Field and Stream - Alaska RSS

Gear Review: Cabela's "Perfekt" 10-Inch Boots by Meindl

JayCassell — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:39:15 -0500

Last month I had the opportunity to hunt for blacktail deer on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Our group of six hunters lived on a houseboat, took skiffs into shore in the morning, hunted all day, then took the skiff back at night. If you got a deer, you’d radio the boat and they’d send the skiff out to get you.
Kodiak is incredibly tough, steep country, with mountains rising from the shore up to 4000+ feet. For this hunt, I was wearing Cabela’s Perfekt 10-Inch boots, by Meindl – a German company that’s well known for making sturdy, durable, high- quality boots. These did not disappoint! The break-in time was practically nothing, the boots kept me warm in 30-degree weather (they have 400 grams of Thinsulate insulation), and the treads made me feel like a mountain goat on some of those dicey ridges. The boots have a layer of cork that is designed to protect your joints from shock, plus mold to your foot for custom support. No complaints on that – they worked, and with the Nubuck outer and breathable Gore-tex membrane, they stayed dry. Weight is 4.4 pound per pair, price is $230 – well worth it when you consider that lesser boots might have failed on this hunt. – Jay Cassell

Should Native Alaskan Subsistence Hunters Have to Buy a Duck Stamp?

Online Editors — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:32:38 -0400

From the Anchorage Daily News:
As waterfowl wing their way to northern nesting grounds by the thousands, key Alaska Native groups are fighting a new federal requirement that subsistence hunters must buy duck stamps….

Native members of a migratory bird panel, meeting in Anchorage last week, said the law is unfair.

Many subsistence hunters don't work and can't afford the stamps or the $100 [for not having one]. Others can't buy the stamps because they're not available in all villages, they said….

John Reft, representing the Sun'aq tribal government in Kodiak, told the panel he's worried about villagers that don't have money.

"These people in outerlying villages don't have jobs," he said. "They want to eat, support their families. That's all we want to do here, just to survive."

Check out the full article and tell us your reaction.

Bob Marshall: What Coastal Drilling Means For Sportsmen

Online Editors — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:18:32 -0400

Editor's Note: Welcome to The Conservationist, a new blog on FieldandStream.com, where at least three times per week we'll be posting conservation news, analysis, and commentary from Conservation Columnist Bob Marshall, Contributing Editor Hal Herring, and Deputy Editor Jay Cassell.

So what does President Obama's decision to open once-protected areas of our coasts to energy drilling mean for fish, wildlife and sportsmen?

It could be terrible. It could be bad. Or it might not matter much at all.

The Terrible: If this derails the push for meaningful carbon reduction legislation, it will be a black mark on his presidency, and a disaster for fish and wildlife and sportsmen.

There is no greater threat to our outdoor pursuits than global warming, and the major cause of that problem is the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, primarily from fossil fuels. There are alternative fuels, but the only way to encourage development and use of those fuels is to place a penalty on the production of carbon. That's what cap and trade is all about.

Even the energy industry agrees the known untapped sources in these offshore areas can't make a serious dent in our needs. During the Bush Administration, the federal Energy Information Agency said the impact on prices would be “negligible”– and even that wouldn’t happen for 30 years. But the longer the nation believes we have a ready supply of cheap carbon-emitting fuels, the longer it will resist converting to cleaner technologies. No pain, no gain.

There is also fear this could lead us on a slippery slope. By opening these previously protected areas off the coasts, the administration will be faced with this question: If the energy emergency means those pristine oceans off the east coast must be sacrificed, why should the Rocky Mountain front be any different?

Throwing our petrol patriots a bone has never slated their thirst in the past.

The Bad: As a lifelong resident of coastal Louisiana, which supports 4,000 oil and gas platforms - the largest such concentration in the world - I think I can speak with some authority on the impacts of offshore drilling.

The first thing to understand is that the most obvious risk is not the most serious.

While the nation this week has been gripped by photos of a rig that exploded, likely killing at least 11 workers and now pumping untold gallons of crude into the Gulf, such disasters are the rare exception to the rule in offshore drilling. Certainly the risks are great in any such event; we'll have to wait to see how much damage this does to the coastal estuaries and beaches, if any. But if tightly regulated, constantly watched and slapped with crippling fines when it breaks the rules, the offshore energy industry can be safe and have very little impact on fish and wildlife.

However, when allowed to bully a state, this industry can do horrendous damage, most of which takes place onshore. This includes a deep and lasting disruption to both natural and social infrastructure by the on-shore component of development such as transmission pipelines, canal dredging, refineries, and port facilities.

Since permitting was required in the 1970s, as much as 10,000 miles of pipelines were dredged for oil and gas work through our coastal marshes. No one has an accurate count of how many miles were dredged before that, but some experts think it was at least as many.

Louisiana's coastal estuaries - the largest and most productive in the lower 48, an ecosystem that 90 percent of all Gulf marine species depend on and that is important to 70 percent of the continent's migratory waterfowl - has been reduced by 2,000 square miles in 70 years, and experts believe almost 40 percent of that loss can be attributed to oil and gas industry impacts.

Did that have to happen?

No. But efforts to force the energy industry to be more environmentally sensitive were defeated under heavy industry lobbying.

There are much greener ways to develop offshore energy than what happened in Louisiana. But sportsmen in states now facing this challenge should be prepared to hear from the petro-patriots that all those environmental safeguards are just too expensive. Let them win that argument, and your fish and wildlife habitat and quality of life will suffer greatly.

Welcome to The Wild Chef, a New Blog on Field & Stream!

Online Editors — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:49:07 -0400

If you’re like us (and we’re pretty certain you are), then you enjoy cooking and eating wild game and fish almost as much as you enjoy hunting and fishing. Almost. And it’s because of our love for all things rare, grilled, poached, fried, you name it, that we decided to serve a second helping of the magazine’s popular food column, The Wild Chef, in blog form on fieldandstream.com. You can check back each week for cooking tips, food news, stories, and, of course, some killer recipes.

But we want to include you as much as possible. We're looking for recipes from our readers, photo galleries of your camp cuisine, and will be running monthly contests in which you can win great prizes. After all, a good meal is always best when shared with friends, and we think this blog should be the same way.

On that note, we’d like to start this blog off right: with a recipe. This one comes from Robert Gelman, executive chef of NYY Steak in New York City (in Yankee Stadium, to be exact). Hopefully you’ll find the time to cook the dish this weekend. If you do, let us know how it turns out.

Rainbow Trout Stuffed with Lemon & Dill
A simple, rustic dish that any weekend recreational fisherman can execute, yet one which I feature on my menu at NYY Steak because of its clean flavors, which gives the dish a certain simple refinement that chefs everywhere yearn to capture. —Chef Robert Gelman

Ingredients:
One rainbow trout, approximately 1 pound
1 tsp. coarse sea salt
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
3 pieces of thinly sliced lemon
2 tbsp. of roughly chopped fresh dill
1 tbsp. of olive oil

1. Clean trout, scaling the fish and then removing head, gills, and bones, leaving both filets attached and intact with skin on
2.    After patting the fish dry, season both filet sides liberally with sea salt and black pepper.
3.    Lay lemon slices side by side on one of the filet sides.
4.    Top lemon slices with roughly chopped dill.
5.    Fold over the other filet on top of the lemon and dill.
6.    Heat oil in a sauté pan with large enough surface area to make contact with the entire length of the trout.
7.    When pan is near smoking hot, place trout in, searing the skin on one side of the fish, letting it get crispy.
8.    After a minute and a half, turn trout over, searing the second side of skin to crispy.
9.    The trout can then be finished in an oven for a minute or two, or simply continued to cook in the pan.
10.    Remove trout from pan and place in center of a plate. Drizzle a good quality olive oil over the skin on topside. As an accompaniment, try a nice crisp watercress salad, and a touch of crème fraîche.

The Ghost of Sheep River

colinkearns — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:57:26 -0400

As far as I can see, there is no top and no bottom to this central Alaskan mountainside. The clouds are low and solid, and the blowing sleet is almost horizontal. My field of view is about as expansive as it would be inside a living room. This is terrain where you could walk off a cliff in the dark. But the mountain’s 60-degree pitch, and a heavy backpack loaded with a rifle and 10 days’ worth of food and gear, has me moving slowly and carefully.

The hood of my rain jacket is pulled down to shield my eyes. I lift it a bit to check on my hunting partners. My brother Danny, an ecologist with the University of Alaska, is behind me. To my right, I can make out the shape of Chris Flowers, a buddy who flies 737s for Alaska Airlines. When Flowers isn’t working in airplanes, he plays in them. He and his Piper Super Cub live in a private airstrip community in Anchorage. (Imagine a golf-course community except there’s only one fairway, and it’s 100 feet wide and 1,300 feet long.) Two days ago, Flowers shuttled us to a gravel bar along a glacial river about 40 miles into the northern end of the Alaska Range.

