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August 23, 2022August 23, 2022

Alaska Packing List

Gear

We took too much stuff. On our flight to Quinagak we were limited to 50 pounds apiece of luggage, and we pushed the limit. They let us on the plane with 101 pounds, but don’t tell anybody. We did well enough on clothes—Ok, I had one too many pairs of long underwear, but Kris ended up borrowing the extra. I have very stylish long underwear.

Where we failed was with fishing gear. We only used four rods, four reels, and four lines. We would have done just fine with nothing but the the two big Spey rods and the two seven-weight single-handed rods that we used for trout.

Meanwhile I had packed five more rods and reels, just in case. I did use some of the flies I tied, which always makes me happy.

Besides long underwear, I had a pair of pile pants to wear under my waders that worked well, and a couple of sweaters, one wool and one capiIene. I don’t think I took the sweaters off until day six. On that sunny day it got within the vicinity of almost hot and all the guides were sporting t-shirts. Show-offs.

Our rain gear got a work out, and the knit cap that fit over my baseball cap did double duty, both keeping me warm and providing padding when I whacked the back of my head on bad casts.

I took the new pair of waders Kris gave me for Father’s Day. Waders are expensive, and sometimes they spring leaks. My last pair were good Patagonia waders that I’d had six or seven years, but the last couple of times out I’d ended up with a wet butt. I’d tried to seal them, but never could find the leak. We have a water feature in our back yard, a shallow pool with a fountain, and weekly in May I’d put on a pair of khakis and my waders and go sit in the cement pond to see if I’d fixed them yet. I never did.

The new waders have a front zipper, which is a recent innovation. Why a front zipper? So it’s easier to pee of course. I’m here to report that for an old man, the zipper is the greatest thing ever, right up there in the list of civilization’s achievements with fire, the wheel, and yoga pants.

The Camp

I had the notion that our stay at Alaska West would be glamping. It wasn’t. Now mind, it was perfectly comfortable. The tent had a propane heater, each cot had its own mosquito net, and there were hangers on a galvanized pipe. The food was good and would have paired well with beer if Quinagak hadn’t been dry. We made our sandwiches each day for our riverside lunch, and there was a perfectly adequate selection of cold cuts. On some days there were Cheetos. The camp runner made our bed each day, and while the cot was made out of 2x4s and a sheet of plywood, it was comfortable, and like I said, it came with mosquito netting. All the luxuries.

That said, nobody knew the thread-count on the sheets, and a memorable part of each shower was spent alternating between cold water and scalding. There were plenty of outhouses though, and there was a shower, not just a hose with a foot pump. I’m sure that in Alaska there are glamorous lodges with down comforters, plush towels, adjustable shower heads, bottles of pinot noir, micro greens applied to plates with tweezers, and flush toilets, and I wouldn’t have minded any of those things, but I also liked our camp at Alaska West. I liked it a lot.

Besides us, there were eight other anglers in camp the week we were there, and Kris and I were the only anglers who hadn’t been there at least once before. Three anglers were from Britain, and one, from California, came every summer and was spending two weeks. Apparently there are a lot of repeat customers.

You know what’s great about almost endless sunlight? You don’t have to find a flashlight if you need to pee in the middle of the night.

Anchorage and Seward

We were in Alaska for ten nights, seven in camp, two in Anchorage, and one in Seward. We flew out of Anchorage at 11 pm on the night we got back from the Alaska West camp, with an Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to Denver. In Denver we changed planes and airlines, and got home at 2 the next afternoon. I honestly don’t remember a thing about that flight home.

To get there we flew into Anchorage three days early and took a sightseeing train across the Kenai Peninsula to Seward. The Alaska Railroad is terrific, and they had a tour package that included a visit to a dog-sled kennel, a hike to a glacier, and then a six-hour boat tour of Kenai Fjords National Park. We saw whales! We mourned accelerated glacial melting! We saw seals and sea otters and kittiwakes! No wonder people go on cruises to Alaska.

