By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After years with the U.S. Forest Service in Sitka, District Ranger Perry Edwards is pulling up stakes and moving to another Forest Service position in the mountains of Colorado.
Though he has lived and worked in many different places, he told the Sentinel that Sitka feels like home.
“When I got the job offer, it was still off in the distance,” Edwards said in an interview. “And it just felt bizarre thinking about the fact of leaving this place we’ve lived at for over 16 years and it felt more like home than any other place I’ve lived in my life.”
Though he was ready for a change of scenery – and a bit less rain – Edwards said he’ll miss Sitka.
“The concept that this will not be home anymore – it’s tough because I love this place. The people here are so incredible. The folks that work on the district and in this office have so much passion and so much heart. I’m going to miss the heck out of all that,” he said.
U.S. Forest Service Sitka District Ranger Perry Edwards holds small Tlingit potatoes that had been left in the ground after a recent harvest outside the district office. (Sentinel Photo)
Initially a fisheries and wildlife biologist, Edwards, and his wife, Michelle Putz, arrived in Sitka in 2005. Before coming to Alaska, he worked in the Malheur National Forest in high desert in eastern Oregon.
“Well, we had been in the Malheur National Forest for almost five years at that point, and it was tough there,” he said. “There was a lot of controversy, the politics were very difficult... We really had a lot of struggles with everything. The best part about that job is I got 15 years of experience in five years. The worst part about that job was that I got 15 years of experience in five years.”
After five years at Malheur, Edwards said, his wife told him, “It’s time to go,” and started scouting for Forest Service job openings elsewhere.
“Michelle saw a job for a writer-editor in Sitka and called them up and asked, ‘Do you have any other jobs?’” Perry said. “And they said we happen to have a fisheries biologist job that’s opening up now, too... Everybody we talked to who had ever worked here, they kind of looked off over our shoulder and looked into the distance and said, ‘Ah Sitka.’ And most of them said, ‘I never should have left,”
In his early days on the Tongass, he remembered backcountry adventures that featured storms, bears and a bit too much dynamite.
“Man, I got to do some exciting stuff in helicopters and float planes,” he said. “It was just heaven.”
On the north end of Baranof Island, Edwards was part of a crew that demolished old logging bridges.
“We were up on the Duffield Peninsula (north of Rodman Bay) on the north end of this island, and we were removing old log stringer bridges from roads. We were using explosives to remove these things, so we had a master blaster, as they were known. We were up there and we had a crew... to go up there and remove all these things and some of them were culverts with 30 feet of fill on top of them. We used a lot more product than we needed. It kind of reminded me of that scene in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’...That was amazing, just seeing the power of that. And as we did each blast they dialed it in a little bit more.”
Edwards also recalled exploring abandoned mining towns on Chichagof Island and enduring a serious storm on the return voyage.
“I would have never, never, ever imagined that I would end up being a district ranger,” he said. “I consider myself a lifelong learner. I love new challenges and new stuff, and after being the fisheries and wildlife biologist for about four years my supervisor, the district staffer for ecosystems, went off on a detail and I filled in behind him and it was really exciting and really fun.”
By 2010, Edwards was overseeing ecosystem management in the Sitka Ranger District.
“If it walks, crawls, lives, dies or flows, I was responsible for dealing with it,” he said.
In 2012 he got the chance for a first-hand look at managing an entire ranger district – but not in Sitka.
“The district ranger in Thorne Bay had a heart attack and died – Kent Nicholson was a good friend of mine and I was just blown away,” Edwards said. “The forest supervisor, Forrest Cole (now retired) ... asked me if (I) would be willing to go down there and be the acting ranger for the next four months.”
Edwards said it’s against Forest Service tradition to promote a district ranger from within that district’s staff, but nevertheless he was selected as Sitka District Ranger in 2014.
“You can’t win if you don’t play. I’m going to go for it. So I asked a number of people I knew,” he said. “I have heard from a bunch of people that I can’t have this job because I work here... and here I am, and that was 2014. And so while I’ve been here 16 years I’ve been in three jobs and this is the longest I’ve been in any job.”