We’ve been walking since. The first day we waded through spruce bogs and alder thickets while downpours flooded the game trails with calf-deep water. On the second day the rain let up, but the brush got nastier: The spruce gave way at higher elevations to willow and dwarf birch so thick we had to pry it apart and walk through sideways. Now that we’ve entered the alpine tundra, we’re climbing into clouds and snow.

Finding a Dall ram in this weather is tough. I don’t care how good your eyes are; it’s difficult to spot a white critter against a snowy background in the middle of a whiteout. We could spook sheep without even seeing them, so we agree to hole up. Before long we arrive at a shoulder of flat land on an otherwise steeply rising ridge. We scrape away enough of the slush to pitch a tent. Later, during a break in the snow, I open the flap and stick my head out. We’re camped on a narrow saddle between two cirques. Within 10 feet on either side of us is land too steep to stand on. It occurs to me that a ram’s survival strategy relies on its willingness to go places where you won’t. It’s sort of like a game of chicken, but I can’t decide if the game is played against the sheep, the land, or your own mind.

Game From the Ice Age

Dall sheep are creatures of the cold. Their genetic ancestors first crossed from Siberia to the New World during the Pleistocene Ice Ages, following routes along the now-vanished Bering land bridge. For millennia after their arrival, there was probably just one species of sheep ranging from Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula down into what is now the Lower 48. Eventually, the population diverged into three distinct species: the snow sheep of Siberia; the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (including the desert bighorn subspecies) of the western United States and southern Canadian Rockies; and the Dall sheep (including the stone sheep subspecies) of Alaska, northern British Columbia, and southern Yukon.

Hunting Dall sheep is more complicated than simply locating them. The real trick is finding a legal-size ram. In most of Alaska’s hunting districts, a legal ram must meet at least one of three requirements: (1) Both horns are “broomed,” or broken; (2) one of the horns shows at least eight annuli, or annual growth rings; or (3) one of the horns is full curl, describing a 360-degree circle when viewed from the side. These requirements describe only about 3 to 8 percent of the sheep population across the seven Alaskan mountain ranges where they live. Many guided sheep hunters obsess over additional attributes, such as extra length or mass, which might signify a trophy-size ram. Most do-it-yourself hunters operating on a limited budget, however, will agree that any legal ram is a trophy.

To reliably find rams, you need access to a lot of land containing a lot of sheep. If you know of such a place, it’s not the sort of thing you advertise to strangers. In fact, Danny was tipped off to our current hunting area when he overheard a snippet of conversation between a bush pilot and an outfitter. They were talking about a valley—I’ll call it Sheep River—with a good supply of rams and an absence of hunting pressure. A year later, Danny happened to fly over said valley. He was impressed by the terrain, but most exciting was the absence of landing strips. There was only one way to get into the area: land in a neighboring valley and bushwhack through a couple of thousand vertical feet of nasty terrain. We began making our plans.

The First Stalk

In the evening, just when our ridgeline campsite is beginning to feel like a prison cell, the snow lets up and the lower clouds break apart. Soon it’s possible to get a few minutes of visibility between each passing mass. We scramble uphill toward the eastern crest of the Sheep River drainage. On the leeward side of the ridge, we wade through a small cornice of snow, then emerge on a windblown plateau. It’s the highest piece of land within miles. If not for the foggy conditions, we’d be looking westward over Sheep River and eastward into a series of creeks that drain into another large valley. Only a fraction of that is actually visible, but we do the best we can do with our binoculars and a spotting scope.

I notice a faint trail in the snow on a parallel ridge toward the east. Scanning leftward I see that the trail disappears over the top of the ridge. I scan rightward and notice that the trail terminates in a sheep’s body. I direct the guys to what I’m looking at. With the color of the animal locked in our minds—they’re just a touch yellower than fresh snow—we begin to see that the slope is peppered with at least a dozen sheep feeding above and below the first one. It’s impossible to see horns in the hazy conditions, but about a third of the sheep are much smaller and spindlier than the rest. It’s a group of lambs and ewes.

A few snow squalls blow through as we watch the sheep. Soon the sun sets, and we pick our way back toward the saddle where we pitched camp. A hundred yards from the tent we cut two fresh sets of caribou tracks. I’m reminded of the caribou permit I brought along in case we encountered a bull within a reasonable distance of the landing strip. I had that distance fixed at 3 or 4 miles, but the sight of these tracks tempts me to stretch that number outward.

Throughout the night we have to knock frozen sleet off the walls of the tent every hour, but by midmorning the skies are clearing up. By noon it’s downright brilliant, and the sun is coming off the melting snow as bright as a welder’s arc. We’re back up on the north-south drainage divide high above Sheep River. I’m glassing a band of five Dall rams that are about 2 miles ahead of us. The sheep are out on a westward-jutting spur of this same ridgeline. They’re lower in elevation, bedded in a shadow of the mountain below the snow line. One of the rams looks good.

Danny takes a long look through the scope. “He is big,” he says. “But we’re just too far out to say for sure.”

Sheep have amazing eyesight—about the equivalent of a human using a pair of 8X binoculars. To stay out of view and make a stealthy approach, we figure that we’ll have to surrender our hard-fought elevation and climb back down into the bed of Sheep River. From there, we can use the channel and the brush as camouflage while we ascend the valley to a point even with the bedded rams.

It takes about four hours for us to get into the vicinity of the sheep. We sneak a look at them and mark their position in relation to a prominent outcropping of rock. Then we head higher up the valley in order to put a mountain between us and them. Once we’re completely shielded from view, we leave the valley floor and start trudging back uphill.

By the time we approach their elevation, we haven’t laid eyes on the rams for more than an hour. It’s likely that they’ll be up and feeding in the cool of the evening. For now we have to trust that they’re in the same place. Tomorrow Flowers has to start walking out to his plane, so this is his only chance. We agree that he’ll take the stalk.

The wind seems O.K. Flowers just has to work his way around the mountain until he comes to the shoulder of rock. When he crawls around that, he should be in sight of the rams but still a couple of hundred yards away. Hopefully he’ll have plenty of time to check out the larger ram and, if it looks good, take a shot.

Danny and I stay well behind. As Flowers nears the shoulder of rock, he freezes in one of those you got me! positions and then slowly collapses his body onto the ground. He peers around to us and points in an unexpected direction—essentially straight up the mountain from us. I lift my head a few inches and stare into the faces of four rams that are very concerned about having company. I could throw a rock to them. I hear a clattering of hooves and see that the fifth and largest ram is already skittering up the mountain. Without pausing he vanishes over an impossible wall of rock. The other four follow in his path at a leisurely pace. Within a few seconds they’re so far gone that they might as well be on Mars.

Danny sits down, takes off his hat, and scratches his head: “That was a legal ram.”

The Rams Return

The best piece of sheep hunting advice I’ve heard came from a bush pilot out of Wasilla, Alaska. “Find the one you want,” he said, “and stay with it.” At the time I had little idea how important this was, but since then my faith in the tactic has been fortified by a number of experiences. I’ve been involved in three Dall sheep kills that began with one or more failed stalks and played out over miles of terrain. Danny’s taken part in even more, including the pursuit of a ram that lasted a few days.

We wake in the morning with the idea that we’ll do it again. Flowers says good-bye and begins the long hike to his plane. Danny and I figure that we’ll continue northward by following Sheep River upstream. We’ll glass as much of the country as possible from down low, and hopefully get a fresh fix on the rams before committing to a new climb.

The valley floor narrows as we get higher. Soon it’s a quarter-mile-wide passage covered in nothing but ankle-high tundra and the gnawed skeletal remains of caribou. The grizzly and wolf scat we’re seeing is mostly packed hair and shattered bone. The same craggy peaks occupy the skyline throughout the morning, and the warming air causes the snow to retreat farther up the mountains. We continue to get fresh glimpses into tributaries and basins where the slopes are gentle enough to allow the growth of grasses and sedges that support sheep. We turn up several small herds of cow caribou and a distant band of bedded Dall ewes and lambs, but there’s no trace of the five rams. Once we’ve covered a few miles it’s possible to see all the way to the head of the drainage. There’s no doubt that the rams have left the valley.

We discuss a few travel routes. For me, logic says to climb eastward, up to the drainage divide that we spotted the sheep from yesterday. For Danny, curiosity says to climb westward, in order to get a glance into a new valley that we haven’t seen yet.

“You know that we’ll get all the way up there and see the rams on the east side, don’t you?” I ask.

“Yes, probably,” he said.

“But you still want to go west?”

“Yup.”

