On a drizzly September morning on Prince of Wales Island, off the coast of southeastern Alaska, Josh Kohn walked through a small forest’s worth of unevenly piled logs. Stacks of fragrant red cedar (Thuja plicata) surrounded a rust-edged log shovel, its claw-arm slumped in rest. Past the cedar, Kohn crossed the bark-scattered track to a jumble of Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) and western hemlock logs (Tsuga heterophylla) along the woodlot’s edge. “This stuff has been nice. I like cutting it,” he said, resting a thick hand on a 15-inch-diameter spruce log. It’s straight and strong, he explained, saws fast, comes out with character.

The spruce and hemlock logs differed in a key way from the cedar ones behind him—and that difference may reshape the future of both the timber industry and the vast forests that still line this part of the world. “This tree here is 65 years old,” Kohn said, touching another spruce. “And that one there is maybe 35 to 40.” The cedars? Tapered like giant carrots, they’re likely more than 200 years old, their tightly packed rings cradling the memory of decades when the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian were the primary people living in this place and harvesting its trees.

If you’ve paid attention to the conservation battles fought in the Lower 48 over the past couple of decades, you might have thought nobody in the United States was still cutting down old-growth forests—at least not on public lands. But like all of Southeast Alaska’s sawmills, the small one where Kohn works, called Good Faith Lumber—tucked amid a scrappy handful of mom-and-pop shops on a dirt-road spur—survives on a diet of ancient trees from the 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest. It’s the last national forest in the country with an industrial old-growth clearcutting program.

Old-growth trees are more likely to have high-priced buttery-smooth, knot-free grain, called “clear,” that’s in demand for interiors; their wood is also prized for musical instruments and carving. Exclusive access to ancient trees keeps mills alive in this remote area, which is dominated by the Alexander Archipelago, more than 1,000 islands jutting down from Alaska like a fractured thumb along the Inside Passage. Here, logs and lumber must be transported long distances by barge, which helps push business costs far past those in the Lower 48.

Staying afloat financially is not getting easier. Market forces, past overcutting, environmental battles, policy changes and other factors have coalesced to make the Tongass timber model nearly impossible to sustain. So starting in 2010, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and top U.S. Forest Service officials pushed what seemed like a sensible solution: transition the timber industry toward harvesting younger trees, like those piled in Good Faith’s lot and growing back on more than 450,000 clearcut acres. In theory, that would help timber businesses maintain local jobs and avoid lawsuits, while better supporting tourism and fishing, and protecting what remains of the secretive vegetated chambers, fat trunks, and multilayered canopies of one of the world’s few massive, and still largely intact, old-growth temperate rainforests.

Kohn and Catherine Mater, a wood-products engineer from Oregon, stepped under an open-air structure that shields fresh cut lumber from the elements, and took a seat on stacked boards to chat with mill owners Greg Boyd and Hans Kohn, Josh’s father. Since buying Good Faith in 2012, Boyd has been one of the few mill operators interested in experimenting with younger trees. Good Faith bought part of one of the Forest Service’s first sales of exclusively younger trees last year, and the mill hopes to work with Mater on a study to assess the economics of harvesting them—and the products they might produce.

“For me, the jury is completely out on young growth,” Boyd explained. The mill and loggers would both need new equipment to process the smaller trees efficiently. Still, Boyd wanted to know his options. “There’s knowledge we’ll be gaining here,” he said. “Are we going to be reactive when the time comes? Or proactive now and start easing into it so we can have a jump on the marketplace—and experience, which is the greatest teacher there is—when we don’t have any choice?”

The timber sale and Mater’s study, though, have been plagued with hiccups, as has much of the Forest Service’s promised transition from old-growth logging. Lingering questions about young growth’s readiness and viability, Forest Service budget issues, the squabbles of entrenched political interests, and inertia have all dragged the effort out. This month, six years down what looked from the outside like a path to detente in Alaska’s bitter logging war, the Tongass National Forest has only just finalized a formal plan to mostly phase out old-growth logging. But even that plan allows 16 more years of heavy old-growth clearcutting, and it’s unclear whether it can—or will, under a Donald Trump presidency—ultimately be enforced.

How much of the Tongass’s last large swaths of truly big old-growth trees will be cut in the meantime? “That is one thing that’s irreplaceable,” said forest ecologist Brian Buma of the University of Alaska, Southeast. “One thing you just can’t manipulate into existence is big trees.”

Indeed, a big old-growth timber sale called Big Thorne—which the Forest Service views as the first pillar in the bridge that will carry industry to its young-growth future—is moving forward, despite concerns about the local Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni) population.

In 2013, outgoing Alaska Department of Fish and Game wolf expert Dave Person stopped the sale that would impact more than 6,000 acres with a brief suggesting that the harvest and its new roads could irreparably disrupt Prince of Wales’ precarious balance among people, wolves, and Sitka blacktailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus sitkensis), a vitally important food resource for rural residents. Wolf populations were already falling because logging roads allowed hunters and poachers easy access into their habitats. And deer faced deepening risks with continued cover loss. If their population crashed, as it had in other heavily logged parts of the Tongass during heavy snow years, pressure on wolves would increase further as people sought to protect their own share of meat, Person warned.

Ultimately, the Forest Service worked with the state to limit wolf hunting to address the problem, rather than significantly altering the timber sale, and Viking, which landed the contract, started logging in 2015, despite ongoing litigation. That’s decreased any likelihood of a wolf rebound, Person said this October. “When I started work there beginning in the 1990s, our estimate was 300 to 350.” This year, the estimate was 69 to 167. “It’s a Greek tragedy in my mind—the whole chronology is already written, everybody plays their role, and nothing ever changes.”

Meanwhile, the forest’s rare, slow-growing, ancient red and yellow cedar (Cupressus nootkatensis) trees may be in danger of vanishing from unprotected lands under an extended timeline for old growth logging, says Juneau-based naturalist Richard Carstensen, who’s done wide-ranging surveys of the region. That’s because their especially high-value wood is one of the few things that still make timber sales here financially feasible. “Why does it count that these are the last really ancient cedar forests in the world? Well, why not just protect them because of that,” he said. “If instead of measuring loss in the volume of wood cut per year, we asked how many years it took to grow the cut trees, we might discover that current logging on public and private land now matches or exceeds the ‘hemorrhage decades’ of the 1960s and ‘70s. I think our heads are in the sand.”

But the latest hemorrhage may mean the large-scale old-growth timber industry is already on its way out, because of basic economics. The industry has always required public subsidy to be competitive here: According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report, while the Tongass spent an average of $12.5 million annually on its timber program from 2005 to 2014, it drew in just $1.1 million in average annual revenue.

And yet even with continued federal spending and the Forest Service increasingly loosening restrictions on sales of raw logs to more lucrative export markets, the industry has struggled. The number of old trees valuable enough, concentrated in great enough numbers, and accessible enough to pay their way out of these rugged woods is simply running out, conservationists argue, driving loggers into slower-growing and more marginal stands to clean out what’s left. The Forest Service had to scour the landscape for scraps to even assemble the acreage necessary to make up the Big Thorne sale. Some, like Nichols and Dahlstrom, blame the Roadless Rule; the Forest Service agrees that it makes timber sales difficult. But others say removing it wouldn’t help: The swaths of forest it protects are roadless largely because they weren’t economic to develop in the first place.

At current old-growth cutting rates, said David Albert, director of conservation science for the Alaska chapter of The Nature Conservancy, “I don’t think we have 15 years.”