Northern Landscapes

CHAPTER 5

SOUTHEAST ALASKA AND THE WILDERNESS MOVEMENT

Dixie Baade arrived in Ketchikan in the late 1940s when her husband Bob, a biologist, took a job with the territorial fish and game department. She fell in love with the rugged mountains and glaciers, the dense forests and fog-shrouded islands. To her surprise, she soon became an unwilling participant in the USDA Forest Service’s plan to create a more diversified economy in Southeast Alaska. By 1973 she was thoroughly disenchanted:

Ketchikan presently has a basically transient population with little or no interest in the future of the community. The loggers are almost entirely seasonal. … Mill workers on a year-round basis wait to retire or transfer. The person who had planned on staying ...