We reach the crest at dusk and lay out our camp in a low spot amid some boulders. At daybreak I’m surprised to see that there’s a group of 17 ewes and lambs feeding just up the ridge from us. The animals look faint and ghostlike in the low light of dawn, and they don’t appear to be going anywhere. Although it’s highly unlikely to see a mature ram with a gang of ewes during the fall months, we’re reluctant to spook the sheep out of a simple reverence for animals that aren’t spooked. As the morning heats up, the ewes begin feeding downslope. Soon we can scoot past them by dropping down along the opposite side of the crest.

It’s slow going throughout the day. There’s a lot of land to look at. We glass a pair of three-quarter-curl rams bedded on a knife’s-edge ridge and several more groups of ewes and cow caribou. But we don’t see anything promising until the afternoon. We’re sitting on a peak while I look through the spotting scope. I comment to Danny that it’s possible to see all the way across the valley to where we’d spooked the five rams two days earlier. I crank up the scope’s magnification.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I say. “There are five white dots up above that same spot.”

Danny takes a look through the scope. “That’s got to be them,” he says. “We must have passed them by. Or maybe they came back.”

Neither of us says anything, but we both know what the other is thinking: We’ve got to climb down this mountain, wade across Sheep River, backtrack down the valley through the alders, then climb back up the other side.

At first it goes pretty well. A two-hour hike puts us on a flat tableland above Sheep River. We continue toward the creek, and a moving set of caribou antlers catches my eye. They belong to a mature bull headed our way. I go prone and rest the barrel of my rifle over my backpack. The bull enters the bed of a tributary stream and then climbs out 75 yards away. He cuts sharply leftward and exposes his right side. I lead him just a couple of inches into the shoulder, and the Ruger .300 mag. puts a clean hole in the rib cage midway up the body. The bull takes a few more steps and tips over.

“I don’t want to be a downer,” Danny says. “But this trip just turned into a hell of a lot of work.”

The Last Stalk

The rams are gone in the morning. We take a good look around, then start heading back up Sheep River. Soon we’re stumbling across our own boot prints from two days earlier. We travel about 2 miles and stop to glass a short, steep basin carved into the mountainside to the east. The basin is shaped like a giant soup bowl. A wedge of the bowl is missing where two small streams come together and spill out of the basin toward Sheep River. The two stream branches are separated by a narrow dividing ridge that rises from the basin floor and climbs toward the crest of the wall. The ridge is carpeted in grass and has a well-worn sheep trail running up its spine. As I study the ridge, I see a shoe-size piece of white amid some boulders. There are no other rocks that color, and there’s something about the way that it reflects light.

“I’ve been looking at that, too,” says Danny. “But it hasn’t moved.”

“Uh-oh!” I almost shout. “There it did. You see that?”

We’re looking at the muzzle of a sheep. To get a look at the rest of the head, we sneak over and climb the wall of the basin that is opposite the muzzle. It belongs to a three-quarter-curl ram. Sure enough, he’s with the other four. Two of them are grazing just downslope. The largest of the group, the legal ram, is bedded down.

Getting to them seems like a laughable notion. They have a commanding view in every direction and would be gone in a wink if they saw us. But there’s got to be a way, I tell myself. I look carefully at the small stream in the basin floor. The stream channel is cut deeply into the gravel in places, and the left fork runs perpendicular to the sheep’s line of sight. It wouldn’t be much fun, but if a guy was desperate enough he could belly-crawl right up the stream channel for a few hundred yards. If he kept low in the water, really low, the sheep would be looking right over his back. Then, when he got to the toe of the ridge, he’d be shielded from view by the curvature of the hill. A long belly-crawl up the trail on the ridge’s spine would deliver him into range.

We retreat toward the mouth of the basin and stash most of our gear. Then we start crawling up the streambed. After 15 minutes my hands and knees are numb from the cold rocks and water. My legs and back are cramped. But we continue along, dragging ourselves across the ground like worms. Now and then I peek up behind a jumble of rocks to see a tuft or two of white on top of the ridge. The sheep haven’t budged. It takes 45 minutes of crawling to get close to the ridge and beneath the sheep’s line of sight. I stand up and walk off the arthritic ache in my knees. I bagged the caribou, so we decide Danny will lead the stalk, and then we commence another long, rocky crawl.

There are many ways to blow a stalk, and most of them end in the same manner: You arrive at the place where the animals are supposed to be, but they’re not there. On this stalk, it takes us a while to realize that this has happened. At least half a dozen times I watch Danny approach small rises along the ridgeline. Each time, he prepares himself for a shot before crawling ahead. And each time, I see the tension fall away from his shoulders as he realizes that there must be one more rise separating him from his quarry. Soon the remainder of the ridge comes into view and there aren’t many more places to hide a group of rams. Danny turns back to look at me. His face says it all. We blew it.

There’s a temptation to stand up and curse, but we keep cool and move slowly ahead. On the right side of the ridge, the slope drops away quickly enough that it’s impossible to see what’s directly below. Maybe they fed their way down. Danny tells me to wait behind, and he creeps ahead to take a look over the ledge. He then backs up a few feet and gives me a series of hand signals: The rams are there. He sees two of them, but not the big one. I should stay put and wait.

He slinks from view, and I hang tight. An hour goes by, and the sun drops. The temperature plummets. I’m wet and shivering. I start to hope that Danny will come back up the hill. But that would mean that he couldn’t find the ram, so instead I hope for the sound of a rifle shot. When it finally comes, the shot sounds crisp and distant. I choke back a yip of excitement, and I’m on my feet. I trot over the lip of the ridge and come to a nearly vertical cliff. I can’t see Danny, but I do see four rams scurrying up the wall of the basin across from me. I throw up my binoculars. The larger ram is not with them. I almost let out a whoop but choke the cry back as well.

With my rifle slung over my shoulders, I climb backward down the rocky cliff face and come to a spot where I have to jump down from a chest-high ledge. I almost land on Danny’s boot. He’s tucked into a little crevice with his rifle shouldered and propped over a wadded jacket. It’s aimed almost directly downhill and following a moving object. I look forward and see the sheep rolling like a runaway piece of firewood down the mountain. The carcass is still when it stops just above the creek we were crawling through a few hours earlier. In a flash I can see the upcoming days with perfect clarity. Two trips back and forth to the airstrip: one with a sheep and one with a caribou. In other words, about 40 miles of walking with packs ranging from 75 to 100 pounds. There will be sore knees, blisters, and vows of never hunting in the mountains again. But I quickly force those thoughts out of my mind. Instead, I turn my attention to that yip of joy that I’ve been holding in. It feels good to let it out.

Charging Bear Killed in Alaska

Joe_Cermele — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:07:58 -0400

Alaska Combat Anglers Get Hooked

Joe_Cermele — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:31:39 -0400

From the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:

Salmon aren't alone in being snagged during this busy summer fishing season in Alaska. Anglers get the hook, too.

Monica Musgrove, a nurse at Central Peninsula Hospital in Soldotna, said emergency room staff have removed 62 hooks from patients since May - including a few through the eyelids and one from the tip of the nose.

And it's likely that many more went to other hospitals or did their own first-aid work.

Discussion Topic: On Alaska’s Aerial Wolf Management

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:16:46 -0400

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

A new bill with 105 sponsors in Congress would for all purposes ban Alaska's "wildlife management" policy of shooting wolves from the air, a policy vocally defended by ex-Gov. Sarah Palin . . . .

Leaving office on July 26, Palin told a Fairbanks crowd that Alaskans must "stick together" in opposing "outside special interest groups. Because you're going to see anti-hunting, anti-Second Amendment circuses from Hollywood. . . .”

The chief Senate sponsor of the legislation, dubbed Protect America's Wildlife, is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

"Shooting wildlife from airplanes is not sport[,” she said]. "It undermines the hunting principle of a fair chase . . . . The practice should be banned."

Under the Protect America's Wildlife bill, aerial hunting would be limited to federal and state wildlife agents. It would force Alaska fish and game officials to prove a biological emergency. . . .

"What this bill does is essentially make it impossible for Alaska to manage wolf populations in any sort of responsible way[,” responds fish and game deputy commissioner Pat Valkenburg. “]We finally have a program that works and to end it because of the emotional feelings of uninformed people is just not a good idea."

But the Feinstein-Miller legislation is supported by nine former members of Alaska's Board of Game.

Be sure to read the full article and give us your take on aerial wolf management.

For more, see this story from the Anchorage Daily News.

A Book Worth Reading: The Alaska Chronicles

kirkdeeter — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:12:07 -0400

Photo by Tosh Brown

A fly fishing memoir is a tough thing to pull off. In my mind, "been there, done that," isn't good enough. "Me and Bob went fishing"... yawn. "How I learned to solve the mysteries of the universe while I caught trout"... give me a break.

In other words, I often pick up these books, and within 10 pages, I'm usually thinking to myself, "Get real!"

Whoa, wait a minute... there's a thought. Get real...

