The Green Invasion at Alaska's Edge

You're moving through the northern temperate rainforest here, where Sitka spruce and western hemlock create a cathedral of green that can live for five hundred years or more. This is the Alaska Panhandle's signature landscape, where moisture-laden air from the Pacific dumps over two hundred inches of rain annually, creating this lush tapestry of moss-draped branches, devil's club thickets, and a forest floor so thick with organic matter it feels like walking on a sponge.

The undergrowth here should be dense with salmonberry, blueberry, and skunk cabbage. Black bears gorge themselves in these thickets before denning season. Sitka black-tailed deer browse the lower branches, while bald eagles nest in the old-growth crowns above. The streams cutting through this forest are the highways for pink, coho, and chum salmon returning from the ocean. Those salmon runs feed everything from wolves to shrews, delivering marine nutrients deep into the forest through the very bodies of the fish, caught and dragged inland by bears and eagles.

But look closely at the disturbed edges, the roadcuts, anywhere sunlight breaks through that dense canopy, and you'll see something that doesn't belong. Reed canarygrass, originally from Europe, has turned aggressive here. Those tall, blade-like leaves form impenetrable walls along waterways, choking out the native sedges and willows that stabilize stream banks.

Here's what's happening: when reed canarygrass takes over, the whole system shifts. Salmon redds, those carefully constructed gravel nests where females lay their eggs, get smothered by sediment because the grass's shallow roots can't hold soil like native plants. Young coho salmon that would normally hide in undercut banks beneath willow roots find themselves exposed in open water, easy pickings for mergansers and kingfishers. The bears lose foraging habitat, the deer lose browse.

Local restoration crews have been fighting back, pulling grass by hand, replanting native species, but it's exhausting work. Every time a storm creates a new opening or logging disturbs the forest edge, the canarygrass races in first. Watch the ditches ahead and you'll see this quiet battlefield, where the future composition of this rainforest is being decided, one root system at a time.