In Anchorage we stayed the first night at the Comfort Inn Downtown–Ship Creek, so that we could walk to the train station the next morning to catch our train to Seward. We had stashed most of our luggage at our third night’s hotel, The Lakefront Anchorage. In between those two we spent the night at the Harbor 360 Hotel in Seward, which was part of the train tour package. Little known fact, but every hotel in Alaska is required by law to have a stuffed bear in the lobby, and the really fancy places will also have a stuffed muskox.

We ate in Seward at The Cookery. If you own a tourist-dependent restaurant in Seward, you open each year in late spring and close down in the fall, but The Cookery was good enough that if they opened in February I’d go back to Seward just to eat there. What great oysters they have in Alaska.

Food in Anchorage was pretty hit or miss, but our first night there we ate at a popular brewpub, The Glacier Brewhouse. We didn’t have a reservation but they seated us at the bar. Our waitress was from Katy, Texas. The couple next to us at the bar was from Monahans, Texas. I think there’s a good bit of Texas in Alaska, and it just goes to show, wearing an Astros cap is never a bad choice.

Playlist

There is a lot of good writing about Alaska, and there are some pretty good movies, plus we bought the boxed set of six seasons of Northern Exposure, which is still the best thing ever broadcast on network television. It’s too bad that Janine Turner is a nutcase.

Music, though, is limited. There’s “North to Alaska” by Johnny Horten, and I found a pretty good cover of it by a blue grass performer, David Mallett. There’s the song, “Alaska” by Maggie Rogers, which she wrote in Boston, and “Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked which I suppose she wrote in Texas. There’s a band, Portugal the Man, which is likely the best thing to ever come out of Wasilla, Alaska, though I gather they’re now based in Portland. Their stuff is very good, and you’d likely recognize a song or two.

After that Alaska seems to turn out female singer-songwriters, led, of course, by Jewel, and including Anna Graceman, Janet Gardner, and Libby Roderick. I’ve got nothing against female singer-songwriters, I’ve got nothing against Jewel, but of the 39 songs on our Alaska playlist, 30 were by female singer-songwriters, and 19 of those were by Jewel. It made one yearn for another run-through of North to Alaska.

I was surprised at the lack of country and western singers from Alaska. With all those Texans, it seemed like an obvious choice. Maybe I just missed them.

Guitar

To save weight, I took my small travel guitar. I bought it originally so that I wouldn’t cry if it was accidentally destroyed, and I had visions of having to leave it in a trash can to make the Quinagak weight limit. I didn’t have to leave it, and it survived another trip. I took the music for “Recuerdos de la Alhambra”, a song I’ve played through from time to time but never learned, and worked on that most evenings. I’m still working on it, and probably never will learn it.

August 13, 2022August 15, 2022

Kanektok River, Bethel Census Area, Alaska, July 3-10, 2022.

I had imagined Alaska, and not just the bears, either. I had imagined glaciers and mountains, forests and Western streams and endless fish–like Yellowstone, but better, with more of all the stuff that makes the West wild. That’s not exactly the Alaska where we fished. We spent a week on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where the Kanektok River meets the Bering Sea, and it was both different and more interesting.

Swinging for Kings

We fished six days at Deneki Outdoors’ Alaska West camp, five miles upstream from the coastal village of Quinagak, population 856. We were where Alaska ended and the Bering Sea began, with no roads into town through the tundra. Quinagak is 72 air miles from the next largest town, Bethel. It was pretty remote.

Fishing for salmon in Alaska is about time. Arrive two weeks too early or two weeks too late and you won’t catch the salmon you want. The salmon come in from the sea on a schedule, year after year, in bigger or smaller numbers, though it seems that these days the numbers are always smaller. We chose early July for king salmon, the largest Pacific salmon. Hubris I reckon.

Fly fishing for kings differs from most other fly fishing. The rods are different. The lines are different. The flies are different.

Spey rods are long, 13 feet compared to the usual 9-foot fly rod, and heavy. You use both hands to cast, and there’s no back-cast. It’s the simplest fly cast, a roll cast, but with some complicating twists and turns and issues of timing, and the arcane lines are the heart of it. We fished with Skagit lines. There is another type of spey line, a Scandi line, but it’s the Skagit that’s used on the Kanektok for kings.