That's what Miles Nolte did with his compelling and gritty work in The Alaska Chronicles, published by Departure ($27.50). The work is a collection of semi-daily reports (initially posted on the message board of The Drake magazine website) from a summer spent guiding in Alaska. In effect, it became a collective "being here, doing this" experience... a thread that connected over 3,000 online message board readers from Singapore to Germany.

The writing appeals to me by virtue of its honesty and simplicity. Sure, you get the fish stories, but you also get the client grind, the cold hamburgers, bloodied body, fatigue, bears... essentially the stuff that separates the pretenders from the contenders in the guide world, and ultimately makes the real Alaska experience come alive. The book is more than worth reading for its candor alone, and the visual images that spin out of that.

For the record, I also find it interesting that the project is a website-to-book phenomenon, the first I know of of this type. The lesson? People can argue all they want about media trends, the death of print, whether long-form writing can work online, blog writing being "open mic nite," and all that... what I see here is that substance transcends. Online, in print... where there is substance there is value. I have long believed that the real substance in the fly fishing world inevitably lives amongst the guides. And there is plenty of all that in The Alaska Chronicles. Check it out.

Deeter

Stop the Pebble Mine

timromano — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:03:00 -0400

THE ELECTION TO HELP STOP THE PEBBLE MINE IN ALASKA IS AUGUST 26TH

Unless you've been living under a rock I assume that you've heard about this ridiculously greedy and shortsighted plan of a mine that's close to becoming a reality in Alaska. It's bad news... Really bad news. Check out more information about the proposed mine and it's potential effects on Bristol Bay region here.

The fly fishing trade organization AFFTA and the fly fishing industry as a whole are adamantly opposed to the development of The Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Oh, and we here at Fly Talk find this proposed mine to be a big middle finger to sportsman the world over, and more importantly the multiple species of fish and animals that would be in very serious jeopardy.

All Alaska residents need to help stop this potential environmental boondoggle next week by voting YES on Ballot Measure #4. If you are not a resident of Alaska but you know someone who is, urge him or her to vote YES on Ballot Measure #4 on August 26. Please, do it now! Pick up the phone or shoot an email to all your friends in Alaska.

Basically this ballot measure puts stricter standards in place for NEW mines in relation to water quality. If you'd like more info please visit this site (http://www.alaskacleanwater.org/).

We the people don't have the millions of dollars to drop on BS propaganda that these mining companies do. We only have our voice and our vote. Help the people of Alaska vote with their conscience and get the word out.

Thanks.

Discussion Topic: Bears Vs. Humans In Alaska’s Biggest City

davehurteau — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:30:04 -0400

From the Anchorage Daily News:
Even in a city whose logo is "Big Wild Life," the summer of 2008 is testing residents' tolerance for large carnivores.

The problem is bears, black bears and bigger grizzlies. So far this summer, three people have been mauled in the city.

Some people say humans are to blame for the confrontations and insist that no bears should be killed because of the attacks. [Others] . . . want something done about the big bruins.

A few excerpts on each side of the debate:
-- "It is pretty much unsafe to walk around at night," [bear-attack victim Devon Rees] said.

--People using the city parks need to practice some common sense, said Dave Parker, a 25-year-old resident of Wasilla, outside the municipality.

"The bears were here before we were," Parker said. "You don't go swimming in shark-infested waters and don't expect to be bit. . . ."

--Mike Vogel, a 51-year-old insurance agent, was stomped by a moose in 2003 on a popular city trail. . . . "We need to kill some of these bears and we need to kill some of these moose," he said. Vogel accuses Fish and Game of catering to "bunny huggers."

"I think the pecking order needs to be re-established with humans on top," he said. "What other city in the world has pernicious wildlife running around in its city parks?"

Care to chime in?

Alaska's Wildest Salmon River

fieldandstream-admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:53:29 -0400

The dream: an unguided canoe trip down Alaska’s Kipchuk and Aniak rivers to some of the best salmon fishing in the world. The reality: A white-knuckled survival story, a near drowning, and some of the best salmon fishing in the world By T. Edward Nickens The idea that there are two Alaskas came to me in a cold wave as my canoe was swept into the toppled trees and I was thrown overboard. I caught a glimpse of my pal, Scott Wood, sprinting toward me across a gravel bar, knowing that this was what we had feared the most. Wood disappeared into the brush, running for my life, and then the river sucked me under and I did not see anything else for what seemed like a very long time. Every angler dreams of Alaska. My dream was of untouched waters, uncountable salmon and trout, and an unguided route through mountains and tundra. But day after day of portages and hairy paddling had suggested that mine was a trip to the other Alaska, a place that suffers no prettied-up pretense. The other Alaska is not in brochures. It is rarely in dreams. The other Alaska will kill you. We’d had plenty of postcard moments, for sure: king salmon jetting rooster tails over gravel bars. Tundra hills pocked with snow. Monster rainbows and sockeye salmon heaving for oxygen as we held their sagging bellies. But day after day the four of us had paddled through the other Alaska, scared to death, except when the fishing was good enough to make us forget the fear. Now the world turned black and cold as the Kipchuk River covered me, my head underwater, my arm clamped around a submerged tree, my body pulled horizontal in the hurtling current. Lose my grip and the river would sweep me into a morass of more downed trees, so I held on even tighter as water filled my waders. The river felt like a living thing, attempting to swallow me, inch by inch, and all I could do was hold my breath and hang on. But I am getting ahead of the story.

Welcome to the Tundra Give me a canoe, paddle, portage pack, and time, and I can make it down almost any river. For years I’ve considered this a given, and remote rivers have been my express route to fish that have never seen a fly. It may be that no one had attempted what we set out to do last July: Complete a 10-day unguided canoe descent of southwestern Alaska’s Kipchuk and Aniak Rivers. These are isolated headwaters in the extreme: To get bodies and gear on the ground required five flights in two-person Piper Cub and Super Cub bush planes. Our largest duffels carried 17-foot PakBoats—folding canoes on aluminum frames—which I figured to be our masterstroke. This was part of the dream too: Instead of a ponderous raft, I’d paddle a sleek canoe, catching eddies and exploring side channels. Or so I’d planned. There were four in the party: myself, photographer Colby Lysne, my friend Edwin Aguilar, and Scott Wood, who more times than not can be found in the other end of whatever canoe I inhabit. Dropping through tundra, we’d first negotiate the Kipchuk through a 1,000-foot-deep canyon. Then we’d slip into the Kuskokwim lowlands, where the river carves channels through square-mile gravel bars and unravels in braids until it flows into the larger Aniak. Some of the most remote country left in Alaska, it is the second-largest watershed in the state, with just a handful of native settlements. We timed our launch for a shot at four of the five Alaska salmon species—kings, pinks, sockeyes, and chums—with a wild-card chance for coho and the Alaska Grand Slam of salmon. We’d been counting our fish for months. Truth be told, though, no one really knew what to expect on the Kipchuk. According to our bush pilot, Rob Kinkade, less than a handful of hunting parties raft the upper river each year. He’d heard of no one who’d fished above the canyon, ever. As for the paddling conditions—well, he said, it all looked workable from the windshield of a Super Cub. But we weren’t paddling a plane. The first test came fast, just after put-in. A fallen spruce blocked the channel, with barely enough room to shoulder past. The obstacle looked easy enough to handle, but the water was swift and heavy, and the laden boats were slower to react than we’d imagined. Wood and Aguilar fought to cross a racing tongue of current and were carried straight for the spruce. Watching from upstream, I could hear Wood barking over the rush of water—“Draw right! Right! Harder! Harder!”—as the canoe slipped closer to the tree. They cleared by inches. Wood glanced at us, knowing what we were in for. “So,” Lysne said, his eyes on the water. “That didn’t look so good.” Already we were feeling our handicap. With a flyover scouting report of no whitewater, Wood and I had dialed back the level of paddling experience we expected from our partners. Lysne and Aguilar had plenty of remote camps in the bag, but they’d never been whitewater cowboys. Cocksure with a canoe paddle, I figured—as did Wood—that we could handle whatever came up from the stern. What came up was a paddler’s worst nightmare: miles of strainers. Where sharp turns occur, the current undercuts the channel’s outside bank. As the bank collapses, trees fall, wedging against the shore. Water gets through, but a canoe carried into a strainer has little chance of remaining upright—and a body slammed into the underwater structure has little chance of escape. Rattled, Lysne and I slipped into the fast water and tried to crab the boat sideways with short draw strokes. A big-handed North Dakota hockey player, Lysne tackles obstacles with a brawler’s bravado—a frame of mind that would pay off later. I started to yell as we neared the strainer, and for a second I caught Wood’s concerned look, knowing that in the next moment, the boat would tangle sideways in the spruce and our fishing trip would turn into a rescue operation. I paddled the strongest half-dozen strokes of my life as the spruce boughs raked across Lysne’s shoulders and caught me in the chest. We pulled away, inch by inch. My heart was pounding. We sidled up to the other PakBoat. “We cannot capsize,” Wood said, his face intense. “You know that. We simply cannot capsize.” That night we calmed our nerves with Scotch and pan-fried Arctic grayling, whose bodies had spilled out whole mice when we cleaned them a few hundred feet from our campsite. Wine-red shapes coursed up the pool—king salmon that ignored our flies. But it was early. With each paddle stroke, the fishing should only get better, the paddling easier. I crawled into the tent feeling like a dog clipped by a car. Tomorrow, we figured, it would all come together. But tomorrow was the day the canyon closed in. This stretch of the river was filled with more dread and sweat than we’d bargained for—and far less fishing. Every turn in the Kipchuk was a blind bend. Every bend was lined with downed trees. And each time the river narrowed, a chute of blistering midstream flow formed a hard wall of current that threatened to flip the boats. We were also running a different kind of uncharted waters. Though Wood and I have been to spots where getting through the country proved difficult and dangerous, never had we experienced day after day of serious peril. We wanted the Alaskan wilds, and we didn’t mind pain and sweat for a payoff of unknown country. A taste of fear was part of the price. But on the Kipchuk, we were gagging on terror.

