Alaska, summer 2002

8/28/02

Fred's notes on a summer in Alaska

I had never really wanted to go to Alaska particularly, but then SCA offered me a job in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, along the Deshka River, and I said 'sure', having a feeling right from the very start that all that glitters is not gold.  I had thought that somehow, Alaska would be a last frontier in a beautiful, exciting way, it turned out to a sad parody of a last frontier, recapitulating the worst mistakes of the lower 48 and of not caring to learn from the past.  Manifest Destiny and the idea of an unlimited frontier turned out in the lower 48 to be a bankrupt philosophy which grossly disrespected the native inhabitants and ruined the land from over use.  Manifest Destiny and the notion of an unlimited frontier seemed to, in the past, be a licence to rape all in the way of brutal, uneducated white guys.  Alaska, sadly, seems hell bent on doing the same thing.

The seat if Alaska's government is in Juneau, in the panhandle, but people cannot drive there, it must be approached by boat or plane.  People complain that they cannot go protest the excesses of "government" if they can't drive there.  And, there is an overwhelming sense of anti-government among people in Alaska, overwhelming.  There is a roaded and unroaded part of the state, the majority being unroaded.  A lot of the people seem to be in Alaska because they are trying to get away from something, they are alienated, wear camouflage, hate the government, are Republicans, are possibly survivalists, white supremacists, pack guns and big knives, have big nasty trucks with giant studded tires, and wives with tattoos, knives, stretch marks, dirty t-shirts and oily hair.  They must all think Rush Limbaugh is God.  Some of the trailer parks looked like scenes from Mad Max,  a post nuclear waste land. I was way under- impressed by the culture of Alaska.  I personally don't want any part of a last frontier that lacks even the rudiments of stewardship. Anchorage and Juneau stand against the rest of the state as being bastions of liberalism.  It is funny, however, that a liberal in Alaska, is a liberal Republican, what they would do with a real flaming liberal, I don't know.  That would be like Saddam getting a hold of a Bushie Republican, what an Alaskan might do with a real liberal; there is such a gulf of reality and world view. 

One reoccurring theme is being "off the grid".  This is a badge of real survivalism, real tough guys, real getting away from it all, living "out in the villages", where you can only fly to, or boat to.  Off the grid, you can do what you want, government can't tell you what to do, you can get the subsistence hunting permit, all you need is tons of engines and gasoline to make it through the winter.  Guns too, can't forget lots of guns.  Oh, and don't forget the airplane drops of the newspaper and the radio contact and all the ways to stay hooked into the grid, just at arm's length, so you can get what you want, but not be imposed upon by others.

The government cannot practically make any decisions based on conservation ideals because there are so many people who will knee jerk react against any efforts to restrict their unbridled use of resources.  A person living within driving distance of a grocery store can apply for a subsistence hunting permit and then, if received, this person can hunt with little restriction, to meet their food needs.  The ridiculousness of the subsistence hunting law close to civilization was evident.  This is obviously not a bad idea when people cannot get to a store and there are moose to eat nearby. What Alaska does then, is shoot wolves from planes and helicopters so there will be more moose for hunters. What I see happening is that Alaska's natural resources will just be eroded a little at a time, until popular will, 100 years from now says "enough".  They are doing exactly the same screwed up things that have led to ungulate overpopulation and forest degradation in the lower 48.  When you kill all the predators, then things get way out of balance.  Nature was never meant to be run by fat white guys in camouflage suits and giant trucks trying to kill a moose from as close to the road as they can, so they won't have to drag it too far.

