8/29/02
Additional
Alaska notes
Notes from a conversation with Pat Owens
-in 1959, Alaska becomes a state
-local Indians around the Deshka River were Dininah,
Athabascans, same general group as the Navajo and Apache, Navajo call
themselves Dine
-Athabascan is a Crow Indian word meaning "they
who live on the other side of the reeds"
-Matanuska-Susitna Borough is a municipality, (similar
to a county), the land is supposed to create revenue or be for the public
benefit
-the Deshka River land owned by the Borough will be
dedicated as a park, 3000 acres
-the owner of the Deshka Landing had another landing
20 miles upstream in the Susitna river, the state of Alaska bought that land
from him to control access and bail him out of bad business practices, but this
guy already had the land where the current landing was opened in 1988, so he
built the Deshka Landing and tried to sell that to the state as well, saying he
couldn't make enough money and that boaters wouldn't pay the 20 dollar launch
fee, but the state didn't buy, he had already taken them for a ride, so he sold
lots to multiple owners, the upshot, Deshka Landing opened up the Deshka to a
lot of dickheads, anyway, guys with $50,000 boats can afford the 20 dollars
-in 1988 the Deshka Landing was built, before that,
the closest landing and access from the Susitna River was 1 hour upstream, that
weeded out most of the Deshka River use as it was too hard to get there, too
dangerous for the novice
-with the creation of the Deshka Landing, the Borough
had to take action, there was trash everywhere, outfitter camps, open toilets,
tent cities, there was a big clean up and a beginning of the regulation of use
-our girl Pat at the Borough is known as a bad person
because she put the screws to the unbridled use
-what they are working on is eliminating the idea that
people can dock at every single campsite, the Borough will put in floating
docks and try to control the access and use of the campground area, which is
adjacent to the best fishing in the river because the salmon pool at the mouth
of the Deshka, just as they come out of the Susitna, to accustom themselves to
the difference in water chemistry, as the Susitna is glacial melt water and the
Deshka is all rainwater, tanniny run off
-the river is now silty from wakes and bank erosion
-the locals think the government is arbitrary, that
the Borough just happened to get a grant and now just need to spend the money
somehow
- it is a question of revenue use and resource
management
-the trail that is now at the point, at the mouth of
the river, was once 40' from the water in 1988
- Pat says they are just getting this situation in the
bud compared to the Kenai
Notes from Neil "Sticks" Stichert's lecture
to us about salmon, Neil is fisheries biologist for the USFWS (US
Fish and Wildlife Service) in Anchorage
The health of the river is important to the local
economy. Guides make lots of money
taking people out. The Deshka is an
intact, natural wild fishery, there is no hatchery. The salmon are counted upstream at a fish
weir by state Fish and Game employees.
This count determines to some extent, how the Fish Board will open the
season or shut it down, it is science, but a good dose of politics too. The
habitat needs to be managed to preserve the quality of the fishing.
There are 5 species of salmon in Alaska. Pink and Chum salmon are coastal fish and go
inland up to 20 miles; they spawn in estuaries and intertidal areas. The eggs over winter in gravel, then hatch
and go immediately to the ocean. Chum,
are called Chum because they are not good eating, people use them for dog
food. Sled dogs eat Chum salmon. King,
Coho and Sockeye salmon spawn farther inland; the eggs overwinter in gravels,
in the Spring they hatch into alevins (baby fish with egg sack still attached),
which mature into fry, which then mature into smolts, which are the young
salmon which go out to sea. The fry get
eaten a lot. The borders of the riparian
habitat zone where the fry live are very important for their survival, the
areas give cover, shade and also are a source of food, as insects fall into the
water there.
Sometimes immature males come back to spawn; they are
called jacks. You can catch 10 jacks a
day, but only 1 mature King. The jacks
have mature sperm and they try to spawn too, why not?
On the river banks, plants function to bind together
silty soils, maintaining the shape of the river, controlling flooding and
keeping up a good water quality by controlling silty erosion. When boats go upriver really fast and make
huge wakes, these upstream wakes put stress on the banks that they were not
meant to have. Upstream wakes are bad
and put unnatural forces upon the
river's banks. The shape of the river
channel has co-evolved with plants and animals adapted to a particular channel
shape and stability, not a constant bombardment from upstream wakes and the
ensuing constant erosion of silt and muddying of the water. The unnatural impact of upstream wakes
changes the dimensions of the channel; the plants get farther away from the
water, the river becomes wider and shallower, there is more sun exposure and
heating of the water. Our job on SCA,
with Neil and the USFWS, is to build the banks back out and bring the vegetation
back to the edge of the natural channel. In terms of channel morphology,
(Sticks has a great vocabulary), there is linear impact, i.e., boats and people
break down the banks by docking and climbing up, destroying vegetation,
fostering more erosion. The channel was
straight, now it is jagged with broken down banks. The Borough will enforce a no wake zone for a
mile or more right at the mouth of the river.
Salmon are anadromous fish; they are born in fresh
water, live their adult lives in salt water and return to fresh to spawn. Anadromy is the life cycle of these
fish. There are tons and tons of food in
the north Pacific ocean and also in the north Atlantic. In terms of evolution, the fish simply had an
adaptive radiation out into salt water to take advantage of the rich food
sources.
Steelhead are ocean going Rainbow trout, they are
genetically the same as a fresh water Rainbow, but they breed in separate
populations. Steelhead only breed with
Steelhead. Steelhead (are a transition
species between trout and salmon, and) are actually in the same genus as
salmon. I have an e-mail into Sticks to
ask him more about trout and what they really are. Other trout are Dolly
Varden, from a Dickens novel, they have a grey dress with pink spots, brook
trout, lake trout, and char. Rainbow
trout are land-based Pacific salmon.
