Prince of Wales Island.

• Author: SWAGEL, WILL
• Position: Alaska - Brief Article

With timber revenues down, Prince of Wales Island is looking to tourism, roadwork and construction for answers.

Think of Hawaii, a pleasant task this time of year. The Big Island is the second largest island in the U.S. Also well known is Kodiak Island, America's largest island.

But ask Americans--even Alaskans--to name the third largest U.S. island and many couldn't come up with the right answer--Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska.

At 135 miles long and 45 miles wide, POW, as it is called, encompasses 2,231 square miles of some of the flattest, most timber-rich areas of the Tongass National Forest. About 6,800 people make their home in one of the island's 22 towns and settlements, the largest 11 of which are linked by road.

Prince of Wales is about 15 miles from Ketchikan, across the Clarence Strait. The island is 150 miles south of Juneau. Cape Chacon, on Prince of Wales Island's southern tip, marks the U.S.-Canada border. A widening of Clarence Strait at Cape Chacon marks Dixon Entrance, the beginning of the U.S. portion of the Inside Passage and the beginning of Alaska.

The island has 1,200 miles of road, some of which is old logging trail (4-wheel drive country). But good roads, many paved, connect the main towns. Communities are spaced 25 to 50 miles apart, ranging in size from Craig-Klawock, with nearly 3,000 people in their metropolitan area, to tiny Kasaan, population 32.

Bill MacCannell, the editor-owner of the Island News, is a four-decade-long veteran of the region who now lives in Thorne Bay (pop. 450). He was there in 1972 when Thorne Bay, in the heart of the area Louisiana-Pacific logged for decades, ranked as the largest logging camp in the world. But for most of the 1990s, LP has been scaling back logging under environmental and market pressures. That has meant a constant decline in year-round family wage jobs in Thorne Bay and the rest of the Prince of Wales Island communities.

"Craig has been hit hard, the whole island has been hit hard," says Tom Briggs, Craig's long-time city administrator. "(Prince of Wales Island) was the first hit and the hardest hit."

Bad News for Timber

Timber jobs have been reduced to half to one-third of the industry's highs in the early 1990s, says Jack Phelps, executive director of the Ketchikanbased Alaska Forest Association. He says the 1999 harvest on the entire 16.7 million-acre Tongass was less than LP used to harvest on Prince of Wales Island alone.

"When I first came to Thorne...