Save the Holes

The opening in the craggy rock face is no bigger than a guitar case, yet caver Steve Lewis, even at 6 feet tall, seems unfazed, and quickly drops his long body underground to meet Kevin Allred and Pete Smith, his two somewhat shorter fellow explorers. There, 10 feet beneath giant Sitka spruce and the fierce winds of Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, a dry, narrow passage opens into what may as well be a different planet. The glow from their carbide lights illuminates scalloped walls of a meringue-like crystalline mineral that drips into delicate stalactites. The air is cold, silent and still; it’s easy to imagine this is some ancient tomb.

“This is our last frontier. The deep sea and these caves up here are the only unexplored places left,” says the 48-year-old Smith, his sinewy form crouched beneath the cave’s slanted roof. “You can climb a cliff that no one’s been on before, but at least you can see where you’re going. When you enter a cave, you don’t know what you’re going to find. The smallest passage could lead to a 500-foot room.”

Created hundreds of thousands of years ago by rainwater that eroded porous limestone bedrock, caves such as this one, underground rivers and deep pits speckle the 16.9 million-acre Tongass National Forest of southeast Alaska. During the last 13 years, Lewis, Allred and Smith, along with others with whom they work, have discovered nearly two-thirds of the 600 known caves in the area. They estimate there could be 600 more, making this one of the best cave landscapes--known as “karst”--in the world. Unaffected by development, these caves have revealed 41,600-year-old bear bones, 10,000-year-old human bones and the skeletal remains of thousands of birds, mammals and fish from before, during and after the Ice Age. Such findings have led paleontologists and archeologists to reconsider theories of human migration into North America.

As the three men balance in rubber boots on the slick cave floor, they speak, finishing one another’s sentences in the excited but hushed tones generally reserved for museums. Then Lewis notices the cream cheese texture of the walls: Dirt is filtering into the cave, turning its white sheen a dingy brown.

“Damn,” he says.

The porous bedrock that produces these caves also produces acres of well-drained soil, creating some of the largest trees in the world--many with 10-foot diameters. If clear-cut, the forest floor erodes and debris and water can infiltrate the caves, destroying artifacts, stalactites and the fragile structure of these ancient domains. That’s not good for wildlife either, says Lewis. Caves contain habitat not only for rare bats and aquatic invertebrates, but also for bear, wolves, salmon and deer. The forest above this particular cave has been clear-cut. Sitka spruce and hemlock litter the forest floor like bodies on a Civil War battlefield.

The three men say that the logging practice is destroying many of the remaining unspoiled subterranean landscapes in Alaska. At last count, 39% of commercial forest land in the Tongass already has been logged. Now the cavers fear a new onslaught.

In late December, President Bush revoked the roadless rule in the Tongass National Forest, a regulation created by the Clinton administration that would have prevented any new logging and road-building in large tracts of intact forest. Now 50 new timber sales in roadless areas and hundreds of miles of new roads are slated for the next 10 years. That’s good news for the timber industry and the locals it employs, but much of that work could take place above undiscovered caves. Plus, last month the administration proposed allowing governors to petition the Secretary of Agriculture (who oversees the U.S. Forest Service) to log currently unroaded land. The rule, if finalized in September, will allow Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski to request that the Forest Service allow logging on an additional 7 million acres of the Tongass. If the agency denies his request, the state could sue.

Up against this political juggernaut, the three cavers--calling themselves the Tongass Cave Project--are isolated voices in the Alaskan wilderness. A biologist, a janitor and a logger, Lewis, Allred and Smith are an unlikely trio pitted against a formidable foe. Yet the three men have teamed up to survey, map and protect as many caves as possible from clear-cut logging permitted by the U.S. Forest Service. The fight over logging the Tongass isn’t new, but it’s usually played out in courtrooms or among lobbyists in Washington, D.C. The Tongass Cave Project guys are a different breed of warrior. They’re volunteers; their organization, though affiliated with the National Speleological Society, doesn’t even have official nonprofit status because they never completed the paperwork. Armed with hard hats, rubber caving suits, righteous indignation, and e-mail, these bull-headed Alaskans have become a real annoyance to the Forest Service, as well as many of their neighbors. But by raising public awareness of this unseen world, they believe they are the last line of defense before the chain saws and logging trucks move in and these mysterious and ancient caves are forever damaged.