Cutthroat trout we saw in Yellowstone, and they are endangered by
introduced lake trout. Grizzly bears eat
spawning cutthroats in the Yellowstone lake and River tributaries.
The Deshka has runs of King, Coho, Pink and Sockeye
salmon. Kings are also known as Chinook,
and Cohos are also known as Silver and Whitefish. Kings and Cohos are piscivorus, carnivorous
fish; they chase a lure. Pink and
Sockeye salmon are planktivores and are red colored because they eat red
colored plankton. In the Deshka, we just
missed a run of Pinks said to be a million fish or more.
Pacific salmon species names:
Onchorynchus (hooked nose) tshawtscha: King
nerka:
Sockeye
keta:
Chum
gorbuscha:
Pink
namycush:
Coho
mykiss:
Steelhead/ Rainbow trout
clarkii:
Cutthroat trout
These above trout are basically landlocked salmon, for
whatever reason, landslides, glacial lakes, etc. Kokanee are landlocked Sockeye salmon. Chars are salmonids that diverged earlier in
the family tree. Of the char there is
Salvelinus malma, Dolly Varden and S.
artica, arctic char. The family
of all of them is Salmonidae.
Salmon are part of the whole ecosystem. You might say salmon are a keystone species,
the mother species, from which all others in the area derive a benefit. The other species all depend on salmon. Salmon eat and are eaten, by many different
organisms. As an indicator experiment,
scientists put low level radioactive isotopes in salmon fry. These fish went out to sea, came back, spawned,
died and later the scientists sampled for the isotopes in the region and found
them in 156 different organisms, in grass, trees, other fish, eagles, bears,
flies, dragonflies, mayflies and other macro invertebrates.
When people have tried to restore salmon runs, it
doesn't work if you just let the fry go.
There needs to be enough biomass to fix a salmon run, What they had to
do was fly and boat in tons of dead salmon to kick start the ecosystem, to get
and support enough life in there for the fry and smolts to be able to eat
things.
On the Kenai River, in Kenai Borough, a lot of land
was sold for private use, for miles and miles. Private owners alter the
environment drastically with roads and docks, insecticides, etc. There is a political aspect too, wealthy
influential people on the river versus needed conservation measures to preserve
the channel and the fish.
Notes from a science book on salmon
-definition of the Pacific northwest: any place salmon
can get to
-because of the effects of post glacial run-off/melt
off, and climatic drying from 14,000 to 5 or 6000 years ago and also a lack of
modern levels of vegetation, salmon may only have reached their modern levels
of abundance 5000 years ago
-abundance of salmon is one of the natural wonders of
the world
-strategy for survival, don't put all your eggs in one
basket, stray salmon will colonize new rivers, this is how they adapted to
glacial advances and retreats, life history variants of the genus, the
different species represent a not putting all eggs in one basket, each species
is an ecotype that finds a niche in the riverine system
-cave men in Europe were salmon fishermen, salmon ran
into Spain and southern France, caves were located near river bottlenecks,
climate was colder, colder waters off of southern Europe
-Columbia River as the mother of all salmon, when
other rivers were iced over or full of glacial outwash, mudslides, all the post
glacial effects which made rivers hard for salmon, the Columbia was always open
and safe
-salmon and habitat are inextricably linked, they have
to be considered as a single unit, "a chain of favorable environments
connected within a definite season in time and place."
-life history variants of each species, in different
parts of the river, a different pathway the salmon follow through a chain of
favorable environments
-as the climate or habitat changes, some life
histories will be favored while others will be disadvantaged, the survival
value of a given life history will vary over time
-life history diversity is a critical key/ legacy of
salmon evolution and survival in complex landscapes in the Pacific northwest,
especially in the dramatically changing Pleistocene ice ages and interstadials
-it is the view of nature itself that has caused
extinction and the failure of efforts to restore salmon, differing assumptions
about nature, industrial economical use of land and water is antithetical to
salmon restoration and to maintaining existing healthy runs
-what we have still in Alaska is an unchallenged myth,
of an unlimited frontier
-you can't have salmon without the whole river
ecosystem intact, with the threats of grazing, logging, mining, electrical
generation, fertilizer and pesticide pollution, sport fishing, commercial
fishing all impacting any given river, the salmon are fighting a losing battle,
all these players blame each other and don't work together
-I saw Lonesome Sam, the only salmon who made it back
to the headwaters of the Salmon River in Idaho, in 1996, they froze his seed,
he looked pretty beat up, God, the only one who made it back to spawn, that is
like Bush winning Florida
-in the north west Olympic Peninsula, Indians
harvested around 45,000 salmon a year, now many of these runs are gone, extinct
-salmon are like silver threads penetrating dep into
the fabric of the Pacific northwest
-hatchery salmon are a technical solution bred out of
the industrial economy world view
-hatchery salmon represent "instrumental
thinking", focusing on the specifics without seeing the forest from the
trees
Notes from the midnight sun
The sun makes a weird arc in the sky. The day is so long because the sun cuts a
horse shoe shaped path. It is strange to
have the arc shaped as a horse shoe, there is a sense of it always being early and
never late, never time to go to bed. I
couldn't sleep good the whole time, even though I tried, I would get up at 3
and 4 in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep because it was light. It was only twilight dark for an hour or so.
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