Featured SalmonState Column
‘The Salmon Way’: Author shares Alaska’s salmon stories and ways of life
From the fish camps of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, to the gillnets of Bristol Bay, to the bear and angler-packed banks of Juneau’s Sweetheart Creek, salmon connect people to the land, the water, the seasons, and each other. Those connections create a culture that inspired author Amy Gulick’s most recent book, “The Salmon Way: An Alaska State of Mind,” released May 1, 2019.
New jewelry line highlights beauty of fish scales
About a year ago my friend Julienne Pacheco dropped by our house with an ocean-caught steelhead. Before we cooked it, she got out a filet knife and carefully separated the flesh from the glittering scales. She had a plan that would leave them glittering long into the future.
Short lived salmon play a role in long term survival
If you’ve fished around Frazer Lake on Kodiak Island over the last 20 years, odds are you’re familiar with jack salmon — a salmon, usually sockeye or a king, that returns to its natal stream after an abnormally short time at sea. For sockeye, that’s one year; for kings, one to two. Because jacks spend less time at sea and have less time to grow, they’re much smaller than normal.
“Surfing the salmon wave” in Bristol Bay
By mid-August Bristol Bay’s river systems are choked with fish, but early July, when most of the bay’s sockeye salmon are fighting their way in from the sea, is another story. What’s a bear — or a grayling, trout or gull — to do?
The short answer is: start surfing.
Upriver during a record year at Bristol Bay
As fishermen leave Dillingham and canneries shut down, the Wood River system in the Bristol Bay watershed brims with sockeye salmon.
The second week of August, I got to spend several days upriver. Sockeye schooled at the mouths of small streams off the lake system, their fins cutting through the water. They choked ankle to knee-deep streams more narrow than the width of your dining room table. Females dug redds in the same part of the streams they were born in, fighting off both other females and undesirable males. The bodies of those who arrived before them littered the banks, and as later fish dug redds, unearthed eggs floated downstream, snapped up by opportunistic rainbow trout and arctic char.
Low Copper River sockeye return effects ripple outward
It’s a summer tradition for many in Alaska: pack up the car, drive to Chitina and dipnet for Copper River red salmon.
It’s a tradition, however, that many won’t fulfill this year, with personal use fisheries largely shut down for the first time since statehood.
Casting for fish, and guides, in Bristol Bay
Triston Chaney, a 19-year-old college student raised in Dillingham, knew before this year that he loved fly fishing. What he didn’t know is that he’d love helping other people catch fish, too.
With the help of the Bristol Bay Fly Fishing & Guide Academy, he’ll soon start a job doing just that.
The impossible journey of the juvenile coho
Turns out finance and salmon survival have something in common: the importance of diversification.
As a PhD student with the University of Washington’s Alaska Salmon Program, Jonny Armstrong — now assistant professor at Oregon State University’s Fish and Wildlife Department — snorkeled the Wood River in the Bristol Bay watershed. He soon encountered a mystery: juvenile coho as much as a mile from the nearest sockeye spawning ground had sockeye eggs in their stomachs.
A downriver homecoming
The Taku Khwáan Dancers have been traveling from Atlin, British Columbia to Juneau’s biennial Celebration for years. This year, for the first time, seven of them did it the traditional way: paddling a canoe down the Taku River.
Hunting for fish in Alaska’s steelhead bearing rivers and streams
For most people, steelhead — sea-run rainbow trout — are “the fish of 10,000 casts.” To catch them, you stand waist-deep in a spring-melt river, growing numb with cold as you cast… and cast… and cast.
Trout Unlimited sportfish outreach coordinator and Bear Creek Outfitter fishing guide Mark Heironymus says it doesn’t have to be that way. A better word than “fishing” for steelhead, he said, is “hunting.” You might go hours between casts, but once you line everything up right, you get your fish.