Nestled at the north end of remote Prince of Wales Island, 1,300 miles southeast of Anchorage, Smith’s barn-style home in Whale Pass is a testament to grit. Built from local woods that Smith and his wife Valery logged themselves using an old GMC truck, the two-story house runs on solar panels. They draw drinking water from a spring, grow vegetables in a 24-bed garden, place bulk food orders as large as $2,000 that arrive by barge from Seattle, and hunt for deer and fish because Smith says he doesn’t “trust the meat in the store, and I wouldn’t want to pay for it either.”

Here in Whale Pass, a former logging camp with a population of 75, there are no grocery stores, no post office, no police station. Smith and Valery moved here in 1985 “to live close to nature,” and spent the first several years in a camper and house-sitting while they built their home. Their two boys, Jed and Kina, were babies during that time, and Val washed their diapers on a scrub board until she got a washing machine.

With a satellite phone and Internet access, and with a collection of military vehicles they’ve nicknamed Godzilla, Vulcan and Zeus, Val says these days things are plush. While she fixes dinner, Smith, Lewis and Allred splay themselves on the floor of Smith’s living room, looking at cave maps and talking about the Alaskan frontier.

“I love that I can walk in any direction away from my house and I’m guaranteed not to see anybody for a day or two,” says Smith, a quiet, small but tightly wound spool of strength and energy. A former abalone diver, for the past 15 years Smith and his family have run a small salvage, logging and sawmill operation. He knows this forest better than most. “This is part of my drive to protect this area. So few people get to experience this. It’s not my forest, it’s a public forest, but because I’m here in this situation, I feel a responsibility to preserve it for myself and others.”

Lewis shares that sense of obligation. A wildlife biologist with an unfinished doctoral dissertation about the impact of logging on bat habitats (focusing on old-growth trees and caves), he photographs whales for the University of Alaska and considers the caves part of a complex forest-wide system.

“For those of us who live out here, we’re depending that the entire forest system remain intact so that we can get deer and salmon,” says Lewis, who lives with his archeologist wife Rachel in Tenakee Springs, another remote town 120 miles and a few islands north of Whale Pass. “When the ecosystem is damaged, it’s not just our playground that’s gone but also our fridge that’s raided. It’s not like any of us want to stop logging on the Tongass altogether, but we’re [against] the corporate, industrial scale logging that has such major impacts.”

Before the Tongass cave discoveries, scientists assumed southeast Alaska was uninhabited during the Ice Age (at its height about 18,000 years ago) and that humans arrived by crossing the Bering land bridge. Now it appears likely that humans colonized the Americas much earlier, and that this region was the initial route into the continent, according to a 2002 article published in the Athena Review, an archeological journal.

“It’s still all a puzzle, but in just a decade we’ve shifted the archeological thinking,” says Tim Heaton, a paleontologist at the University of South Dakota who works extensively in southeast Alaska. “This area remains a big unexplored resource for our research, but they’re cutting the trees [and damaging the caves] before scientists have a chance to see what’s there.”

News of the move to increase logging in the Tongass doesn’t surprise Allred, the most cynical and irreverent of the three. A handyman and janitor for several Mormon churches throughout the region, he lived in rural Haines for 23 years until moving to Ketchikan last year. He and his wife, Carlene, wrote a comic strip, “Rubber Caver,” for years, chronicling the exploits of Rubber Caver and Fat Man for Alaskan Caver, the newsletter for the local caving club--that is until, one or two strips got a little too critical of the Forest Service and the editor stopped running them.

