging era — abandoned culverts and bridges — and rebuilding the streams and stream banks the salmon need.

The deeper story is how Cube Cove got scarred in the first place. Admiralty Island is nearly a million acres of protected wilderness, home to one of the densest brown bear populations on Earth and creeks thick with salmon. But a chunk of it wasn't always public. Cube Cove was private land, clearcut during the logging era — a stark gap in the middle of otherwise protected country, the kind of thing that breaks up habitat and chokes salmon streams with the leftovers of old roads and crossings. The Forest Service has since bought back nearly 23,000 acres of it, folding the cutover land into the Kootznoowoo Wilderness and setting up exactly this kind of repair.

That's what the closure is really about. Removing decades-old culverts and bridges lets water and fish move naturally again, and restoring the streambanks begins to erase the footprint of industrial logging inside a national monument. Tribal and local partners have described the access limits as a necessary trade for long-term fish habitat recovery — a short-term lockout in service of a watershed that should run wild for a long time after.

The closure carries real teeth — violating it is a federal misdemeanor — so anyone planning to travel near Cube Cove should check the Tongass closure map first. But the inconvenience has a satisfying cause: a piece of Alaska that was cut over is being put back.