Skagit lines are short, as short as 20 feet, and thick and heavy. They’re the colors of Play-Doh so you can see them on the water, and they’re thick as baling wire, nearly an 1/8th of an inch. Skagit line weights are measured in grains. The heaviest part of a regular 9-weight redfish line, a heavy line, might weigh 330 grains. My 8/9-weight Skagit line weighs 600 grains. See what I mean by arcane? They use an ancient alchemist weight system to measure the lines, and I doubt that much of anybody knows what a grain actually is. Regardless, nearly twice the weight makes a difference, whether it’s measured in grains or in kilograms or in ounces.

The Skagit line is attached to the reel through 100 feet of thin plastic-coated running line, and then through 200 yards of braided nylon backing. We would cast some of the running line, but only saw the backing when a hot fish ran.

Skagit lines are designed to pick up and throw a sinking tip that is also heavy. A sink tip’s plastic coating is mixed with ground tungsten to sink into the river as much as 7- or 8-inches per second. At the end of that heavy ten-foot sink tip is a large, annoying fly with the added water weight of a good river baptism. And the flies are annoying. Once they hit freshwater from the sea, salmon aren’t feeding. The flies are designed for provocation, not imitation.

Learning to spey cast is not for the faint-hearted. The heavy lines, large soaked flies, and high line speed can leave a lasting impression, even if you don’t actually hook yourself. I thwacked my left ear hard, and another bad cast took my stocking cap into the river. If I hadn’t been wearing the cap it would have been bits of my scalp.

When we started on Sunday we were less than competent casters. By the next Saturday we were casting more or less in the vicinity of ok. Our guides were good teachers, and we were at it most of 10 hours a day for six days. Even I had a chance of getting better.

We waded along gravel bars, trying to fish the places the salmon might hold before another upstream push. There was enough river and few enough anglers to always have our own private gravel bar. We’d wade out in the shallows then cast across to the deeper water, maybe 70 feet, more likely 60, and let the fly and 10-foot sink tip drag down and across in the current. That arc–more of a rounded right angle, really–is the swing, arced down and across from me, the pivot. When the line and fly were almost directly below me I would let the fly hang in the current, then retrieve line back until I could cast again.

When I usually fish, I cast to fish I see, or cast to where I think fish are likely. This was more like broadcasting on the radio, casting out to as much of the river as I could cover and then letting the fly search. Cast, swing, retrieve, step downriver one or two steps, and then do it all again. Then do it all again. Then do it all again. I never really knew who was out there.

Those tungsten sink tips? Rio fly lines sells them as MOW tips, and I was told that MOW are the initials of three former Alaska West guides who developed the lines. The Kanektok has the reputation of one of the best places in the world to swing flies for kings, and whether or not you catch fish, it’s a mesmerizing business.

The River, the tundra, and the sea.

Most anybody can work up some mystical awe for a mountain, but it’s hard to work up much awe for a delta. Its beauty is more difficult to parse. I’ve probably spent more time fishing coastal marshes than most, and that’s what first struck me about the Kanektok. Out of context, if someone told you that those were mangroves, not stunted alders, and that that was marsh grass, not tundra grass, you’d like as not believe you were somewhere in Belize, or Galveston, or New Orleans.

The Kanektok flow was steady and smooth. The gravel bottom was easy to wade, though it did get deep. We stayed in the shallows, and I doubt that I ever waded in water that was much above my knees.

At the sea the mouth of the Kanektok is a tidal plain. At low tide at the outlet there were sand bars and tall, cut banks. Twelve hours later, everything we saw would be hidden under ten feet of high tide. I climbed up a bank, in part from a full bladder and in part from curiosity, and from there the tundra grass, flat and seemingly endless, was dotted with purple fire weed, white yarrow, and yellow grundsels.

