454 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



PAXSOX'S ROAD HOUSE 



Comfortable road houses are found along the Richardson Trail, 

 which is the road of 320 miles from Chitina, on the Copper River 

 railroad to Fairbanks. 



States. It has been seriously urged that the interior for- 

 ests present great opportunities for an export trade in the 

 manufacture of pulp, or for the location of wood-using 

 industries, furniture plants, or other minor forest prod- 

 ucts. The species composing the interior forests are ad- 

 mirably suited for pulp, and are the same species that 

 have been used by eastern pulp and paper makers for 

 many years. However, the cost of transportation, the 

 enormous area of forest land involved, and the absence 

 of very large stands of timber in compact bodies, would 

 make the plan of utilization of these forests for pulp ex- 

 port entirely too chimerical. 



Alaska's interior forests are found along her stream 

 valleys where they will be accessible to the mineral 

 (quartz) development in her hills and mountains and 

 handy for use in bringing under cultivation her potential 

 farming lands. A large area of forest along the valleys 

 will undoubtedly be either destroyed by placer mining 

 operations or be cleared for agriculture, since the besr 

 tree growth occurs on the best agricultural soil. This 

 will reduce very materially the total forest area, thus nec- 

 essitating the safeguarding and protection from needless 

 burning of the remaining forest lands. 



It is believed that the interior forests of Alaska are 

 hardly holding their own against the annual loss in 

 volume due to uncontrolled fires. That 25 million acres 

 of these forests have been burned over seems a not un- 

 reasonable estimate. Millions of acres have been burned 

 over two or three times leaving an utter waste. It has 

 been said that ten times as much timber has been burned 

 in the Fairbanks region as has been cut for fuel or 

 Ininbcr. Former Chief Forester Graves estimated In 

 1915, after a trip through central Alaska, that in the pre- 

 vious 20 years forest fires had burned over an average of 

 one million acres per year in interior Alaska, and that in 



1915 alone several million acres were burned. Travelers 

 through the interior during the summer months are cer- 

 tain to see numerous forest fires buxning and find no at- 

 tempt being made to control or extinguish them. 



As typical of the situation, the writer saw a forest fire 

 north of Copper Center on September 3, 1920, that had 

 covered several hundred acres and that was said to havc- 

 been burning since June; between Chitina and Fairbanks, 

 a distance of some 320 miles, he saw on this same trip not 

 less than eight forest fires burning along the Richard- 

 son Trail. Passengers on the new Government railroad 

 during the dry season report a string of fires starting 

 from sparks from the locomotives. 



There is no agency, governmental, territorial or pri- 

 vate, that realizes its responsibility for the protection of 

 the interior forests from fire. Fires are not fought unless 

 they threaten someone's private property. In a region 

 with less than 15 inches of rainfall and under practically 

 20 hours of sunlight each day for four months each 

 sunnner, the interior forests become very inflammable, 



y 



COXSTRUCTIOX WORK UNDER WAY 



This is -a clearing along. the Government railroad right of way, 

 showing one of the construction camps. 