Salmon and fishing are the big deal, as they always have been for people wherever salmon are. Now, in the roaded area, you have all kind of bozos with way expensive boats and lots of beer, and no laws saying a person needs some sort of training on how to use the boat.  This is great for the folks who don't like to be regulated.  Get some hot shit boat, get drunk and go fast, make wakes, bother every one else and then wreck your boat and kill your brother-in-law.  There are few cops out on the water and plenty of assholes.  The worst boats are the air boats, powered by a propeller and some huge engine with no mufflers.  These boats are incredibly obnoxious, I mean OBNOXIOUS!.  They make so much noise it sounds like a jet taking off at an airport.  The people in them have to wear ear phones and wet jump suits to avoid getting wet.  When they drive by, they are like robots, asshole robots who don't care about the effect they have on all the other users who must listen to their stupid ass boat and noise.  We named these boats "dickhead boats" and the owners must be dickheads to think they can make so much noise and not be bothering anyone.  The interesting thing about some boats and owners is the perceived need for camouflage paint jobs and clothing.  The last I checked, water doesn't look like camouflage.  The dickhead boat of the month was all black, with a big male rottweiler in front, with a studded collar and two tough guys with black shirt sleeves cut off and big muscles and a bad attitude, true dickheads.  Add to this even, mad max type float planes, a hang glider float plane everyone with guns, knives, camouflage and trying to live out some boyhood, boy scout type of wilderness fantasy that has been outdated now for a long time.

The propensity of the boaters to want to go fast and race their engines has one very negative impact, upstream wakes that eat away at the river banks and destroy prime habitat for salmon fry and smolts.  Smolts are salmon that are going out to sea.  These guys have to get a fish, but in the process, they are ruining the habitat for the fish, future fishermen, and they just don't care.  When some people saw us working, their first comment was, "things have been fine around here for the last 30 years, you don't need to go changing them now...."

A local archaeologist named Fred Allebach unearthed a recent fisherman's camp and discovered fascinating new evidence of the 21st century Alaskan fisherman's diet: catalogued were: two giant packages of hamburger meat, one can of Van Camp's Pork-n-Beans, 1 giant bag of Doritos, 1 orange, 1 six pack of hard cider and about 85 cans of beer.  From this evidence it was concluded that no fish were caught that day and there may have been a women in camp, as evidenced by the hard cider and the orange.  The lack of fish evidence may have had a feedback loop with the beer drinking behavior, the more beer, the less fish.

The story of the Deshka landing and the current close boat access to the Deshka River is interesting.  The owner of the land put the landing in it's current location to spite the Mat-Su Borough for doing some sort of regulation on his land farther upstream in the Susitna River.  The current location of the Deshka landing is very easy for large concentrations of population in Wasilla, Palmer and Anchorage to access.  Only recently have such large attacks of boaters come into the Deshka, before, you had to really know the Susitna River, to be able to ride _ hour or more down all the channels.  The "Big Su", or Susitna River, starts with the Susitna glacier in Denali National Park.  It is a big, powerful river, not for the novice.  If you dump in the Big Su, between the strong current and cold temperature, you will be dead in 5 minutes if not rescued.  (In Alaska, a large percentage of drownings involve alcohol and of those, 50% of the men have their flies down.  If only they would leave the corpse to let the salmon fry eat them, that would be a fair trade.)  Now the Deshka River  is much closer to the average boater with low skills on the water and they can fairly easily get to the Deshka.  On the weekend during the peak King salmon run, the parking lot there at Deshka Landing is like a Grateful Dead concert, only with trucks, boat trailers, planes, air boats, camouflage style outfits,  to be presentable in public and suitably manly, Rambo knives hanging and fucking country music blaring everywhere.

Another aspect to the boating is that the engines have traditionally been all 2-cycle, which are known as gross polluters.  There is movement now to bring compliance with a rule to have all 4-cycle engines by a certain date.  People whine and cry about this, "big government, telling us what to do....".  Who is going to pay for the new engine????" They imply they are the victims of out of control government, of people who have nothing better to do than figure out fucked up ways to spend tax payer dollars.  This prevailing view of government is so silly, so immature, so uneducated, it is funny, but it is real.  It's scary; it's Alaska.  These guys are fucking Neanderthals with camouflage and guns and engines galore.  If you look out on the river, what you see is gasoline spilled all over the place, oil slicks on the water, and just generally a me-first, who cares about tomorrow type attitude.  In Alaska, if it doesn't have an engine associated with it, it must not be manly.  They have engines for everything, and therefore, need gasoline for everything.  Shit, real men, real natural people, pioneers, last frontier lovers, don't need gas to enjoy the outdoors, but not in Alaska, those motherfuckers need engines for everything.  So if the government wants to keep water and air clean by getting rid of 2-cycle boat engines, as boat use is huge in Alaska, then this must be a conspiracy, a liberal conspiracy, to defraud the hard working survivalists of their quality beer drinking time with the boys, to somehow try to regulate their activity.  They just want to be free to have kids with fetal alcohol syndrome and not have any fucking liberal telling them anything.

