The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-04-29
ALASKA AND THE PAPER FANGT1EBy Frank G. Carpenter

vation. It runs around Prince William sound. embraces the Kenai peninsula and extends into the territory where the gov ernment railway is now building. The two forest reserves contain something like 70,OO0 CO., 900 feet of tirnb CT, or more than enough to make a board walk ar
 inch thick and 50 feet wide from the
 earth to the moon. Much of this timber Is fit for lumber All of 1t will make
 excellent paper.
 I had a good opportunity to see the character of the timber of southeastern Alaska in going from Seattle to Skagway. The distance Is 1000 miles and you are
 in the woods all the way. The woods begin on leaving Vancouver, and all along the coasts of British Columbia and Alas ka the steamers wind in and out through mountainous islands covered with forests. The trees rise like walls, almost straight up from the water, and with a glass you can pick out the size of the timber. Some of the spruce trees are six feet thick and POO feet high. You see great logs at the sawmills at the ports, and learn that there are 30 or 70 mills In operation in southeastern Alaska alone. I saw them saving logs at Ketchikan, Petersburgh, Wrangell. Sitka and Juneau and other places. Father Duncan has established a sawmill at Metlakatla, and the Haida In> dians have a cooperative mill on Prince or w dl0S ISldnQ IHc illllS iicihO PNAiN- ing lumber and also boxes for the salmon canneries More than 100000 boxes are
 annually needed, and 80 per cent of the
 lumber of Alaska is used by the fish, ing industry in one way or another.
 As to pulp wood, nearly all of the trees are fitted for paper. The chief varieties in the national forests are the Sitka spruce and the western hemlock, both
 of which have been tested at the forest service laboratory at Madison, Wis. There are also western cedar, lodge-pole pine, yellow cedar and other good paper trees on the reservations. I saw a great deal of spruce on the Kenai peninsula and am told that Kodiak Island has forests of hemlock.
 These national forests are practically
 confined to the coast. In adition, there Is a great deal of timber In the interior
 of the country. I found woods all along
 the Yukon, and in going 15O0 miles down
 that stream was seldom out of the for ests. There are thick woods along the Tanana and other tributaries of the Yu- kon and also along the Kuskokwim. some distance back from the rivers the timber
 grows sparser, but there are scattering
 trees in the greater part of the Yukon
 basin. The trees cover the valleys and
 go up the hills to an altitude Of lOoo or loVt feet above sea level.
 Altogether only about one-fourth or one-ffth of all Alaska is wooded. Some
 of the estimates make the whole forest area 90,000000 acres or about three times as large as the state of New York There are no woods to speak or north of the Yukon river A short dis tance from the Yukon the mountains begin, and beyond that are the coastal
 plains covered with tundra that slope down to the Arctic ocean. There are similar plains along Boring sea. They all have only low bushes and thick vegetation of moss growing upon thin soil laid upon a bed of perpetual ice. Many of the forests of interior Alaska are bedded upon the prehis- toric ice. The soil extends only foot or so below the surface, and the earth under 1t, down to unknown depths, has been frozen for thousands Of years The trees send their roots down to the ice and spread out through the thin depth of soil above it. This makes the clearing of land
 comparatively easy. After the trees
 have been cut the stumps die quickly, and they can easily be pulled out Along the rivers every flood leads to