I’ve read that in summer the Bering Sea hosts the largest biomass on earth, and that carries over into the Delta. Even along the relatively people-inhabited river we watched swallows attack a golden eagle, compared the glaucous gulls to our own smaller laughing gulls, saw beaver swim dragging fresh-cut alder, and watched tiny yellow warblers, maybe from as far south as the Yucatan, explore the bankside alders.

An odd factoid: the average American eats about one ton, 2000 pounds, of food each year. In Quinagak, about 700 pounds of each resident’s annual food supply comes from subsistence fishing, hunting, and gathering. Even with our annual fig crop and July okra production, plus those two or three tomatoes each year that actually ripen, I doubt that we get 25 pounds of food per year from anywhere but the HEB. And this year the figs didn’t make because of the drought. We’ve had a lot of okra though.

There’s Yup’ik archeological history near Quinagak that dates from as early as 1350, so it’s a well-established trading site, and probably a fishing site. During the year though the current residents’ ancestors would disburse throughout the region to gather food. I suppose that’s part of the legacy of the Alaskan Native Claims Act: it mandated that Native Alaskans pick their spot. Maybe there’s an anthropologist somewhere who knows.

Anyway, back to that 700 pounds. There always seemed to be Quinagakians on the river snagging sockeye. It wasn’t sporting, but then it wasn’t meant to be. It was harvesting. And from the river mouth we could watch Quinagak boats put out to sea to net fish.

On the Kanektok, the king return was down, and for the season Alaska had banned chum salmon fishing because the numbers of returning chum are way off. Global warming maybe, maybe the efficiency of gill nets, maybe both. Probably combinations of things I can’t imagine.

Fish, No Fish

The first day I caught five fish. Now mind, any day with five fish is a good day, and I caught one 15-pound king, a couple of smaller jacks, and two chum. They were bright, fast fish, only a few miles from the ocean and not yet changing to their spawning form and colors, not yet dying.

We couldn’t target chum, but when we fished for kings we couldn’t help accidentally catching chum. We landed and released them as quickly as we could. The jacks are a bit of an oddity, and are defined by Alaska law as any king salmon that’s less than 30 inches long. The two Jacks I caught the first day were big for jacks, maybe close to ten pounds. They were good fish, but they weren’t 30 inches. They weren’t kings.

Kings go out to the ocean for five to eight years before they return to their home river. Jacks are immature males, always males, teenagers, who go out to the ocean but then return to their river after one to three years. People say it’s a bit of a mystery why the jacks return early, but do teenage boys ever believe in the possibility of death? Are teenage boys everywhere not stupid for the chance to get laid? Where’s the mystery?

The first day my five fish were the best catch for the camp, and I reveled in it, certain that I had this Alaska thing down. The next day I followed it up with nothing. Nichts, nada, nil. I worked hard, and came back to camp in the evening shamefaced. Kris caught fish, Kris always catches fish. Within a couple of hours of arriving at camp she walked down to the river and caught a nice rainbow. Then she caught a jack, a chum and a rainbow on Monday, a jack and two rainbows on Tuesday, a chum on Wednesday, two rainbows on Thursday, a jack, a king and the first pink of the season on Friday, and three rainbows and two jacks on Saturday. She mostly spent her time in Alaska outfishing me.

I had imagined Alaska as a steady stream of fish, and after going nil on Monday, on the third day, Wednesday, I caught one jack.

None of this matched my imagination. On Thursday again I caught nothing. I hooked two fish and lost them after setting the hook. Once I tried to set the hook too soon after the slightest nudge.

I got plenty of practice casting.

All of this was done under lead skies, in cold and rain. Kris caught fish and I caught nada.

Besides the obvious differences in rod and line, maybe the biggest difference between swinging flies and other fly fishing is the take. So much of fly fishing is visual, or a fish attacks a retrieved streamer. You watch the line, you watch an indicator on the line, you watch the fish, or you watch the fly. You’re active, you’re looking. Swinging the fly, on the other hand, is all tactile. The connection through the line between you and the hook is direct, and it’s the only connection. We couldn’t see what was happening beneath the surface, but could only feel a nudge, a tug, and then the heavy pull of the fish on the line. If you hadn’t already blown it, that’s when you would set the hook. It is the most connected, electric thing.

