“I'm Mike Mason, and I’m a lifelong Alaskan. I lived up in the Mat-Su Valley for most of my life and then I moved to Alexander Creek here in 1999, because I had this dream about living in the bush. I just figured it would be a weekend type thing. And within three months I moved here. I learned the way of life around here, and started boating. All the fishing back then was really good.”

“Growing up I spent a lot of time on the water fishing with my dad and my grandpa in the waters around Juneau. I have a lot of memories of time spent on the boat waiting for a fish to bite, getting seasick, and processing fish. As I got older and in my teenage years I didn’t have as much interest in fishing, but continued to spend a lot of time on boating adventures with family and running around with cousins casting and setting crab pots.”

“I grew up in Port Townsend, Washington. My parents weren’t fishermen, but my maternal grandparents were. They lived in Port Angeles, on the Olympic Peninsula about an hour away from where we grew up. Summers, my parents would take us to our grandparents’ house and drop us off for 10 days at a time.”

“My parents raised their six children at fish camp right above our village of Rampart, on the Yukon River. I have very fond memories of being at camp. Multi-generation family members together harvesting salmon. Family members coming from different villages and cities to come and fish together.”

“My great grandfather came here from Missouri in 1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush. He and two or three other guys built a boat in Missouri and put it on a train, dumped it in the water in Seattle and rowed and sailed up here from Seattle. They stopped in Juneau. I think they were about half crazy, and they were broke.”

“I’ve been sportfishing ever since I was old enough to hold a pole. I think I caught my first king salmon when I was about five years old, and I’ve continued to catch king salmon every year since.”

“Until we were probably 10, 12 years old, my brother and I fished on my mom's trolling boat. She just had a little 20-foot wood boat and two kids on it running around. She would tie us off to the mast sometimes.”

Past clearcut logging and gravel mining left East Ohmer Creek with degraded fish habitat and stream function. Now, a coalition of partners have intervened to help nature restore the stream.

“I have a cabin in Deshka Landing, on the Susitna River. Originally it was my parents’. They bought the property when I was 10 or 11, but even before then, we would go up there all the time to do a lot of salmon fishing, and go camping there. “

“My education comes from the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound. My people, the Eyak, originally migrated out of the interior of Alaska 3500 years ago and ended up east of Yakutat in a place called the Ikaleo river.

When some of the team working to restore this place were kids, Seven Mile Creek, just outside Klawock Lake on Prince of Wales Island, was home to strong returns of sockeye salmon. Those sockeye fed their families, both on the island and beyond it. But in 1987, the forest surrounding Seven Mile Creek was clearcut down to the creek banks. In later years, Klawock Lake’s once-prolific sockeye salmon run has plummeted.

“I graduated from college with a nursing degree, and I came to Alaska to pay off my scholarship. I wanted to go to New York, to a busy emergency room situation. But I went to Anchorage, and worked at the Alaska Native Medical Center in the ICU. There, I met my husband Carl, who was an audiologist.”

“I grew up in Colorado, and my family exposed us to fishing, and camping. As I got older, I spent more time in the woods, and I was 14 when I started really getting into fly fishing. The moment I did it I was hooked — pardon the pun.”

"I had always heard stories about Alaska and especially from my dad, who traveled to Alaska from Minnesota every year to go fishing. The first time I ever visited Alaska was when I was in high school, during a family trip to Anchorage and Kodiak.”

“I came to Alaska when I was 35 or 36, with an ex-husband who was a fisherman when the fisheries collapsed in New England. I was very immersed in fishing culture back there in New England. When I arrived I got a job at KMXT to produce their Alaska Fisheries report. It was an overview of fishing around the state.”

"I was born in Dillingham back in 1961. My folks came to Bristol Bay in 1948. They worked out of Clark’s Point Cannery on the Nushagak. My dad, Denny, started out commercial fishing out of Clark’s Point — he was able to talk his way onto a boat. While at Clark’s Point my mom, Jan, had her first child, Katrina, who was born in the old school house near the cannery. After their time at Clark’s Point they were able to apply for a GI Bill homestead.”

"I was born in Fairbanks, and at a very young age, maybe 4 or 5, I moved out to Rampart, where my mom was born. We call it the canyon area — it’s the mountainous area of the Yukon River. Sixty miles right above Rampart is the Dalton Highway. To get to Rampart in the summertime, we drive our trucks out and boat down the river. In the wintertime, we make an ice road 25 miles out to the Elliot Highway near Manley Hot Springs. When the ice road is closed, I’ll drive my snowmachine 25 miles to the Elliot Highway where my truck is parked. That takes all day.”

"Growing up as a kid in the summers in Egegik, I remember at the peak of summer the grass was taller than I was. It was always a fun and mysterious thing. My friends and I would chase rabbits in the grass, and my parents would be out fishing. It was fun growing up in a community where everything revolved around salmon, the tides, and the weather.”

"Salmon is pretty much everything. We eat it every way possible. My whole family. My friends, their families, my aunts, uncles, cousins – everybody in Chignik. You eat it as much as you can. You smoke it, salt it, dry it, freeze it for the winter, can it. When my sister comes down we jar a bunch of fish for her. Salmon puts food on the table, literally and figuratively. We eat them and we make money to buy all of the other stuff. It puts a roof over our head.”

"I grew up in New Hampshire and spent a lot of time outside in the White Mountains, which are gorgeous. It was really nice, but even then, I was always looking for something a little more.”