“Caves aren’t tangible; they can’t benefit rich guys,” Allred says. “But senators in D.C. can see a dollar bill from a logging sale. Most of the time I feel like I’m powerless. It’s easy to feel disappointed and discouraged. It’s rare to see even the smallest victory, like when a cave entrance is protected, but it’s usually only after a lot of hassle.”

Despite the frustrations, Allred is propelled by his love of caves. He met Carlene when both were exploring the same cave and the two moved to Alaska in part because of the caving and outdoor opportunities. The most experienced caver of the bunch, he met both Lewis (who also met his wife in a cave) and Smith on caving expeditions for the Forest Service, but within several years the three say they became disillusioned by the timber-money that drives agency politics and decided to act on their own. Since then, they have funded their caving trips with grants from environmental and national caving groups. They also have filed legal challenges to several logging sales and tried to act as Forest Service watchdogs.

In an area where the economy largely depends on federal timber sales--many full-time, year-round jobs in the region are at sawmills and veneer plants--their conservation ethic hasn’t exactly made them popular. But these independent guys didn’t move to Alaska to make friends.

While scrambling through an old-growth forest, Lewis pauses beside an 800-year-old Sitka spruce. Its tall, wide body looms over a treacherous forest floor where each step is a patient and careful crawl over downed trees, thorny devil’s club, and the possibility of falling through the thin, mossy layer into deeply fissured limestone. For those unfamiliar with the area, it’s the path to hell. One short hike and it’s clear how the untrained eye could easily miss cave entrances.

This, say the cavers, is key.

Federal law requires that the Forest Service protect caves, sinkholes, and underground streams--that is, if the agency knows they exist. Mandated by the Tongass National Forest’s Land Management Plan, the agency must survey the land for these karst features prior to all timber sales. If caves are found, the agency is forbidden to log in a way that hurts the underground passages. The regulations sound good in theory, but in reality, the agency can’t protect what it doesn’t know is there.

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest has one full-time geologist to inventory as much as 5,000 acres of karst per year, so it relies on environmental consultants from Seattle to seasonally survey land slated for harvest. Seasonal workers unfamiliar with the area often miss small cave entrances and sinkholes, says Smith. For the past five years the Tongass Cave Project has organized annual expeditions with volunteers from across the country to monitor the Forest Service’s work. They have found that the agency misses up to 75% of karst features and caves. And while the Forest Service leaves a 100-foot no-harvest buffer around identified Tongass cave entrances, fierce winds regularly blow down three-quarters of the more vulnerable trees, leaving the caves just as damaged as if the area had been clear cut. Even nearby logging can alter the caves. Underground rooms can spread, tunnel-like, for miles. In the absence of significant protection, Smith, Allred and Lewis are pushing for more federal regulation--not exactly what they intended when they fled the Lower 48. To help make the karst lands permanently off-limits to logging, they’re helping Greenpeace identify karst areas in the Tongass. Greenpeace is drafting a report due out in September that will push for a congressionally designated wilderness or monument.

Says Allred: “We’re looking to the future, 300 years from now. We want to keep [the caves] from being impacted again.”

Jim Baichtal may be the cavers’ nemesis, but he doesn’t look all that fierce. A broad man with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard and a camouflage baseball cap, Baichtal is the Forest Service’s Tongass geologist and karst expert and, for Smith, Allred and Lewis, the embodiment of all that is wrong with federal agencies. As he drives his truck past a clear-cut hillside pimpled with white stumps, bleached as bone, Baichtal sighs about his plight.

“The constant adversarial role that has developed between the agency and the Tongass Cave Project is one of the huge things that eats at my time. Everything I do is questioned and beat up by them,” says Baichtal. “The Forest Service is a multiple-use agency, and the culture in Alaska is one of extraction. When I take out an acre of land [to protect caves] from a logging sale, I’m taking out absolutely the biggest and the best timber there is.”