Careful What You Ask For “There was a time,” Wood said, standing on the bank three days into the canyon, “when I liked being scared in the woods. It made it all seem so…real.” His voice trailed off, and his gaze followed downriver. I knew where his thoughts were taking him. Mine were already there. Home. Wife. Children. “I don’t like being scared anymore,” he said. Lysne and I pushed the canoe into the river without saying a word. I could only imagine what he was thinking. Lysne never complained, never pointed out that he’d signed on to photograph a fishing trip, not an adrenaline rush down a rain-swollen river. I didn’t voice the thoughts coursing through my own head. The cheerful scouting report notwithstanding, I’d had no business putting inexperienced paddlers in such remote, unknown water. My arrogance was shameful, and the dangers were accruing. Humping gear and dragging boats through 20-foot-tall thickets, where a feeding bear would be invisible at 10 feet, was a necessity. But that’s the seduction of wilderness travel. Each time you come back, you think you can handle more. Until you can’t. Downstream, the river disintegrated. On the banks, water boiled through 10-foot-tall walls of downed timber as the Kipchuk careened around hairpin turns. Time and time again we roped the canoes around the roughest water, but too often the only choice was to carry everything. To portage the hairpins, we bushwhacked through thickets, taking turns as point man with the shotgun and bear spray. We hacked trails through streamside saplings. We fished in spurts—10 minutes here, 15 there. It took all we had just to keep going. One night I crouched beside the campfire, nursing blisters and a bruised ego. My back felt like rusted wire. Lysne limped in pain, his toes swollen and oozing pus. I was tired of portaging, tired of paddling all day with little time for fishing, tired of fear. I watched Lysne take a swig of Costa Rican guaro. “I have to be honest with you,” he muttered. “I’ve had some dark times the last few days. Been damn scared and I’m not afraid to say it.” The night before, he said, he’d dreamed that we were paddling through a swamp, but it was inside somebody’s garage, and a fluorescent alligator attacked the canoe. “Weird, huh? I wonder where that came from.” The next morning I dragged myself out of the tent with a mission. Somewhere, downriver, the other Alaska waited. “Today we paddle like madmen,” I suggested. “Yeah,” Aguilar groused. “We need to quit being such slackers.” A few miles downstream we lined a run and dragged the canoes to the head of a deep pool the color of smoke and emeralds. A half dozen large fish held near the upstream ledge. I slid a rod out of the canoe. The first cast landed a pink salmon. My second brought in a chum. I hooted as Aguilar fumed and glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes!” I pleaded. “I promise, just 10 minutes!” He huffed and grabbed a rod. Fishing chaos broke out. Wood, Lysne, and I worked a triple hookup on salmon, our lines crossing. We fought sockeyes, kings, and wolf-fanged chum salmon. We landed 3-pound grayling and a solid 26-inch rainbow. One fish ran up the rapids at the head of the pool, leaping like a silver kite. Another was so close that it splashed me. For the first time I felt the pieces coming together. The pull of strong fish was a poultice for ragged nerves and sore shoulders. Eleven salmon steaks, slathered in chipotle sauce, sizzled over the fire that night. “We deserved today,” Aguilar said, lying back on a bed of rocks. “Fishing is fun,” added Wood. “We should try to do more of it.”

Pay to Play Late the next afternoon, we beached the boats to fish another salmon-choked pool, and in less than a minute we were shoulder to shoulder, working a quadruple hookup. Lysne cackled as my king ran under his bent rod. It was a fine place to camp and a good time to call it quits, but I’m not fond of camping above a hairy rapid. Just below the pool, a pair of fallen spruce trees leaned over the main channel, then the river bent hard, the bank combed with strainers. “Let’s get this over with,” I muttered. “We can celebrate when there’s clear sailing ahead.” “Sure,” Wood replied. “But we were first on the last horrible, terrible, death-for-certain river bend. You’re up.” The next half minute, Wood would later say, seemed to last an hour. Entering the river, Lysne and I lined up with the route we’d hashed out. Once the laden canoe sliced into the main current tongue, however, it was propelled downstream with terrifying speed. Draw strokes didn’t budge us. Pry strokes and stern rudders proved useless. I lost my hat as we rocketed under the timber. The craft arrowed into a wall of downed trees and suddenly we were tangled in branches, broadside to the current, water boiling against the hull. “Don’t lean upstream!” I screamed. Lysne didn’t, but in the next instant the river swarmed over the gunwales anyway. The boat flipped, violently, and disappeared from view. The current sucked me under. I caught a submerged tree trunk square in the chest, a blow buffered by my PFD, and I clamped an arm around the slick trunk. I can’t say how long I hung there. Twenty seconds, perhaps? Forty? For long moments I knew I wouldn’t make it. With my free arm, I pulled myself along the sunken trunk as the current whipped me back and forth. But the trunk grew larger and larger. It slipped from the grip of my right armpit, and then I held fast to a single branch, groping for the next with my other hand. I don’t remember holding my breath. I don’t remember the frigid water. I just remember that the thing that was swallowing me had its grip on my shins, then my knees, and then my thighs. For an odd few moments I heard a metallic ringing in my ears. A vivid scene played across my brain: It was the telephone in my kitchen at home, and it was ringing, and Julie was walking through the house looking for the phone, and I suddenly knew that if she answered the call—was the phone on the coffee table? did the kids have it in the playroom?—that the voice on the other end of the line would be apologetic and sorrowful. Then the toe of my boot dragged on something hard, and I stood up, and I could breathe. Wood crashed through the brush, wild-eyed, as I crawled up the bank, heaving water. I waved him downstream, then clambered to my feet and started running. Somewhere below was Lysne. The big-handed hockey player had gone overboard farther midstream than I had and vanished beyond the strainers. Stumbling through brush, I heard Wood give a cry, and my heart sank. I burst into sunlight. Wood was facedown on a mud bar, where he’d catapulted after tripping on a root. Aguilar battered his way out of a nearby thicket. A few feet away, Lysne stood chest-deep in the river, with stunned eyes and mouth open. In his hand he gripped the bow line to the canoe, half sunk and turned on its side, the gear bags still secured by rope. Our ragged little foursome huddled by the river, dumbstruck by the turn of events. For a long time we shook our heads and tried not to meet one another’s gazes. Wood finally looked at Lysne. “I can’t believe you saved the boat.” “It was weird,” Lysne said, his voice rising. “I popped out of the water and saw another strainer coming for me, and I just got pissed off. I was yelling to myself: I ain’t gonna drown! I ain’t gonna drown! I went crazy, punching and kicking my way through the trees. Then boom: I saw the rope, grabbed it, and started swimming.” I’d lost a shotgun, two fly rods and reels, and a bag of gear, but everything else that went into the river came out. Aguilar sidled over, quietly. “You okay? I mean, in your head?” Only then did I feel the river’s grip loosen from my legs. I began to shiver, and no one said a word.