When these guys camp out by the Deshka, this is pitiful, ridiculous, sad, the way these folks camp out.  There are sites full of guys just drunk off their asses, with food scattered everywhere. There is shit and toilet paper all over the place, trash all over the place, just a mess.  Wood is ripped off of all available branches.  Low impact use doesn't seem to have made it into the fishing community yet. First of all, campers would complain bitterly about any noise our SCA crew would make, if it woke them up earlier in the morning, like 9 AM, after they had been up all night drinking beer and illegally fishing.  (The river is closed to fishing from 11:PM to 5:AM, this lets some fish run upstream unhindered by blockades of boats and engine noise.) The boat and plane noise was so obnoxious, how could these guys even pretend to want any peace and quiet?  Anyway, they would leave food all over the place, oblivious to the threat of bears or to the even subtler issue of creating a food habituated bear, which is then, a dead bear.  Their answer to bears was one, "there are no bears here, because there are too many people" (even though we saw grizzly tracks not 100 yards from the camp site area) and two," if it bothers us, we will just shoot it." This is wildlife management, Alaskan style.  For the people who did catch salmon, the camp was a mess of salmon bones and parts and skin, sure to eventually attract animals.  For the people who did not catch salmon, it was hamburgers and Doritos, both parties with tons of beer to wash everything down.

The boaters come roaring through a fishing area or marina or slow section of river, oblivious to the effect their wakes have on other boaters and even less aware of how wakes damage the river banks and salmon habitat.  On the Deshka River, people seemed to be in a huge hurry and more interested in giving their engines a work out, than they were in enjoying nature at all.  In fact, there were so many boats at the height of the King salmon season, that fishing lines were tangled, and the whole place was a cacophony of engines 24 hours a day.  Add to this the float planes that come in, with their hellacious noise, and you have just a way over-used resource with practically no regulation.  People don't want regulation yet how can they accept such a low quality of resource use?  Alaskans just seem to be pretty boorish and primitive to me.

This year the Kenai fishery was closed early due to unacceptable high impacts.  The Kenai has gotten pretty fucked up from over use and when you mention the Kenai, everyone knows that things got out of hand there and the fishery is fucked up.  At one point, our river, the Deshka, was the only big King salmon run open on the roaded system.  Seeing as how the Deshka Landing is within easy striking distance of Anchorage, you get all kind of weekend warriors out there to fish.  To get to the Deshka, you must navigate the Susitna for 15 or 20 minutes and this is glacial meltwater and incredibly cold.  A wreck will not last long in this water, yet one after another you see the combination on high powered new boats, camouflage, beer and testosterone, roaring out there, and a surprising number being towed back in and wrecking too.  These guys also bottom out in the shallower upper Deshka and have to be towed out.

In terms of who regulates the fishing itself, it is a Fish Board, which can ignore science and decide how many fish get taken on the basis of politics.  Alaska seems like a place for bozos, run by bozos. The Deshka was shut down for 5 or so years earlier in the 90s from over fishing, but the people are back and we saw them breaking fishing law time and again, time and again.  The outfitters are not supposed to catch fish for their clients, but they do and everyone has myriad ways to circumvent the fishing regulations to get what they want now.  Honor takes a back seat to me- first Alaska. Personally I don't understand why people want to catch and release fish, as a sport, to me that is just stupid.  This clearly impacts the animal and saying that hooks don't hurt fish is like saying dickhead boats don't make noise.  The idea that fish don't feel anything is stupid.  Why do they try to get away????  If you catch it, then you eat it, that is my rule, no catch and release for sport, no releasing a perfectly good salmon just to try and get a bigger one, if you catch it, it's yours.  Fred's rule.  You only release the little ones and the females full of eggs.

