Salmon
Stories

“I started working on trails the summer before my senior year in high school when I got a job for Sitka Trail Works. We spent the summer rebuilding the Sealion Cove Trail, the WWII Causeway, and trails around town, and I kinda caught the bug.”

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.

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 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.”

"I am so grateful for the way I was raised— we were completely off grid. We didn’t have TV, didn’t have internet, and the bears would chew through the phone cables, so sometimes we didn’t even have a phone.”

“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.”

“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.”