The Cane Pole Hole “Salmon. Salmon. Salmon-salmon-salmon.” I was counting the kings passing under the boat. Sunlight streamed into the water, lighting up 15-, 20-, and 30-pound chinooks. Downstream, the Kuskokwim lowlands flattened out—no more canyon walls, no more bluffs: slow water and flat country and easy going. In the bow, Lysne watched the fish and shook his head. “I just spent a week on the Russian River, shoulder-to-shoulder combat fishing,” he said. “I can’t believe nobody’s here. And nobody’s been here. And nobody’s coming here. Amazing.” I settled into a cadence of easy paddling, the sort that lets the mind drift free. So far, the price of admission to a place where nobody goes had come close to a body bag. I wondered how much longer I’d be willing to shell out for the solitude. Back home were two kids and a wife and a life I’ve been lucky to piece together. With each year I have more to lose. I’m not ready for an RV and a picnic table, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was time to dial the gonzo back. I didn’t know. I won’t know, until I hear of the next uncharted river, the next place to catch fish in empty country, and ask myself: What now? Salmon. Salmon. Salmon-salmon-salmon. Late in the afternoon we slipped into a deep pool unremarkable but for the 50 kings, pinks, and chums queued up, snout to tail. For 15 minutes they ignored egg-sucking leeches, pink buggers, Clousers, mouse flies, saltwater copperheads, and even a green spoon fly, the go-to choice for hawg bass back home. Downstream, salmon darted across a gravel bar. We could see them coming from 100 yards away. Wood reeled in and stomped off. He is not one to be snubbed by visible fish. “I’m gonna think outside the koi pond,” he said, following grizzly tracks up the sandbar. Ten minutes later we heard a whoop from inside shaking willows. The tip of a fly rod protruded from the thicket, arcing into the water. “Bring your cane poles, boys,” Wood hollered. Worming his way through the brush, Wood had flipped a fly into the gravy train of salmon. It didn’t work right away. But ultimately, a pig king had sauntered over to slurp it. No casting, no stripping was required—you just had to keep the fly away from the tykes and hold on. Some of the fish were enormous. Dangling my rod over the salmon, I tried five drifts, 10, no takers, 15 drifts with the pink leech jigged fractions of an inch from the mouths of fish. They stared, looking, looking, l-o-o-o-king, until one sucked it down. Cackling and howling, the four of us caught king after king, taking turns in the hole. No one cared that this was artless fishing. Dumbed-down salmon whacking was what we needed. A half hour later, Lysne hooked a brute of a king. The 30-pound chinook never showed until Lysne fought it into the shallows. I went in up to my armpits to land it. My hands barely reached around the base of the tail. Lifting the fish was like pulling a log out of the water. When I handed it to Lysne, he groaned. “We’ve got to camp right here,” he said and grinned. “I don’t think I can lift a paddle after this.” Behind him, chum salmon leapt in the air, and kings sent more rooster tails skyward, their backs out of the water. We flopped on the sandbar and fired up a stove. Mist turned into rain as we scrounged the food bag, poured out the juice from a can of smoked mussels, and sautéed jerk-seasoned sockeye in the makeshift frying oil. Not 3 feet away, a single chum salmon labored upstream. This one was far past spawning. The sight struck me silent: The fish was rotting, its flanks pale and leprous, the spines of its dorsal and tail fins sticking out above the flesh like the shattered masts of a toy sailboat.

The Land of Easy Living The next three days brought the Alaska of my dreams. Now the fish came in schools so large that they appeared as burgundy slicks moving upcurrent. There was nothing easy about coaxing them to a fly, and nothing easy about bringing them to hand. We killed one fish a day, enough to eat like kings. One afternoon I was lying back on rocks near grizzly and wolf tracks so fresh that the prints had not yet dried. “This is what I thought it’d be like every day,” Aguilar said. “But now, just one day of it feels so-o-o-o good.” We’d had moments of fish chaos—multiple hookups, the Cane Pole Hole, outrageous rainbow trout. But fishing remote Alaska isn’t about the numbers, or the variety of species. It’s about the way the fish are seasoned with fear, sweat, miscues, and the mishaps that are the hallmark of an authentic trip in authentic wild country. On the night before our scheduled pickup, we camped at the juncture of the Aniak and a long, sweeping channel. After setting up the tents, Lysne cooled his heels. His toes were swollen and chinook-red from day after day of hard walking in waders. “I can’t even think about wading right now,” he said. “I’m just gonna lie here and fish in my mind.” Wood, Aguilar, and I divvied up the water: They headed off to hunt rainbows down the side channel, while I fished a wide pool on the river. Since I’d lost my rods and reels when our boat flipped, I fished a cobbled-together outfit of an 8-weight rod with a 9-weight line. It was a little light but heavy enough for the fish we’d landed over the last few days. In an hour of nothing, I made 50 casts to an endless stream of oblong shapes. Then suddenly my hot-pink fly disappeared. Immediately I knew: This was my biggest king, by far. The salmon leapt, drenching my waders, then ripped off line and tore across the current. The rod bent into the cork, thrumming with the fish’s power. I’d have a hard time landing this one solo, so I yelled for help, but everyone was long gone. So I stood there, alone and undergunned, and drank it all in. It no longer mattered if this was my first or 15th or 30th king salmon. What mattered was that wild Alaska flowed around my feet and pulled at the rod, and I could smell it in the sweet scent of pure water and spruce and in the putrid tang of the dying salmon. I felt it against my legs, an unyielding wildness. Part of what I felt was fear, part of it was respect, and part of it was gratitude that there yet remained places so wild that I wasn’t sure I ever wished to return. Then the king surfaced 5 feet away and glimpsed the source of his trouble. At once the far side of the river was where the salmon wanted to be, and for a long time there was little I could do but hang on.

Whitewater, Survival, and the Best Salmon Fishing in Alaska

fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:00:00 -0400

Every angler dreams of Alaska. My dream was of untouched waters, uncountable salmon and trout, and an unguided route through mountains and tundra. But day after day of portages and hairy paddling had suggested that mine was a trip to the other Alaska, a place that suffers no prettied-up pretense. The other Alaska is not in brochures. It is rarely in dreams. The other Alaska will kill you.

We'd had plenty of postcard moments, for sure: king salmon jetting rooster tails over gravel bars. Tundra hills pocked with snow. Monster rainbows and sockeye salmon heaving for oxygen as we held their sagging bellies. But day after day the four of us had paddled through the other Alaska, scared to death, except when the fishing was good enough to make us forget the fear.

Now the world turned black and cold as the Kipchuk River covered me, my head underwater, my arm clamped around a submerged tree, my body pulled horizontal in the hurtling current. Lose my grip and the river would sweep me into a morass of more downed trees, so I held on even tighter as water filled my waders. The river felt like a living thing, attempting to swallow me, inch by inch, and all I could do was hold my breath and hang on.

But I am getting ahead of the story.

Welcome to the Tundra
Give me a canoe, paddle, portage pack, and time, and I can make it down almost any river. For years I've considered this a given, and remote rivers have been my express route to fish that have never seen a fly.

It may be that no one had attempted what we set out to do last July: Complete a 10-day unguided canoe descent of southwestern Alaska's Kipchuk and Aniak Rivers. These are isolated headwaters in the extreme: To get bodies and gear on the ground required five flights in two-person Piper Cub and Super Cub bush planes. Our largest duffels carried 17-foot PakBoats—folding canoes on aluminum frames—which I figured to be our masterstroke. This was part of the dream too: Instead of a ponderous raft, I'd paddle a sleek canoe, catching eddies and exploring side channels. Or so I'd planned.

There were four in the party: myself, photographer Colby Lysne, my friend Edwin Aguilar, and Scott Wood, who more times than not can be found in the other end of whatever canoe I inhabit. Dropping through tundra, we'd first negotiate the Kipchuk through a 1,000-foot-deep canyon. Then we'd slip into the Kuskokwim lowlands, where the river carves channels through square-mile gravel bars and unravels in braids until it flows into the larger Aniak. Some of the most remote country left in Alaska, it is the second-largest watershed in the state, with just a handful of native settlements. We timed our launch for a shot at four of the five Alaska salmon species—kings, pinks, sockeyes, and chums—with a wild-card chance for coho and the Alaska Grand Slam of salmon. We'd been counting our fish for months.

Truth be told, though, no one really knew what to expect on the Kipchuk. According to our bush pilot, Rob Kinkade, less than a handful of hunting parties raft the upper river each year. He'd heard of no one who'd fished above the canyon, ever. As for the paddling conditions—well, he said, it all looked workable from the wind-shield of a Super Cub.

But we weren't paddling a plane.

The first test came fast, just after put-in. A fallen spruce blocked the channel, with barely enough room to shoulder past. The obstacle looked easy enough to handle, but the water was swift and heavy, and the laden boats were slower to react than we'd imagined. Wood and Aguilar fought to cross a racing tongue of current and were carried straight for the spruce. Watching from upstream, I could hear Wood barking over the rush of water—"Draw right! Right! Harder! Harder!"—as the canoe slipped closer to the tree. They cleared by inches. Wood glanced at us, knowing what we were in for.

"So," Lysne said, his eyes on the water. "That didn't look so good."

Already we were feeling our handicap. With a flyover scouting report of no whitewater, Wood and I had dialed back the level of paddling experience we expected from our partners. Lysne and Aguilar had plenty of remote camps in the bag, but they'd never been whitewater cowboys. Cocksure with a canoe paddle, I figured—as did Wood—that we could handle whatever came up from the stern. What came up was a paddler's worst nightmare: miles of strainers.