The Deshka River used to be much more of a recreational resource, for floaters and rafters.  Now it is broken open as a big time King salmon fishing spot near Anchorage.  The Mat-Su Borough has 11 miles of river front land, where there are only 2 in holdings, on which there is one cabin and one resort.  At the resort, dogs attack you coming off the dock, to buy a fishing licence, so they don't seem to be very good businessmen, who wants to eat a burger with dogs attacking you all the way to the restaurant?  Maybe the dogs don't recognize people without camouflage?  Anyway, the Borough wants to manage this resource and seems to have the political will to vote for some regulatory powers and some stricter management.  Surprisingly, Mat-Su voters passed a $250,000 bond for this at the Deshka, which also includes other Park upgrade work in the Borough, although the voters may have been somewhat bamboozled by thinking it was all campground creation.  The USFWS also had a $45,000 grant for material we used to shore up the banks and for collecting willow cuttings which we planted. The Borough is working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, SCA and others, to get the Deshka area fixed up, and so it will not have the same fate as the Kenai River down south.  The level of use at the Deshka is incredible, incredible, with good runs of King, Pink, Coho, people are coming out to get some fish.  Apparently the Pink run is in the millions.  Yet it has not gone as bad as the Kenai, due to the lack of private in holdings.  With little private land, the Borough can manage the river as a whole entity, in it's 11 mile jurisdiction and not have every private owner working at cross purposes to the over benefit of the river, and the fishery. 

To the Mat-Su Borough's credit, they are taking steps to mitigate the use, even early steps, compared to the Kenai River.  I do not envy Pat's job, as she is in the position of trying to educate and modify the use of a bunch of bone heads.  She manages an area the size of West Virginia, alone, with 2 bone headed helpers. The higher ups in the Borough told me before I arrived, "there are no bear out there, maybe an occasional black bear." We arrive and find out that there are indeed grizzly right nearby and there are black bears in the campground turning over garbage cans and looking for food.  In Alaska, people are much more casual about bears.  You can just shoot one and then claim self defense.  The brazen behavior and gun toting mentality probably does freak the bears out some and keep them away but bears come for food, that is a truth, a given, they will come if there is food left out.  Like the lower 48, even now in some regions, people see no good reason for there even to be predators or bears and want to kill them all.  This is a way out dated, primitive attitude.  In Alaska, people are determined to not be told what to do by a bunch of stinking lower 48 liberals, they want to be free to kill all the wolves and bears, fish out all the salmon, mine, timber harvest and generally ruin the whole place just like we did in the lower 48 in the last 100 years.  It is the last frontier, it will never end, will it?

At our camp, which was adjacent to the Borough compound out on the river, next to Jeff and Wade's's cabin, etc, when Indi and I got there, there was a huge pile of trash collected from the campground just laying near the beach.  Jeff said, "there are no bears, the stuff is fine right there." I insisted to Pat later that the trash be hauled off before my kids got there. Later I went off in the bushes nearby and found 8 to 10 bags torn to shreds and pilfered by bears.  The trash storage in the camp was in non-bear proof containers.  The Borough was unable to provide us with completely adequate food storage, as one bear box was delivered a mile down stream and it was too heavy and dangerous to manage in the small boat we had.  We ended up taking steps to secure the area by putting the outside trash inside the half finished cabin and then nailing a piece of ply wood over the unfinished door during the day when we were gone and also at night.  The cabin was unfinished because the carpenters hired to work on it were volunteers and spent most of their time fishing, ("we are volunteers...") and worked only a couple of hours a day and even then, did pretty shoddy work.  The famous line of one of the carpenters was, "we are trying to do as little as possible as fast as we can".  Our students picked up on the discrepancies between SCA policy and how Borough and local hangers on-ers were behaving, in terms of low impact and trash etc., so we had to deal with our kids slacking and not respecting our low impact rules, because, why should they, if everyone else is jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, why can't we?  The students moved to the level of least compliance possible.  This was not the SCA I had envisioned, but it was interesting and educational, at least it is getting a decent essay!

