Into the Forest

Plush as velvet, densely piled, cozy as a blanket, hugging the trunks of trees, clinging to the bark, mounding over boulders, everywhere you look is dense, moist moss.  It makes the forest vibrate with its unearthly greenness.  Step deeper into the rainforest and look closer.  The moss is the nurse soil for this verdant world.  Dwarf dogwood barely an inch high has burrowed into its wetness, germinated and spread forth deeply veined leaves to cup white-petaled flowers. Fiddle ferns are pushing upward from its damp bed tightly curled scrolls that will unfurl into fronds.  A tiny hemlock has taken root. 

Moss and lichen are the linchpins to the rich temperate rainforest that covers these coastal mountain lands left barren by the retreating glaciers. It is very new land in geological time, and you can almost see it being created right before your eyes. Juneau is gaining half an inch of land a year. The Great Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago and the Little Ice Age in the 1750s, and as the glaciers retreat, there is a process called isostatic rebound at work. For thousands of years, the colossal weight of trapped ice had pushed down the mantle of the molten earth, and now the ice is melting, the earth’s crust is slowly rebounding, lifting new land from the rivers, the lakes and the ocean. 

But it is sterile, rocky land, leached of minerals by the vast wash of meltwater and near-constant rain of South East Alaska. In the beginning, only moss and lichen, which create nutrients from sunlight and air, can survive. They are the first colonizers, providing the soil bed. 

After 10-15 years, alder and lupine follow, fixing nitrogen through bacteria in their roots to provide fertilizer, and then Sitka spruce and finally western hemlock take hold. It takes over 200 years to create a mature rainforest, and throughout that time the constant in feeding the soil and nurturing the plants is the moss.  

When I lead a hike through the rainforest, I like to take clients on a detective hunt, enabling them to  discover how the forest ecology allows you to read the clues of time - How long has the forest been there? Where were the glaciers? There are signs if you know how to read them, and immersing yourself in this fairytale world of cathedral trees anchored by sprawling roots draped in yards and yards of sumptuous moss is a lesson in learning how to see.  

Stella practicing her forest talk

Most of our walks in the forest are short, barely a mile, and we combine them with the whale-watching tour.  So it is a cursory overview of forest succession. Without a science background, I am hard pressed to offer more, but at least I can weave a narrative of specie interdependence and tell how glaciers feed the oceans and forests feed the salmon. 

One walk is through a hummocky area of moraines left by the retreating Mendenhall Glacier. When we reach the lake overlooking its receding snout, it is a “Wow!” moment for clients, and a sobering one when they realize how fast it is melting. 

The beach at Mendenhall Lake with glacier in background. Forest is reclaiming land beyond foreground, exposed 100 years ago as the glacier retreated..

Another walk ends at tidal waters on a beach formed from isostatic rebound The snow-capped mountains are the backdrop. We also lead a couple of five-mile hikes that are more demanding, up the mountainside for higher views above the glacier.  

The Tongass National Forest is the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, stretching 540 miles across the ribbons of islands and mountains of South East Alaska and 120 miles inland to the height of the Coastal Range at the border with Canada. It is second only to the Amazon in size as a rainforest, but its sheer density of biomass, due to a very slow decomposition rate in the cold climate and the immensity of its trees, make it a powerful carbon sink, arguably even more important in addressing climate change. That the old-growth logging here is less talked about than in the Amazon brings home to me yet again how important it is to value and preserve these wild spaces.

We must learn to be good stewards of these incredible resources, while will still have time.

Tongass National Forest