Where sharp turns occur, the current undercuts the channel's outside bank. As the bank collapses, trees fall, wedging against the shore. Water gets through, but a canoe carried into a strainer has little chance of remaining upright—and a body slammed into the underwater structure has little chance of escape.

Rattled, Lysne and I slipped into the fast water and tried to crab the boat sideways with short draw strokes. A big-handed North Dakota hockey player, Lysne tackles obstacles with a brawler's bravado—a frame of mind that would pay off later. I started to yell as we neared the strainer, and for a second I caught Wood's concerned look, knowing that in the next moment, the boat would tangle sideways in the spruce and our fishing trip would turn into a rescue operation.

I paddled the strongest half-dozen strokes of my life as the spruce boughs raked across Lysne's shoulders and caught me in the chest. We pulled away, inch by inch. My heart was pounding. We sidled up to the other PakBoat.

"We cannot capsize," Wood said, his face intense. "You know that. We simply cannot capsize."

That night we calmed our nerves with Scotch and pan-fried Arctic grayling, whose bodies had spilled out whole mice when we cleaned them a few hundred feet from our campsite. Wine-red shapes coursed up the pool—king salmon that ignored our flies. But it was early. With each paddle stroke, the fishing should only get better, the paddling easier. I crawled into the tent feeling like a dog clipped by a car. Tomorrow, we figured, it would all come together.

But tomorrow was the day the canyon closed in.

This stretch of the river was filled with more dread and sweat than we'd bargained for—and far less fishing. Every turn in the Kipchuk was a blind bend. Every bend was lined with downed trees. And each time the river narrowed, a chute of blistering midstream flow formed a hard wall of current that threatened to flip the boats.

We were also running a different kind of uncharted waters. Though Wood and I have been to spots where getting through the country proved difficult and dangerous, never had we experienced day after day of serious peril. We wanted the Alaskan wilds, and we didn't mind pain and sweat for a payoff of unknown country. A taste of fear was part of the price. But on the Kipchuk, we were gagging on terror.

Careful What You Ask For
"There was a time," Wood said, standing on the bank three days into the canyon, "when I liked being scared in the woods. It made it all seem so...real." His voice trailed off, and his gaze followed downriver. I knew where his thoughts were taking him. Mine were already there. Home. Wife. Children. "I don't like being scared anymore," he said.

Lysne and I pushed the canoe into the river without saying a word. I could only imagine what he was thinking. Lysne never complained, never pointed out that he'd signed on to photograph a fishing trip, not an adrenaline rush down a rain-swollen river. I didn't voice the thoughts coursing through my own head. The cheerful scouting report notwithstanding, I'd had no business putting inexperienced paddlers in such remote, unknown water. My arrogance was shameful, and the dangers were accruing. Humping gear and dragging boats through 20-foot-tall thickets, where a feeding bear would be invisible at 10 feet, was a necessity. But that's the seduction of wilderness travel. Each time you come back, you think you can handle more. Until you can't.

Downstream, the river disintegrated. On the banks, water boiled through 10-foot-tall walls of downed timber as the Kipchuk careened around hairpin turns. Time and time again we roped the canoes around the roughest water, but too often the only choice was to carry everything. To portage the hairpins, we bushwhacked through thickets, taking turns as point man with the shotgun and bear spray. We hacked trails through streamside saplings. We fished in spurts—10 minutes here, 15 there. It took all we had just to keep going.

One night I crouched beside the campfire, nursing blisters and a bruised ego. My back felt like rusted wire. Lysne limped in pain, his toes swollen and oozing pus. I was tired of portaging, tired of paddling all day with little time for fishing, tired of fear. I watched Lysne take a swig of Costa Rican guaro.

"I have to be honest with you," he muttered. "I've had some dark times the last few days. Been f---ing scared and I'm not afraid to say it."

The night before, he said, he'd dreamed that we were paddling through a swamp, but it was inside somebody's garage, and a fluorescent alligator attacked the canoe.

"Weird, huh? I wonder where that came from."

The next morning I dragged myself out of the tent with a mission. Somewhere, downriver, the other Alaska waited.

"Today we paddle like madmen," I suggested.

"Yeah," Aguilar groused. "We need to quit being such slackers."

A few miles downstream we lined a run and dragged the canoes to the head of a deep pool the color of smoke and emeralds. A half dozen large fish held near the upstream ledge. I slid a rod out of the canoe. The first cast landed a pink salmon. My second brought in a chum. I hooted as Aguilar fumed and glanced at his watch.

"Ten minutes!" I pleaded. "I promise, just 10 minutes!"

He huffed and grabbed a rod. Fishing chaos broke out. Wood, Lysne, and I worked a triple hookup on salmon, our lines crossing. We fought sockeyes, kings, and wolf-fanged chum salmon. We landed 3-pound grayling and a solid 26-inch rainbow. One fish ran up the rapids at the head of the pool, leaping like a silver kite. Another was so close that it splashed me.

For the first time I felt the pieces coming together. The pull of strong fish was a poultice for ragged nerves and sore shoulders.

Eleven salmon steaks, slathered in chipotle sauce, sizzled over the fire that night.

"We deserved today," Aguilar said, lying back on a bed of rocks.

"Fishing is fun," added Wood. "We should try to do more of it."

It was a fine place to camp and a good time to call it quits, but I'm not fond of camping above a hairy rapid. Just below the pool, a pair of fallen spruce trees leaned over the main channel, then the river bent hard, the bank combed with strainers.

"Let's get this over with," I muttered. "We can celebrate when there's clear sailing ahead."

"Sure," Wood replied. "But we were first on the last horrible, terrible, death-for-certain river bend. You're up."

The next half minute, Wood would later say, seemed to last an hour. Entering the river, Lysne and I lined up with the route we'd hashed out. Once the laden canoe sliced into the main current tongue, however, it was propelled downstream with terrifying speed. Draw strokes didn't budge us. Pry strokes and stern rudders proved useless. I lost my hat as we rocketed under the timber. The craft arrowed into a wall of downed trees and suddenly we were tangled in branches, broadside to the current, water boiling against the hull.

"Don't lean upstream!" I screamed. Lysne didn't, but in the next instant the river swarmed over the gunwales anyway. The boat flipped, violently, and disappeared from view.

The current sucked me under. I caught a submerged tree trunk square in the chest, a blow buffered by my PFD, and I clamped an arm around the slick trunk.

I can't say how long I hung there. Twenty seconds, perhaps? Forty?

For long moments I knew I wouldn't make it. With my free arm, I pulled myself along the sunken trunk as the current whipped me back and forth. But the trunk grew larger and larger. It slipped from the grip of my right armpit, and then I held fast to a single branch, groping for the next with my other hand. I don't remember holding my breath. I don't remember the frigid water. I just remember that the thing that was swallowing me had its grip on my shins, then my knees, and then my thighs. For an odd few moments I heard a metallic ringing in my ears. A vivid scene played across my brain: It was the telephone in my kitchen at home, and it was ringing, and Julie was walking through the house looking for the phone, and I suddenly knew that if she answered the call—was the phone on the coffee table? did the kids have it in the playroom?—that the voice on the other end of the line would be apologetic and sorrowful. Then the toe of my boot dragged on something hard, and I stood up, and I could breathe.

Wood crashed through the brush, wild-eyed, as I crawled up the bank, heaving water. I waved him downstream, then clambered to my feet and started running. Somewhere below was Lysne.

The big-handed hockey player had gone overboard farther midstream than I had and vanished beyond the strainers. Stumbling through brush, I heard Wood give a cry, and my heart sank. I burst into sunlight. Wood was facedown on a mud bar, where he'd catapulted after tripping on a root. Aguilar battered his way out of a nearby thicket. A few feet away, Lysne stood chest-deep in the river, with stunned eyes and mouth open. In his hand he gripped the bow line to the canoe, half sunk and turned on its side, the gear bags still secured by rope.

Our ragged little foursome huddled by the river, dumbstruck by the turn of events. For a long time we shook our heads and tried not to meet one another's gazes.

Wood finally looked at Lysne. "I can't believe you saved the boat."

"It was weird," Lysne said, his voice rising. "I popped out of the water and saw another strainer coming for me, and I just got pissed off. I was yelling to myself: I ain't gonna drown! I ain't gonna drown! I went crazy, punching and kicking my way through the trees. Then boom: I saw the rope, grabbed it, and started swimming."

I'd lost a shotgun, two fly rods and reels, and a bag of gear, but everything else that went into the river came out.

Aguilar sidled over, quietly. "You okay? I mean, in your head?"

Only then did I feel the river's grip loosen from my legs. I began to shiver, and no one said a word.

The Cane Pole Hole
"Salmon. Salmon. Salmon-salmon-salmon." I was counting the kings passing under the boat. Sunlight streamed into the water, lighting up 15-, 20-, and 30-pound chinooks. Downstream, the Kuskokwim lowlands flattened out—no more canyon walls, no more bluffs: slow water and flat country and easy going.

