Misty Fjords

Proposed National ParkAlaska
Snow-dusted granite walls rising straight out of the water in Misty FjordsPhotograph: Mark Wetzler / NOAA
All proposed National ParksMisty FjordsNo active campaign
Location
Alaska
Current protection
Misty Fiords National Monument, Misty Fiords Wilderness, Tongass National Forest
Status
No park campaign on record
Tier
Tier 2 · National Monument
In the book
Not featured in Undiscovered America

Why should it be a National Park?

Behm Canal is a hundred and seventeen miles of natural fjord, and the granite walls above it rise three thousand feet straight out of saltwater. Misty Fjords covers more than two and a quarter million acres of this country at the southern end of the Alaska panhandle, which makes it larger than Yellowstone, and almost nobody sees it from the ground. There are no roads. Access is by floatplane or boat out of Ketchikan, forty miles west. The rain is the defining fact. More than a hundred and fifty inches fall in a year, and the result is a landscape where waterfalls pour off cliff tops directly into the sea and the fog sits in the fjords for days. The temperate rainforest below is Sitka spruce and western hemlock, some of it never logged. Brown and black bears both live here. All five species of Pacific salmon spawn in the streams. Mountain goats work the cliffs above the water.

The water does the work. Rivers here run salmon in numbers that support the bears, the eagles, and a commercial fishery, and the fjord walls are scored by glaciers that left the granite polished and vertical. Sea lions haul out at the mouth of the canal, whales work the passage, and the whole system is fed by rain on a scale that would be a disaster anywhere else.

The history of National Park Campaigns

Misty Fjords, 2,294,343 acres of fjord and rainforest in the Tongass National Forest, has never had a National Park proposal; its designation history is a monument-and-mine story. President Carter proclaimed it a national monument December 1, 1978, and ANILCA (1980) confirmed it while designating all but 151,832 acres as wilderness, deliberately excluding the Quartz Hill molybdenum deposit. The mine was pursued through the 1980s and abandoned on economics.

Distinct National Park attempts
0
Other designation attempts
2 (national monument 1978; wilderness 1980)

Sources

  • Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (P.L. 96-487)
  • U.S. Forest Service, Quartz Hill Final Environmental Impact Statement (USDA-FS-R10-MB-41a, 1988)
  • Presidential Proclamation 4623 (December 1, 1978)
  • Tongass National Forest management records, Ketchikan-Misty Fiords Ranger District
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  1. December 1, 1978

    President Carter proclaims Misty Fiords National Monument, roughly 2.28 million acres, under the Antiquities Act.

  2. January 4, 1979

    Administrative RARE II wilderness proposal for the area.

  3. 1980

    The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (P.L. 96-487) confirms the monument by statute and designates all but 151,832 acres as wilderness, the carve-out covering the Quartz Hill molybdenum deposit.

  4. 1980s

    U.S. Borax pursues the Quartz Hill mine; the Forest Service issues a final environmental impact statement in 1988. The project is abandoned on economics late in the decade.

  5. Present

    Managed by the Forest Service as monument and wilderness; no National Park proposal on record.