“Some of the most iconic bear images ever captured are from Bristol Bay. You think of the Bristol Bay fish that go up the Brooks River— that is the most popular destination, maybe in the world. So when you think of Alaska, that image of the bear snatching the salmon out of the air at Brooks Falls is close to the top.”

“Sometimes with Bristol Bay, you don’t know until you know. You’ve got to just experience the fishing and the beauty of the area. Pictures and even videos don’t do it justice. Not even close. Once you get up there, it’s a totally different feeling. You see everything, you’re experiencing everything, you feel everything— it’s so much different.”

“I grew up in a mill town, Ketchikan. The Tongass was having a quarter of a billion board feet logged a year at that point. One year I’d be in a bay, and it would be amazing, wild old growth. The next year it would be a logging camp and then it would just be a clearcut. I saw a fair bit of that growing up— and kids don’t question that much. So I experienced it, and by the time I was a teenager, I started thinking, ‘You know what, this doesn’t seem to be the best idea, to be cutting a thousand acres at a time.’ I saw my fair share of landslides, washed out rivers, that kind of thing. That’s where my interest in conservation started.”

“In 2005, 3 years after graduating, a Dillingham community member and business owner dropped this challenge and called me up and said, ‘Hey I know you’re an artist, and I want you to paint me this mural.’ I thought, ‘I don’t even know what a mural is, man. What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘It’s just a bigger version of a painting, you could do it really easily. Maybe it could say Welcome to Dillingham.’ And then he said, ‘Everyone is going to want one of these, you just wait and see.’ He paid me to create the first public mural that I’ve ever done, on Bristol Express.”

“My brother and I grew up very remotely, on an Alaskan inholding homestead in the Becharof National Wildlife Refuge, on the Alaska Peninsula. My first memory that really stands out was catching a 12, 15 pound monster Dolly Varden on one of the nearby creeks. I was maybe six years old and barely able to get it in.”

“When I was a young kid —about 10 or 12 — me and my cousin, who’s the same age, we went fishing with our uncles. Where we went there’s two salt-water-fed lakes, as well as fresh water coming down from the hills. You’ve got to go in there at a certain tide in order to get up into the lakes. And what we were there for was chum salmon, dog salmon, in the fall time. Me and my cousin, we thought it was just the greatest thing to be with our uncles, going on an adventure. And once we got up to the second lake — you have to go through the first one, and there’s a short stretch of river to get up to the second one — and it’s rather tricky, because there’s big rocks along the way. Once we got up there to where we’re going to fish, my uncles got off and they told us to stay with one of our other uncles on the boat to let the seine out of it.”

“Until I was in my late twenties, hunting was something my brother and my dad did. I moved away after high school, for college. I was gone ten years. One of the reasons I moved back was because anywhere else I lived, I missed the connection I had to the people, the land, and my culture. My dad took me hunting when I was 28, in 2014, and I got my first deer. Ever since then, it’s just something I’ve loved to do — hunting, and gathering your own food, and being able to provide for yourself. I feel like I missed out on so much in the ten years I was gone.”

“When I was in first grade, in 1954, we moved to Edna Bay. My stepfather worked down on the water, making rafts to deliver trees to the pulp mill. Edna Bay was one of the first big logging camps. We had a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher for all eight grades. As a kid on Prince of Wales, I saw big, perfect spruce. It was amazing how fast it was harvested. In those days they didn’t build roads. They mostly used the salmon streams to clear up and down, because it was open. Sometimes they did it when there were salmon in there.”

“I have a dream. In my dream, it’s 2028 and I’m hiking up the Kadashan River with my grandchildren, fifteen-year-old Maya and twelve-year-old Toby.”

“Shortly after graduating from high school, I got a job. It didn’t take me long to see it wasn’t working out. I grew up with an interest in the outdoors all my life, so I decided to go out west.”

I’m a fairly conservative individual. I typically vote Republican. I’m pro-development and I’m for the responsible use of our God-given resources. But this mine, in this location, could be catastrophic on so many levels.