A (second-growth) cabin in the woods: Tongass pilot project explores value-added forest products.

• Author: Solberg, Dustin
• Position: Special section: Building Alaska

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This summer, a crew of carpenters is at work on a cabin in a quiet Alaska town. It's an Alaska dream cabin, with unique hand-crafted joinery and big windows offering stupendous views. It's also something more: This home--and the wood of which it is built--is on the leading edge of an emerging economic opportunity: second-growth restoration forestry in Southeast Alaska.

"The thing about this project, it demonstrates that there are ways to utilize second-growth. The possibilities are definitely there," says Bill Thomason, who, with his wife, Carolyn, owns a small sawmill business called Woodcuts in the town of Thorne Bay on Prince of Wales Island.

The Thomasons say the story of this home began long before they hammered the first nail. It begins in the Tongass National Forest at a place known as Winter Harbor on Prince of Wales Island. This is where the Thomasons and their crew cut the Sitka spruce logs over the course of three summers. They hauled them to his log yard, where the logs were piled neatly before they were milled into squared-off building timbers. The Thomasons then shipped by barge the materials for this 1,000-square-foot log cabin, custom-built for a family on a quiet road in the town of Gustavus.

The Thomasons have emerged as pioneers in the second-growth industry in the Tongass, though their interest is straight-forward: creating business opportunity.

"We don't see ourselves as trailblazers," he says. "We're just doing what we need to do."

And that has them developing a specific niche: milling specialty products from young-growth trees in areas of the Tongass National Forest that were first logged many decades ago. In addition to custom designed cabins, their product list includes flooring, trusses, beveled siding, molding--and all manner of requests.

Where the Log Cabin Begins

The Tongass is the nation's largest national forest and it's home to some of the nation's biggest trees. Like a great cathedral, these forests can inspire. The Tongass National Forest is laced with salmon streams, and these waters, incredibly, produce almost one-third of the U.S. commercial wild salmon catch.

The Tongass also produces prized wood: yellow cedar, western red cedar, western hemlock, and lastly, Sitka spruce, commonly used for lumber but also a strong and lightweight material that, in the era before aluminum, was used in airplane construction. Luthiers build guitars and other stringed instruments from clear-grained...