One interesting point to the idea that there are no bears.  Jeff said, one, there are no bears, and two, they learn not to come around because they are shot.  So I wondered, how does that knowledge help the bear if it is dead?  How do they learn and pass this on if they are dead?  Trying to emphasize even a little bear safety with the Borough employees was like pulling teeth.  They just do not have a culture of safety like the Park Service or the Forest Service.  Wade one time shot at a bear that was eating fish guts out of beached boats.  He told me later, "I know you would have preferred me to kill it to protect your kids...." God, Wade was a pin in the ass. Shit, it was just a little black bear.  His and my connection was so off he thought I would prefer him to kill a bear.  Jeff shot at the same bear with his pistol when it came into our camp while we were eating hot dogs on the 4th of July.  That bear wouldn't even have been around if they had bear proof trash containers at the campground, had Jeff protected his own trash.  There we are with mouthfuls of hot dog and there is a pistol being fired right towards the river, with no view of whether there are people there.  God help them.  The bear runs away, doomed.  When I first got there and wanted to talk about bear safety to Jeff and Wade, they seemed to take it as a personal insult, that I would not believe that "there are no bears." I told Pat we would leave if there was a bear incident.  I think that got her attention.  I also found a huge fresh bear shit not 50 yards from our camp, no bears huh?

One astute student asked me, "if they are all armed, and shoot bears as their method of camp cleanliness and in self defense, and we are walking on a trail behind the camps in the woods, will they shoot us?" No one did, luckily.  This would not be the kind of place to do a gag with a gorilla suit.

Further dissonance with SCA values and Borough employee behavior came when Wade confiscated a camp full of gear.  He was pumped up, had his gun ready, telling us, "when you take a gun out, you have to use it, don't take it out if you are not going to use it..." He had his Clint Eastwood 44 magnum, which he delighted in flashing to us periodically.  This program had way too many out of control elements to be appropriate but at the same time, the conservation work was much more direct and satisfying than just trail work.  Here we had direct impacts on salmon habitat, our work had immediate effects and a great rationale.  Trail work is much more diffuse and harder to rationalize as "conservation".

On SCA, we get thrown into these impossible situations, where the agency coordinators give us misleading or false information, where the whole thing is an out of control juggernaught we are expected to bring some rhyme and reason, some order to, to comply with a huge book full of SCA rules.  "There are no bears." That is a red flag statement right there.  How can you be in Alaska and there be no bears?  If higher ups in the Borough say also "there are no bears" and they perceive this to be the truth, what other truths are different in such radically different world views?  "This is Alaska...." is another refrain, referring to the zaniness, lack of law, lack of everything, just all fucked up, snafu (situation normal all fucked up).  There were grizzlies fishing for salmon 10 miles up stream, grizzlies near our camp as revealed by tracks.  This is a safety issue with 6 teenagers, yet my agency is in total denial. There is no clear path for the SCA crew leader, no guideline on how to deal with massive, institutional boneheadedness.  Just south of us in Alaska, SCA crew leaders carry shot guns to deal with bears.  We had pepper spray, but only after insisting and having to take all kind of shit from Jeff and Wade.  We are under pressure to perform, to uphold SCA's reputation, yet we are thrown into really inappropriate situations.  Who knows how SCA would treat us if we refused to work in such weird contexts?  This is a grey area, who really gets to decide if a project is inappropriate?  Crew leaders who make waves may never be seen again.