He highlighted some of the stream restoration projects in the Sitka Ranger District during his time here.
“We did one over on the Sitkoh River up on Chichagof Island,” he said. “That was a really big one. We also did one here on Shelikof Creek maybe just four of five years ago where we did large wood placement in streams... A lot of those tributaries, there were no buffers when they initially harvested those areas, and what ended up happening is the trees were all cut around there and if there was wood left in the streams, that wood eventually rots,” he said. Forest Service crews placed wood in the streams to offer refuge to young salmon as the clearcut forest regrows.
Edwards was pleased to have developed amiable relationships with Sitka Tribe of Alaska and the Sitka Conservation Society.
“The incredible relationships that I have with the Tribe here, with SCS here... Right before I got here SCS was having sit-ins in the Forest Service; it was a very difficult situation. They were protesting, and now we’re partners. Instead of paying lawyers to fight each other, we’re pooling money to do a better job of managing the national forest,” he said.
Edwards is preparing for his move to Colorado, where he will head the Salida Ranger District on the Pike-San Isabel National Forest & Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands. He said he looks forward to the job.
“New places to explore, new adventures to have, new relationships to make,” he said. “It’s exciting, it’s nauseating all at the same time, but it just feels like the right thing... It seems like having a road system that’s longer than 14 miles would be pretty cool. And seeing what we call a ‘day star’ – what other people call the sun – might be pretty cool. Those are the things that are calling to Michelle and me, and we’ve been talking about it for the last two years.”
The Pike-San Isabel National Forest is situated in the high country southwest of Denver.
“It’s just a Mecca for year round recreation, and it’s just exciting and I think about opportunities to explore new trails,” he said.
Edwards is eager for chances to hunt Rocky Mountain elk and explore a maze of new trails by foot and by ATV. He said he’ll even consider buying a snowmachine.
Salida receives about a fifth of the annual precipitation Sitka gets, and along with little rain Salida also gets forest fires. The mountains around the town rise to 14,000-foot peaks.
“Everyone I’ve talked to is like, ‘It’s amazing there, it’s so beautiful.’ They have an incredible arts and music situation,” Edwards said.
Edwards is scheduled to leave Sitka on Oct. 19.
“I’m leaving the day after Alaska Day, and I chose that date because I want to walk in the parade one last time, feeling super nostalgic now... I feel like it’s kind of my swan song,” he said
He said Michelle will remain in Sitka for several more months, and plans to take the ferry south with their three cats, Gruff, Grendel and Bieli.
After he leaves, Edwards said, an interim ranger will step in for about four months before a permanent replacement is assigned.
“Realistically, they will have a permanent new ranger who will probably be here in this chair starting sometime in February,” Edwards said.
He noted that many projects in the ranger district aren’t complete.
“I think about the things that aren’t yet done. There’s all those things that I’m not going to see to fruition, but if I tried to I would be dead and they still wouldn’t be,” he said.
They include a massive cleanup project at the old mining town of Chichagof on Klag Bay.
“I’ve got a meeting next week on it, the Chichagof mine collaboration. Chichagof mine is 400 plus acres of privately owned mine. It’s a superfund site, it’s a hazmat site. The owners of the mine came to the Forest Service and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to give this to you, and we can’t take it because it’s contaminated,” Edwards said.
The cleaning up will take years and the cost will be immense, he added.
“We’ve been working together now for probably a year and a half... this is, gosh, hundreds of millions of dollars that we’re talking about, but the value of that from the subsistence and the cultural (aspect) is huge,” he said.
He hopes the next district ranger continues to push the cleanup.
Improvements planned for Sandy Beach, one of the Forest Service’s small holdings in town, and at Starrigavan are among other projects Edwards didn’t get to finish.
“My beloved Sandy Beach...that’s managed by the Forest Service and yet nobody knows about it,” he said. “That parking lot is pretty rough; I’d like to see better access down to the water,” he said.
On a personal note, he said, “I will miss king salmon. I’m kind of looking forward to elk.”