On Friday, I lost a good king after a good fight, and landed another king within a mile of the ocean. There was a lamprey wound on its belly, and it still had the sea lice it would lose in freshwater. Kris also landed a king, and her fish had the beginning colors of the spawn. Late in the day I hooked a salmon, and it ran down and across the river, taking all of the 100-foot running line and a good bit of the braided backing. I saw the fish once, 100 feet across and downriver, dragging the long curve of my line and jumping upriver parallel to the surface. While I fought the fish it started to rain, the only rain of the day, big, heavy drops. When I finally landed the fish it was a huge chum, bigger than any of the kings I’d caught, and by then the rain had stopped. Alaska can be a volatile place.

Chris the Guide spent time reviving the fish, and Kris the companion snapped a photo when he took it from the net. It was nothing but a moment, a few minutes to revive the fish, and a brief glimpse of the sea, of the river, of a different place from what I had imagined.

Our last day

Our last day fishing, Saturday, was bright and clear, warm and sunny, with low tides. It was a terrible day for fishing, though of course Kris caught all sorts of fish. We fished for a bit, caught nothing, then went down to the mouth of the river at the sea, as much to see it as to fish. After lunch Chris the Guide ran the boat upriver 15 miles to fish for trout with single-handed rods. We caught some on heavy sculpin patterns, and Kris caught a couple of jacks, but we went as much to sightsee as to fish.

They were good rainbow trout, big by the standards of the lower 48, as much as 20 inches. They weren’t big Alaska trout though. Those would come later in the season, and downriver, closer to the ocean, after more salmon had spawned and died and the trout were fat with salmon flesh and eggs.

Upriver I sat bankside to change flies and was swarmed with mosquitos. They weren’t as substantial as our Gulf Coast mosquitos, more of whisps of mosquitos, but they were real enough and plenty numerous and persistent, plenty annoying, and until we left that place the swarm stayed with me. I guess that was something I hadn’t really imagined either. Just like I hadn’t imagined the tundra, or the wildflowers, or the tiny bank-side yellow warblers.

On our final sunny day I could finally see the sockeye ghosting upriver to spawn. It was a continuous line of driven fish, and I watched hundreds, maybe thousands. They coasted up the shallows where I stood, and would come within a few feet of me then swerve deliberately, out and around me, never stopping, never running, saving their energy to move upstream.

The sockeyes were fish I couldn’t catch, or at least that I wouldn’t snag. I would go again just to watch those fish.

June 28, 2022August 12, 2022

North to Alaska

When I say that we’re going to Alaska, people usually ask if we’re taking a cruise. I gather that cruises go from Seattle up through the Inner Passage, hitting some of the coastal towns along the way. In September, I could sail from Seattle to Alaska on the Carnival Spirit for as little as $579, plus taxes and port costs of $279. Is that per day? That’s cheaper than a flight to Anchorage from Houston.

It doesn’t matter. I can’t fly fish off of a cruise ship.

Photo by Ice Cream for Everyone, *Sign at Quinhagak Airport*, 2011, from Wikipedia.

Tourism employs one in eight Alaskans. About 2 million visitors arrive in Alaska every year, about half on cruise lines, and tourism is crammed into the four months from June to September. Alaska’s tourism mimics Alaska’s natural world: make hay while the sun shines. Far North winter survival depends on the solar energy stored during the long summer day. Everything blooms, grows, breeds, and feeds during summer, and that stored energy is then converted into winter survival. Alaskan tourism is on the same schedule.

Here’s an Alaska travel tip: everything is cheaper in February. In February, a hotel room that’s $400 in July only costs $150. A car that rents for $350 in July only costs $100. Flights are cheaper. Uber rides are cheaper. If you could find a lodge that thought fishing in Alaska in February was a good idea, the lodge would be cheaper.

There are no fishing lodges open in February, so like everybody else, we’re going now. Tomorrow we fly to Anchorage. Actually, because Houston flights to Anchorage are expensive, we’re flying Southwest on points to Seattle, then we’ll switch to Alaskan Air to fly to Anchorage. It makes for a longer day, but with 11-hour flights the day’s shot whatever we do.

