THORNE BAY, Alaska -- The Tongass National Forest, a panoply of snow-dusted peaks and braided rivers, slender fjords and more than 5,000 islands draped over a stretch of Pacific coastline, is widely viewed as one of America's great natural treasures. Under pressure from environmentalists, the Obama administration pledged four years ago to phase out logging of virgin woodlands here.
Yet the Forest Service is now preparing its largest auction of it in a decade: 9.7 square miles of hemlock, spruce and cedar near this island hamlet. An additional four square miles are planned for sale later, and seven more after that. And conservationists, crying betrayal, are in court again, trying to force a reappraisal of the auctions in the world's largest temperate rain forest.
Environmental groups filed three lawsuits against the Forest Service last month. Perhaps the most significant of them contends that further logging threatens an already struggling Alaskan wolf, defying a federal law requiring the service to protect wildlife on its lands.
Indeed, the wolf has emerged as a key player in the dispute, a symbol for environmentalists of logging's degradation and -- potentially -- a wrench in the entire auction works.
"The agency is certainly saying one thing and doing another," said Niel Lawrence, the forestry project director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is a party to the suit. "They've picked a path of continued conflict and controversy and damage to the resources that made this place so special."
But the Forest Service argues that it must keep southeast Alaska's loggers and sawmills in business until a replacement source of timber is ready: second-growth forests, now maturing on lands where virgin forests were clear-cut. "The industry here is quite small today, and it is kind of on the edge of existing or not," said Forrest Cole, the Tongass Forest supervisor. "And if we lose it, this whole idea of a transition to a new young-growth industry will probably fail immediately."
By his reckoning, young-growth trees will not be ready to log for 15 to 20 years. Conservationists say they could be ready in five, and note that a Native Alaskan timber company already is logging them, albeit with the help of cost advantages other loggers lack.
This is perhaps the nation's longest-running environmental dispute. In nearly six decades, loggers have cleared more than 700 square miles of the Tongass -- twice the size of New York City -- over environmentalists' repeated lawsuits. It is as much about shifting cultures as facts, a battle between preservationists focused on saving ancient forests and wildlife and an agency bound by politics and tradition to Alaska's loggers, mills and economic development.
Alaska looms large in Forest Service considerations, not only because the Tongass is the agency's biggest jurisdiction. The state's congressional delegation strongly supports further logging, and should Republicans take over the Senate after the November elections, Alaska's senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, would preside over panels overseeing the agency's budget and operations.
But this fight has the air of an endgame, a little like the fight to preserve the dwindling coal industry in the Appalachians. Tongass timber once sustained thousands of jobs, but supports only a few hundred today. And although the industry punches above its weight politically, it could struggle without the centuries-old trees that are valuable because of their fine grain, sturdiness and resistance to rot.
Conservationists want to protect those trees, moving loggers quickly to second-growth forests they liken to tree farms: uniform in age, lacking the clearings and lush undergrowth that wildlife requires. Once logged, they say, virgin forests need lifetimes to recover.
But moving to younger timber is hardly a sure thing. Those trees would compete with cheap lumber from elsewhere; Alaska's remoteness and ruggedness make logging and shipping more costly. Sawmills would require new machinery probably affordable only with federal help.
Though the Tongass is bigger than West Virginia -- and one-third protected wilderness -- preservationists say many of its best trees are gone. Two-thirds of the Tongass is tundra, rock or scrub forest. Only 4 percent holds the sprawling, high-quality stands of giant trees prized by the timber industry, typically at lower elevations or in valleys and river basins that are also prime wildlife habitat. Much of that has been logged -- and the Forest Service has bulldozed more than 4,500 miles of roads through the forest to take the logs out.
The Tongass once was the region's economic backbone, sustaining a booming, if heavily subsidized, timber industry. The government all but gave away virgin forest in the 1940s to lure pulp mills. Congress actually ordered the Forest Service in 1980 to auction 4.5 billion board feet of lumber every decade -- enough for a stack of inch-thick, eight-foot planks nearly 9,000 miles high.
But the pulp mills closed after the sweetheart timber deal was scrapped in 1990, and by 2000 demand was so slack that some timber sales drew no bidders. Across southeast Alaska, only one sawmill now cuts logs in volume. Much Tongass timber is exported unmilled, often to Asia, where milling is cheaper.
The Forest Service gets at most a few million dollars a year from timber sales, but spends multiples of that to support logging. In 2013, the National Audubon Society pegged timber employment at 200 jobs in southeast Alaska -- down from 4,500 at its peak -- and the federal subsidy at $130,000 per worker. Conservationists say southeast Alaska's future lies in its thriving fisheries and tourism industry; tourism alone employed 10,900 workers last year, up 700 jobs just from 2012, and its payroll is 33 times that of the timber business.
But preserving timber jobs is important, said Mr. Cole, the Tongass supervisor, for in remote Alaska towns they can be critical. State-supported schools require at least 10 children; one lost job can close a schoolhouse. And new jobs close by can be scarce.
"The grim reality is that we're not tied to the Interstate," he said. "You don't just lose your job, drive 20 miles and find another one. You leave."
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Today most logging jobs are concentrated on Prince of Wales Island, at 2,500 square miles the epicenter of Tongass logging. This is where the only major sawmill operates, where the logging dispute is hottest and where the next auction, called Big Thorne, will take place.
In the island's northern half, nearly 94 percent of the biggest stands of virgin forest have been cut down. Big Thorne will clean up some of what remains; the 9.7 square miles of woodlands marked for cutting are sprinkled over 360 square miles, much of it clear-cut in decades past.
The conservationists' lawsuit argues that the Forest Service ignored the law and its own rules in choosing tracts of forest for logging in Big Thorne and five other sites. Example 1, they say, is the Alexander Archipelago wolf.
The wolf, a smaller, many-colored cousin of the timber wolf, relies on the Sitka black-tailed deer for food. The deer winter in the island's old-growth forests, where big trees and underbrush provide forage, shelter from snows and cover from the island's hunters.
Federal rules require the Forest Service "to maintain viable populations" of the wildlife on its lands. For the wolf, that means having enough deer for itself and deer hunters, too -- 18 per square mile, the Forest Service said in 2008. But at the same time, the lawsuit argues, the agency downgraded that 18-deer requirement to a guideline, one the suit claims it disregarded in Big Thorne and elsewhere by proposing to auction off prime deer habitat.
The lawsuit seeks only to enforce the deer habitat requirement on Forest Service lands. But it could tie up at least some auctions in court -- and, should conservationists win, even send Big Thorne back to the drawing board.
Nor is that the most serious threat to the auctions. In March, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service said it would consider listing the wolf as a protected species, saying Prince of Wales's deer habitat is already below requirements in many areas, with more logging planned. A ruling that the wolf is in danger could severely limit timber sales at a time when the supply of logs for milling is dwindling.
"Without the mills, there's no timber industry, and without the Forest Service's second-growth sales, there are no mills," said Rachelle Huddleston-Lorton, the Forest Service ranger in Thorne Bay. "We've got to keep the mills alive."