Stung by salt spray, Sylvia Geraghty struggled with the outboard motor of the skiff, connected by a line to her larger freight vessel, the Freyja.  As she pulled the starter cord, a wave crashed over the Freyja’s wheelhouse and pushed the disabled vessel closer to the looming rocks of White Cliff Island.  If Sylvia couldn’t start the motor, she and the boats would be crushed against the cliffs.  

On this stormy summer afternoon, Sylvia was on her way to a meeting in Edna Bay.  The State of Alaska was revising its land management plan for Prince of Wales Island, and Sylvia, a longtime resident and advocate for the area, wanted to be certain that the State heard the concerns of local residents.  

At last, the skiff’s outboard sputtered to life.  Sylvia motored the skiff up to the landward side of the Freyja and pushed the bows of both boats into the waves, working them down the length of the island until a rescue boat arrived soon after.  Sylvia climbed aboard and continued to the meeting, where, in the words of a friend, “Sylvia gave the agency guy hell and got the community all fired up.”

Though Sylvia Geraghty’s work to protect the Tongass National Forest is rarely as dangerous as it was that day, it has always been exciting.  For nearly twenty years, she fought to lessen the impact of logging in the wild places near her home, including the mist-shrouded forests of Mount Calder and Holbrook Mountain, whose stark summits overlook the intricate inlets of Shakan Strait and El Capitan Passage.  Her extensive, personal knowledge of the land, down-to-earth style, and ability to energize the small communities off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island (people who have been referred to as “unorganizable, fringe of the fringe, hard-core back-to-the-landers”) enabled her to achieve surprising victories.  

Yet Sylvia’s early career hinted at little of what was to follow.  In 1971, she was a computer systems analyst in Juneau and a mother of three.  Sylvia raised her children with the dream that someday they’d live on a remote homestead like the one near Petersburg where she’d spent much of her childhood.  Finally, when her eldest son reached junior high school, Sylvia quit her job and moved her family to New Tokeen, an inactive cold-storage facility on an uninhabited, three-mile-long island off the coast of Prince of Wales.

When Sylvia and her children arrived, New Tokeen was a collection of ramshackle buildings.  After refurbishing them, Sylvia became a commercial fish buyer and opened a general store, a laundromat, a liquor store, and a fuel business that served boats in the area.  The family depended on the sea and forests of nearby Holbrook Mountain and El Capitan Passage for fish, shellfish, game, wild greens, and berries.

Sylvia’s initiation as an activist began in 1984 with a one-page legal notice from the Forest Service announcing that swathes of land near her home, including areas near Mount Calder and Holbrook Mountain, would be clearcut.  Shocked, she went to a meeting in Craig, where she discovered that the entire Prince of Wales community was violently opposed to the plan.  At that time, Craig lacked good media access, so Sylvia organized a second meeting in Ketchikan.  As a result of the heavily-reported public uproar at that meeting, the Forest Service abandoned its proposal.

After that fast and furious introduction to Tongass logging, Sylvia became aware “that though I had won that particular battle, there was a whole war out there to be fought.”  In her mid-forties, Sylvia became an unstoppable conservation activist.  She educated herself about Tongass forest management issues, wrote letters, and held meetings with locals and Forest Service employees at her homestead.  

Protecting most of Calder-Holbrook in the 1990 Tongass Timber Reform Act was one of Sylvia’s greatest victories.  With its majestic old-growth cedar and spruce, the west coast of Prince of Wales has always been a prime target for the timber industry, and has been logged heavily since the 1950’s.  “I knew if we could retain those two core areas,” Sylvia says, “we would have a fairly large preserve of land that was the way it had always been.”  

Sylvia, now a grandmother, recently (and reluctantly) retired from the demanding work of running Tokeen and moved to Wrangell.  She continues to work for the protection of the area that she lived in for so long – increasingly with an eye toward future generations.  “There is room for logging in Southeast Alaska, and a need for it,” she says.  “But we have to do it wisely this time, or we’ll leave nothing for our children and grandchildren.”