Tongass

On a rare sunny day in southeast Alaska last summer, Sheila Jacobson, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, led a group of visitors on a tour of a battered but recovering salmon watershed in the Tongass National Forest, a 17-million acre coastal temperate rain forest. It's a place that the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy have invested considerable money, time and effort in, trying to restore it to its near-natural condition.

A project to restore an important salmon river in the nation's largest national forest is getting under way in what marks a new direction for the Tongass National Forest.