Practically speaking, how can SCA explain to an entity like the Mat-Su Borough, just what SCA is and what the institutional expectations are?  The Borough is essentially a county government.  If SCA at the administrative level cannot give the Borough a clear picture, then are crew leaders supposed to just gloss over all those rules and protocols?  Do we need to educate the Borough one rule at a time, as the Borough proceeds to run us up against all the rules?   What happened here was that Bruce Urban was supposedly the coordinator, but in reality, he just came up with the money.  Pat Owens had all the on the ground details, but she had no administrative contact with SCA.  There was no indication from Bruce that Pat would be the main contact.  Whether either of them read the Coordinator's Handbook from SCA is doubtful, so they had no clue as to SCA's expectations. I don't think Bruce had any idea what SCA was all about.  He was a really nice guy, he and his girlfriend made us cookies, but he was not at the same professional level with SCA as someone from the Borough should have been. So, this was the old coordinator switch, that agencies are so famous for.  One more time.  I think SCA should have gotten this earlier, made it clear to the Borough earlier, but we were thrown in, did a decent job, but suffered some with all the flux.  SCA thought this was Alaska, it had to be good, little did they know that "this was Alaska" in a real, home boy, snafu kind of way that the locals love to sing the praises of.  "But this is Alaska....." I see Alaska now as some sort of modern Hieronymous Bosch painting, a seething mass of iniquity and ineptitude, with the innocent animals running away from the modern Neanderthals, with liberals being burned at the stake and tortured and laughing anti-government bird-headed monsters ruling, eating $8.00 bags of chips from usurious store owners fleecing all passers by with 3 year old ham for $5.00 a slice. The USFWS people involved were not impressed by the level of Borough administration, as no one seemed to be able to be pinned down to make a solid decision.  People seemed apprehensive to take full responsibility and wanted to shift as much around as possible, so perhaps when blame might come, from reactionary constituents, everyone would be stained and implicated, they could all go down together.

This is really all about long term versus short term, and whether anyone can learn from the past. No one seems to want to sacrifice anything, it is me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, never a thought of us or that humanity is in this together, with nature too.  The notion of stewardship is glaringly absent in your run of the mill Alaskan mentality.  This is not so much different than the lower 48, it's just that in Alaska, I expected things to be more pristine.  Nature still was pretty impressive and pristine.  The views gave the impression that the ice ages might have just ended yesterday.  What was not pristine was the level of culture and my disappointment in my fellow humanity. 

(Letter from Fred in Alaska, SCA trip)

6/16/02   received 6/21/02 in NJ

Dear Mom & Dad,

There is so much to say about Alaska & this particular place. The salmon are the most interesting to me and I am learning a lot about salmon biology because there is a U.S. Fish & Wildlife biologist out here w/us and he will be directing the revegetation project.  We will be providing the bulk of the labor.  The project is necessary because the Deshka River is very popular, is a major salmon run of pink and King salmon and in Alaska, if you can’t get to it with a motor powered vehicle, you probably aren’t going.

This place, during the King salmon run, is just packed with boats and fisherman, who have no concept of the environment or low impact camping and these guys are probably all Republicans who are also survivalists and alienated from society and in Alaska to get away from rules and laws and cops, and these guys land their boats on any shore they can and after years and years of this, have started to break down the banks very badly. Our job is to restore the banks and thereby, create more habitat for salmon fry(baby salmon) .

An interesting discovery we made yesterday by inspecting the trash of an illegal campsite, is about the diet of the Alaskan fisherman. First, only 25% of people will actually catch a King salmon, or maybe that is 25% of tourists who come to fish for King salmon, anyway, what they eat, as discovered by your son, the archaeologist (you remember at one time in my youth, I wanted to be an archaeologist). - - 1 can Van Camps Pork and Beans, 1 extra large bag of Doritos, 1 orange, 2 large packs of hamburger meat, 1 6-pack of hard lemon-aid and about 85 beers.  So basically, they eat just enough food to settle their stomachs from the massive quantities of beer.

Also, over 1000 people die from boating accidents every year, 10% of those drown; about _ of those deaths involve alcohol and 50% of drunk men who drown, have their flies down(true).  So, the fishing here is not some kind of bucolic, placid, wilderness thing. The place is over-run by boats, airplanes, float planes, airboats and these guys are essentially like grown-up boy scouts w/ beer and big engines; it is pretty pathetic actually.

