FOR THE ADVENTUROUS skier, stump skiing is the next frontier. At least that's what Roo and I are telling ourselves. And nowhere are there more beautiful stumps than the Tongass. Stretching from glaciated 7,000-foot peaks to low, craggy islands, the 26,200-square-mile national forest takes up 80 percent of the Alaska Panhandle, much of it rock and glacier and bog. But the Tongass also contains the world's largest intact expanse of old-growth temperate rainforest—some 14,323 square miles of long-lived conifers, a third of such rainforest left on earth, including 838 square miles of the largest-diameter trees. This moist, cool environment of Sitka spruce and red and yellow cedar harbors astoundingly productive salmon grounds as well as brown bears, moose, gray wolves, northern goshawks, and wolverines.

Much of that old growth is off-limits or too remote for harvest. But the Tongass has been logged extensively since World War II, when loggers systematically began cutting down the giant conifers. So far, environmentalists say, most of the biggest trees have been felled, a handful of mills turning six-foot-diameter trunks into window frames, guitar soundboards, and pulp for newspapers and disposable diapers. Forest Service plans call for harvesting some 775 square miles of the biggest remaining trees over the next century.

In effect, we've been paying the logging companies to cut trees. Since 1982, the federal government has lost an average of $40 million a year subsidizing Tongass sales, says the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, offering life support to a dying industry that employs about 400 loggers and road builders. The Forest Service sees it differently, estimating that the amount spent on logging infrastructure is less than half that figure. "That number is so inflated it's embarrassing to see it in writing," says Tongass supervisor Forrest Cole. "And anyway, the Forest Service is not mandated to make a profit." Critics, he says, ignore the fact that state and native lands have been logged even more heavily, that the industry employs closer to 1,000 people when you count the pilots and grocers who support it, and that sales are sustainable, moving toward second-growth cuts.

President Bill Clinton tried to stop the big giveaways with his 2001 "roadless rule," designed to prevent the new access roads necessary to log old growth in national forests. Americans submitted 1.2 million comments to the Forest Service on the executive order, 96 percent in support. But when Clinton left office, the Bush administration undid the rule by allowing each state to choose whether it wanted to comply, spurring legal battles that continue today.

This is all terrible, obviously.

Peeved, I once let a Greenpeace solicitor shake me down for $15 on the way to the post office. But then I thought, Wait a second, why not make use of those taxpayer subsidies? The Tongass has snow, wild country, great access. How about stump skiing? I pictured myself scribing perfect arcs around ancient trees lopped off at the base as speckled goshawks barrel-rolled overhead and gray whales migrated through the Inside Passage. It would be the next big thing, the poor man's heli-skiing!

The epicenter of all this possibility seemed to be Prince of Wales Island, once the capital of old growth and now the most heavily logged place in the Tongass. Just 135 miles long, the largely federal-owned island is blessed with some 2,000 miles of veiny logging roads leading to dozens of naked buttes and bald ridgetops. To my wide eyes, it was the clear-cut choice for clear-cut skiing.

I called Roo, who at the time was a smoke jumper based near Winthrop, Washington. He immediately recognized the brilliance of the plan, declaring it a "priority-pink mission," whatever that means. Two weeks later, we were bucking an hourlong seaplane flight from Ketchikan, racing for the pow on P.O.W. Island.