It wasn’t obvious to me, but Anchorage isn’t really a destination, it’s a gateway. Visiting Anchorage seems a bit like visiting Fort Worth, or Albuquerque, or Salt Lake City–all nice cities, but after a day or so it’s time to move on. Because of the lack of roads in Alaska, to get out of town and actually see stuff you have to fly into Anchorage and then go elsewhere, as likely as not by train, or boat, or plane, but usually not by car. Not only are there few roads, but that $350-a-day July car rental is pretty steep. And even post-retirement, driving is just too much of a time commitment.

So we fly to Anchorage, and after a short train excursion and another day of piddling, we fly in a 9-passenger charter plane 300 miles west to the coastal Native Alaskan village of Quinhagak, population 776, elevation 38 feet, on the Kuskokwim Bay of the Bering Sea.

I don’t have any clue about how to pronounce this stuff.

Quinhagak sits on a delta, a huge delta, with more in common geologically with the Mississippi Delta than with Glacier Bay or Denali. We’re going to a flat, treeless coastal plain of raggedy fishing villages and countless mosquitos. Maybe that’s why we picked it. It sounds a lot like home.

From Quinhagak, we travel by jet boats up the Kanektok River, to a tent village where we’ll stay for the next six nights. It’s a nice tent village, at least according to the website. According to the website we’re actually going a’glamping. There are showers, there’s a dining hall, and there’s even a drying tent for boots and waders. Because it’s technically within the boundaries of Quinhagak, there’s no alcohol. Quinhagak is dry.

I didn’t know it was possible to fish without a wee dram at the end of the day. We didn’t notice that clause when we booked, and I suspect they keep it in the fine print. Alaska is marijuana friendly, but we’ll skip that as well.

We’re bringing along a lot of baggage, sort of.

For the flight from Anchorage to Quinhagak, we’re each limited to 50 pounds of luggage and a 15 pound carry-on. There are currently three resident gamefish and three salmon runs in the Kanektok; king salmon, sockeye salmon, chum salmon, rainbow trout, arctic char, and Dolly Varden, ranging in size from 50 pounds to a few pounds. I can’t catch a 50-pound fish on the same rod I’d use for a two-pound fish, and it’s no fun catching a two pound fish on the same rod I’d use for a 50-pound fish, so that means a lot of our weight limit is made up of six single-handed rods, three apiece, plus one big game rod for the king salmon, and a dainty 5 weight just because, well, just because. The big king salmon are usually fished on long, 13-foot double-handed rods, spey rods, so that’s two more rods apiece. Then we’re taking another lighter spey rod for backup. It’s a lot of rods.

And the rods aren’t really the heavy part. Every rod has a reel, and a lot of the reels are massive things. Those long spey rods are counterbalanced by heavy big game reels that must weigh a couple of pounds apiece, and each of the single-handed rods has both a floating line on the reel and a sinking line on a spare spool. It’s a lot of metal, and along with our boots and waders, fishing gear takes up a good chunk of that 50 pounds.

We can bring home 40 pounds of salmon apiece, though you can’t harvest the kings. If we do bring salmon back, it will be the most expensive sockeye ever eaten.

We’re also taking flies, not that flies weigh much, but I’ve been tying flies for Alaska for months. There are big gaudy flies for the king salmon, and smaller flashy flies for the sockeye. Sockeye are filter feeders, and in the ocean feed mostly on zooplankton, but they may also eat small shrimp. The flashy sockeye flies are tied to mimic tiny bright crustaceans.

Or maybe not. Who knows why salmon strike flies?

Anyway, the weirdest flies are the trout flies. In the Lower 48, trout flies are mostly lovely, delicate things with lovely, delicate names like quill gordon, prince nymph, meat wagon . . . ok, forget that latter. They imitate mayflies, or caddis flies, or stoneflies, or perhaps a wind-blown hopper or small baitfish or crayfish.

In Alaska the flesh flies imitate rotting salmon.