I would say Alaska is about 100 years behind the rest of the country in terms of resource management and the legislature here are representing people who want to exploit resources on their own terms and not be told what to do by anybody.  Eventually the state will be forced to manage resources more closely, like happened in the “lower 48".  The Mat-Su Borough is beginning to manage this river, as the Borough (county-municipality), owns the river banks. 

And, by the way, there are elevator buildings in Anchorage, some maybe 10-15 stories high.

The students are very good, this is a nice crew, w/a nice tone, good balance and everybody so far has been just fine.  We can swim in the river after work.  We have to haul our water, daily, by taking a small motor boat upstream and fill water jugs from a spring, that takes about an hour.  The river water is too fishy and also has a lot of tannin, which clogs the filters.

I’m having a good time, working hard and enjoying myself and getting paid good $, not a bad deal.  The mosquitoes are bad, but not terrible, not like the Everglades.

I hope all is well in Medford Leas.  Oh, also, this run of King salmon in the Deshka River, is a natural run, not a hatchery run.

Love, Fred

Letter received from Fred Allebach, in Palmer, Alaska, dated 6/28/02, received 7/05/02

Dear Mom and Dad,

Things are going quite well w/ a good crew & Indi (co-leader) and I are getting along well . Aside from the work being hard physically and my body still adjusting to working so hard, everything is just great.  We only have 8 more days of work and then it will be pack up the camp and go on our recreational trip.  On the rec. trip , we may do some sight seeing rather than go on a hike, maybe go to Denali National Park and see the tallest mt. in North America, go see some glaciers etc. Or maybe we will go on a hike, we’ll see.

The King salmon run is almost over. King are also called Chinook. We ate one that Todd caught and we grilled it inside the foil, w/ soy sauce and garlic and it was very good, all stewed in it’s own juice and garlic.  I will have some great pictures to send you of BIG FISH.

There are four other species of salmon - pink, sockeye, coho or silver and chum. Some Rainbow Trout are also in the salmon genus and sometimes they go to sea and come back to breed also, then they are called Steelhead.  We haven’t eaten any other than King salmon because there are none others running now. The whole world wants a King Salmon!  Apparently the Chums are not good eating and they use it for dog food, for the sled dogs.  The Sockeye and Pink salmon eat plankton, the Coho and King eat the fish, Chum I don’t know.

We have seen some black bear and also some grizzly tracks & droppings, but there has been no trouble.  There are lots of moose around as well.

The Mat-Su web site will probably put up something about our project after we are done.  We are not at an official campground but at a Borough Camp area w/ 2 cabins and a bunch of picnic tables., and a tarp over our kitchen area, a fire area, outdoor toilet( that is just a commode/ no building around it and our tents off in the weeds on one side & then the river is right close by, so in a way, it is like being “trailer trash”. It is messy and we are not in control of everything, as there are others involved from the Borough, well-meaning people but sometimes a pain in that they talk too much or want to get too involved when that is not their place.

The salmon in the river are all wild and none farmed or stocked. This is a real wild salmon river, so there is no competition from stocked fish.  Farmed salmon are different, they don’t compete but they sometimes escape, and in that case, if they are Atlantic salmon and they interbreed w/ Pacific salmon, that would not be good because then the fish would not behave like Pacific salmon should.  As far as canned salmon goes, you just have to believe the label (or order from your cousin in Valdez) to certify it is wild.  We are @ 40 miles from the ocean, so we have no salt water fish, but seals do come up the river here, after the salmon; they come into the fresh water.

King salmon are fattier and they are the biggest salmon, so you get steaks, but the flavor is not real “salmony”.  It is close between Kings & Sockeye for the best taste.  Sockeye eat plankton and the meat is really pink, really oceany flavor.  Kings are less that way but w/ more of a fatty taste, like more meaty.

Well, that’s it for my current report.  I hope you are both well.     Love, Fred