The federal government owns more than 97% of southeast Alaska, and the pressure to provide jobs is not lost on Baichtal and his colleagues, especially when jobs are threatened by imported timber. In the past decade, the number of jobs in the Tongass has decreased from 6,200 to 700. “[Smith, Lewis and Allred] are advocates for a single resource; they have the luxury of only looking at that,” says Scott Fitzwilliams, Baichtal’s boss. “Everything we do affects these communities. We have to talk to people whose kids are impacted when they get laid off.”

Baichtal says that not all karst is created equally--that some was damaged by glaciers and is not worth keeping. It’s a stance that Alaskan politicos favor. “Nobody is saying [to] cut it all down,” says Courtney Schikora, a spokesperson for Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens. “We love wildlife and open spaces just as much as the next person, but we still need an economy.”

Baichtal points out that the Forest Service already has forbidden logging on 53% of all karstlands, and he wants to designate certain areas within the Tongass as “high vulnerability” and place them off limits for any future timber sale. He also has built a boardwalk trail to showcase karst caves and other features in order to build public support for preserving the resource.

“Honestly, the [Tongass Cave Project] guys are not out in left field at all. We both want to protect the resource; I just don’t think all of the resource is created equally,” says Baichtal. His tone becomes almost sensitive. “I have really mixed emotions with these guys, I embrace their passion and I really respect them as cavers. I don’t know, I suppose when I’ve got everybody all [upset with] me I’m probably doing my job.”

On the morning before Lewis and Allred board float planes and fly home, the cavers visit a cavern named Beaver Falls. On the hike back to the car, they encounter a young couple who eye the cavers’ red hard hats, rubber boots and rope and ask eagerly about caving. The three discourage the couple: You can die if you go in there without the right gear; it’s easy to fall; it’s hard to find the cave.

Later, back in the car, Allred wonders if that was the best approach. “You know, we just may have missed an opportunity for recruits right there,” he says. Although they’re a hardy bunch, the three cavers are aging. At 48, Smith is the youngest. Allred is 50, and Lewis is close behind. How much longer will they be able to squeeze through tight rock and endure hours of cold? Ten years? Twenty? Allred’s kids aren’t interested in caving, and while Smith’s seem to be, their interests could change. These fiercely independent, capable men know the Tongass Cave Project needs young people to carry the torch, but in this empty region trustworthy recruits are few.

That may pose just as dire a threat to new cave discovery and exploration as timber sales. In the past decade the timber harvest has dropped from about 400 million board feet to 50 million. While the Forest Service would like to allow timber companies to cut three times that much, it’s an unlikely goal: more than half of all current timber sales are tied up in litigation. Although some state and federal politicians may want to continue logging old-growth trees in the Tongass, many Americans remain opposed to the idea.

In mid-June the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bipartisan measure to end federal funding for new logging roads in the Tongass, effectively reinstating Clinton’s roadless rule for 2005. Although the Senate still has to pass the legislation, the House approval suggests an unwillingness to spend tax dollars to clear-cut Alaska’s old-growth trees. While that’s good news for the cavers, it doesn’t solve their long-term need for new explorers to protect the Tongass caves.

Back in the car, Allred leans into the front seat with a new idea. Suddenly, the three are brainstorming: they’ll create informational brochures about the Tongass Cave Project and responsible caving practices to place in waterproof plastic containers inside the caves. Within several minutes they each have new marching orders and the beginnings of a plan. While their effort may accomplish little, it’s clear that nothing will stop them from trying.

Earlier that morning, after climbing down a rock wall through a thin but steady waterfall, Smith, Allred and Lewis paused in the dark, dank tunnel. They recounted getting stuck upside down while exploring narrow cave passages several thousand feet under the earth’s surface. It’s happened to each of them several times. The rock presses against your ribs and you can’t get free even after exhaling and pulling with all your strength. “Of course you’re scared; we’ve all been scared. But you don’t panic,” Smith says. When he pauses, his shy half-smile fades to a defiant stare.

“Hard-core cavers never quit.”