Flesh flies, mice, leaches, egg-sucking leaches, sculpin, fish eggs . . . there’s no part of this that sounds lovely and delicate. The lodge lists bass poppers in its fly lists.

At least the forecast is for warm and sunny days in Quinhagak. Just kidding

That’s ok. Fish like rain.

June 25, 2022June 26, 2022

Alaska fishing

Next week we go to Alaska. This whole exercise–going to each state to catch a fish–is really a desperate ruse to get Kris to Alaska. For a girl who got all the way through law school inside the Houston loop, Kris has a peculiarly well-developed terror of bears. “Kris, do you want to go to Alaska?” I’ve asked that question for nigh on 40 years, and she’s consistently answered no, nope, not on a bet. “There are bears.”

That Werner Herzog movie, Grizzly Man, didn’t help any. I highly recommend it though.

She must be terrified of bears because they infested Poe Elementary and the Rice campus. She must have lost a dozen of her Lamar High School graduating class to grizzlies, and watched horrified as University of Houston law professors were snatched from the lecture hall and dragged to a polar bear’s lair. For a long time I thought it was a joke, and then I thought that maybe it was real but vague, and that she’d get over it. Nope. For as long as I’ve known her she has only been afraid of one thing: bears–Alaskan bears in particular.

Bean, Tarleton H., King Salmon (Oncorhynchus chouicha), 1889, Report on the salmon and salmon rivers of Alaska, with notes on the conditions, methods, and needs of the salmon fisheries,
Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

Ok, two things. My driving and bears. My driving isn’t horrible, and I swear, outside of the zoo, there are no bears in Houston.

Fishing finally got to her. She fishes, and if you fish, Alaska is the very thing. If I listed places I’d like to fly fish, New Zealand, Scotland, Cuba, Mongolia, Montana, Christmas Island, Norway, Chile, Iceland, the Seychelles, British Columbia, Nebraska, the Amazon . . . Ok, maybe not Nebraska. Anyway, it would be a long list, but Alaska would be at the very top. Unlike the lower 48, there are still good salmon runs in Alaska. There are still large numbers of steelhead. We haven’t yet blown it in Alaska, though that’s not without trying. The trout are not dinky little 14-inchers daintily sipping mayflies from a mountain stream. The trout are 28-inch monsters gorging on the rotting flesh of dying salmon.

There are five species of salmon in Alaska, plus sea-run steelhead trout. To plan our trip, we started from when a species of salmon would be in a river. Ok, we started from restaurant quality and when a species of salmon would be in a river. We picked a river, the Kanektok, where all five salmon species have a summer run from the Bering Sea. First, beginning in June and running through mid-July, are king salmon. King’s are the largest Pacific salmon, weighing up to 40 pounds (though they’re protected in some rivers, and can’t be killed in the Kanektok). Sockeye and chum salmon overlap the king season. Pinks have the shortest run, for a couple of weeks in late July. Silvers begin in August and run through September.

Milton Love, male sockeye salmon in spawning shape and colors, Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara.

We’ll be on the Kanektok for king season, and also the sockeye and chum. There will also be rainbow trout, arctic char, and dolly varden. Dolly Varden, by the way, are the only fish named after a Dickens character.

When salmon enter the river from the sea they are bright and silver, and then as they move into freshwater their colors change for spawning. They spawn and die, and don’t return to the sea, and they don’t feed as they move upriver. They strike flies out of annoyance, or habit, or maybe curiosity, but not for food. By the time they spawn they are dying, deteriorating, and in the short summer feeding season the trout grow huge on eggs washed out of the spawning gravel and the flesh of decaying salmon. Everything feeds on the salmon, both live salmon and dead. Birds, other fish, bears, Alaskans. . . . There are bears in Alaska, but the usual wisdom is that the bears are too intent on fish to be interested in Texans, even plump, well-fed Texans. That’s the usual wisdom, anyway. I’m kinda counting on it.

The State of Alaska warns of two hazards on the Kanektok River: bears and bugs. Don’t tell Kris about the bears.

Tag: Alaska

Alaska Packing List