Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Haines Economic Development Corporation (HEDC) held a planning session last week for input on its master trails plan and the 2022-2026 Haines State Forest management schedule.

Community members discussed ideas for a new public use trail and cabin at Walker Lake, rebuilding a dilapidated recreational cabin at Chilkat Lake, an update on the Baby Brown timber sale and possible funding sources for future trails and cabins around the borough.

Haines state forester Greg Palmieri presented the draft five-year forest management schedule, a broad scoping document published every two years for the public to provide input. The schedule includes more than a dozen timber sales and plans for various trails and cabins on the 260,000 acres of state-managed forest in the Chilkat Valley. (Public comments for the schedule, which the Division of Forestry released more than a month ago, were due June 7.)

HEDC meanwhile is in the first year of developing a trail plan for the valley, with assistance from the U.S. National Park Service. The nonprofit’s goal is to work with stakeholders, ranging from tribal leaders to Alaska State Parks to the Chilkat Snowburners, to establish a recreation plan that the borough assembly could adopt into the borough’s 2025 comprehensive plan.

“Developing a plan is foundational to being successful at applying for grants,” said HEDC executive director Lee Hart. Through a grant from the National Park Service’s Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance program, HEDC and stakeholders will work with park service staff to map existing and future trails for motorized and non-motorized year-round recreation.

The first phase of the project is broadly to gather information and review existing trail plans; during the second phase planners will hash out details and enter a more formal public process, Hart said.

Palmieri said over the years the idea to build public-use cabins in the state forest emerged from public feedback on forest management schedules.

“What you’ll see in this document is what bubbled up over the years,” including the Walker Lake trail access and the cabin at Chilkat Lake, Palmieri said. He added that in 2015 the state legislature made cuts to the Division of Forestry’s budget and for the last six years he has been working to identify funding sources for the recreation projects.

In other outdoor recreation news, Hart said Alaska Outdoor Alliance, a statewide organization aimed at promoting Alaska’s outdoor recreation economy, will host its annual summit at the Chilkat Center over the weekend of Sept. 7-9. The conference will focus “on the intersection of outdoor recreation and regenerative tourism,” according to the organization’s website, and will include a discussion of transboundary recreation work with representatives from Canada.

In other forestry news, Palmieri said the operator that purchased the 1,000-acre Baby Brown timber sale last spring, Oregon-based Northwest Forest Products, has the capacity to complete the harvest in slightly under two seasons. Contractually it has to be completed within five years.

Palmieri said two of the economic challenges with Baby Brown, which is along the Klehini River near Glacier Creek, are figuring out how to transfer logs to the port and how to market low-value wood.

He said 50% of Baby Brown wood is potentially low-value but that demand for wood biomass has been growing. The operator has been developing a biomass facility in Oregon where he would process Baby Brown logs.

Palmieri also said the owner of Northwest Forest Products has expressed openness to selling timber locally.

Baby Brown, which was combined with a 145-acre sale called Glacier Side 2, was the Chilkat Valley’s largest timber sale in two decades.