In the bow, Lysne watched the fish and shook his head. "I just spent a week on the Russian River, shoulder-to-shoulder combat fishing," he said. "I can't believe nobody's here. And nobody's been here. And nobody's coming here. Amazing."

I settled into a cadence of easy paddling, the sort that lets the mind drift free. So far, the price of admission to a place where nobody goes had come close to a body bag. I wondered how much longer I'd be willing to shell out for the solitude. Back home were two kids and a wife and a life I've been lucky to piece together. With each year I have more to lose. I'm not ready for an RV and a picnic table, but I couldn't help but wonder if it was time to dial the gonzo back. I didn't know. I won't know, until I hear of the next uncharted river, the next place to catch fish in empty country, and ask myself: What now?

Salmon. Salmon. Salmon-salmon-salmon.

Late in the afternoon we slipped into a deep pool unremarkable but for the 50 kings, pinks, and chums queued up, snout to tail. For 15 minutes they ignored egg-sucking leeches, pink buggers, Clousers, mouse flies, saltwater copperheads, and even a green spoon fly, the go-to choice for hawg bass back home. Downstream, salmon darted across a gravel bar. We could see them coming from 100 yards away.

Wood reeled in and stomped off. He is not one to be snubbed by visible fish. "I'm gonna think outside the koi pond," he said, following grizzly tracks up the sandbar. Ten minutes later we heard a whoop from inside shaking willows. The tip of a fly rod protruded from the thicket, arcing into the water. "Bring your cane poles, boys," Wood hollered.

Worming his way through the brush, Wood had flipped a fly into the gravy train of salmon. It didn't work right away. But ultimately, a pig king had sauntered over to slurp it. No casting, no stripping was required—you just had to keep the fly away from the tykes and hold on. Some of the fish were enormous. Dangling my rod over the salmon, I tried five drifts, 10, no takers, 15 drifts with the pink leech jigged fractions of an inch from the mouths of fish. They stared, looking, looking, l-o-o-o-king, until one sucked it down.

Cackling and howling, the four of us caught king after king, taking turns in the hole. No one cared that this was artless fishing. Dumbed-down salmon whacking was what we needed.

A half hour later, Lysne hooked a brute of a king. The 30-pound chinook never showed until Lysne fought it into the shallows. I went in up to my armpits to land it. My hands barely reached around the base of the tail. Lifting the fish was like pulling a log out of the water. When I handed it to Lysne, he groaned. "We've got to camp right here," he said and grinned. "I don't think I can lift a paddle after this."

Behind him, chum salmon leapt in the air, and kings sent more rooster tails skyward, their backs out of the water. We flopped on the sandbar and fired up a stove. Mist turned into rain as we scrounged the food bag, poured out the juice from a can of smoked mussels, and sautéed jerk-seasoned sockeye in the makeshift frying oil.

Not 3 feet away, a single chum salmon labored upstream. This one was far past spawning. The sight struck me silent: The fish was rotting, its flanks pale and leprous, the spines of its dorsal and tail fins sticking out above the flesh like the shattered masts of a toy sailboat.

We'd had moments of fish chaos—multiple hookups, the Cane Pole Hole, outrageous rainbow trout. But fishing remote Alaska isn't about the numbers, or the variety of species. It's about the way the fish are seasoned with fear, sweat, miscues, and the mishaps that are the hallmark of an authentic trip in authentic wild country.

On the night before our scheduled pickup, we camped at the juncture of the Aniak and a long, sweeping channel. After setting up the tents, Lysne cooled his heels. His toes were swollen and chinook-red from day after day of hard walking in waders.

"I can't even think about wading right now," he said. "I'm just gonna lie here and fish in my mind."

Wood, Aguilar, and I divvied up the water: They headed off to hunt rainbows down the side channel, while I fished a wide pool on the river.

Since I'd lost my rods and reels when our boat flipped, I fished a cobbled-together outfit of an 8-weight rod with a 9-weight line. It was a little light but heavy enough for the fish we'd landed over the last few days. In an hour of nothing, I made 50 casts to an endless stream of oblong shapes. Then suddenly my hot-pink fly disappeared. Immediately I knew: This was my biggest king, by far. The salmon leapt, drenching my waders, then ripped off line and tore across the current.

The rod bent into the cork, thrumming with the fish's power. I'd have a hard time landing this one solo, so I yelled for help, but everyone was long gone.

So I stood there, alone and undergunned, and drank it all in. It no longer mattered if this was my first or 15th or 30th king salmon. What mattered was that wild Alaska flowed around my feet and pulled at the rod, and I could smell it in the sweet scent of pure water and spruce and in the putrid tang of the dying salmon. I felt it against my legs, an unyielding wildness. Part of what I felt was fear, part of it was respect, and part of it was gratitude that there yet remained places so wild that I wasn't sure I ever wished to return.

Then the king surfaced 5 feet away and glimpsed the source of his trouble. At once the far side of the river was where the salmon wanted to be, and for a long time there was little I could do but hang on.

OVERLOOKED ALASKA
Rob Kinkade's gig is brilliant. "There's nowhere in Alaska you can't get to in two or three hours with an airplane," figures the owner of Aniak Air Guides. "Anywhere you can land one of the larger aircraft—the Beavers, Otters—you're going to have company." So Kinkade has downsized. He flies small planes, and between the Cubs, a jet boat, ATVs, and rafts, Kinkade has opened up a chunk of the Last Frontier. He runs guided and unguided trips. Contact him at 907-675-4540; aniakairguides@yahoo.com; aniakairguides.com.

Unguided Alaska: Whitewater, Salmon, and a Near-Death Experience

fieldandstream-editor — Wed, 16 May 2007 02:00:00 -0400

One Wild Ride: Fishing Alaska By ATV

fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:45:00 -0500

Travel Report: Salmon Fishing in Alaska with Deputy Editor Jay Cassell

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:00:00 -0400

How to Plan A Fishing Trip to Alaska

fieldandstream-editor — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 20:00:00 -0400

Seward's Folly might have seemed like a poor deal in 1867, but Alaska proved to have abundant natural resources of gold, timber, and oil—and the best fishing on the planet. You can catch all five species of Pacific salmon, 5- to 10-pound rainbow trout, grayling, Arctic char, Dolly Varden, and northern pike in freshwater; steelhead and sea-run cutthroats in the panhandle; and salmon, monster halibut, lingcod, and rockfish in the salt.

Planning an adventure isn't difficult, and if you do it correctly, it can be a lot of fun. The key is making decisions before you start. Do you want to focus on one species of fish, or many? Do you want to just fish, or also do other things, such as sightsee? Will you travel solo, or with friends or family? Is an inexpensive housekeeping cabin where you do it yourself more your style, or a five-star lodge where you won't have to lift a finger except to pick up your rod (and fight fish)? Your options are limitless.

FISHING FOREMOST

The first time I went to Alaska, I set my sights on flyfishing for big rainbow trout from a lodge where I could spend all my time on the water. Lodges didn't have websites back then (15 years ago), so I talked to outfitters at sportsmen's shows, gathered brochures, then phoned their references. Eventually, I settled on Wood River Lodge in the Bristol Bay area. The brochure looked inviting, and the references raved about the fishing and accommodations. Located in the remote Tikchik Lakes region, Wood River not only offered trophy rainbow trout fishing within walking distance of the guest cabins but also provided fly-out fishing to nearby waters.

The fishing was great, the cabins and food lived up to expectations, and I did a lot of flying in floatplanes, getting views of incredible scenery, moose, eagles, and innumerable grizzly bears (not a big deal in Alaska, unless it's your first trip).

Subsequent trips also worked out, because I knew what I wanted to fish for, when, and where I wanted to go. Make these your priorities, then start gathering your gear.

TACKLE TIPS

FLYFISHING King salmon (chinooks) require stout fly tackle—9- to 10-weight rods with sinking-tip lines, heavy leaders, and large, gaudy flies. Because the fish aren't particularly interested in eating once they're in freshwater (from May to early July), you have to tease or infuriate them into striking. You can buy most of the flies you need on the Orvis website (orvis.com), go to a tackle store in Anchorage before you head out to the bush, or buy them at your lodge. If you are fishing with a guide, he should have everything you need; check ahead of time, though. For silvers and sockeyes in rivers and streams, 8- and 9-weights work fine. Seven-weights are suitable for chums, though I took a bunch on a 6-weight my last time there. And if you're after pink salmon, a 5-weight is ideal; they're scrappy fighters but rarely get above 5 or 6 pounds.

Rainbow trout are another story. They grow huge in Alaska: 10-pounders are real possibilities, 5- and 6-pounders almost common, and you have to be prepared. Pack 5-weights with either sink-tip or weight-forward line, plus a 6-weight if you'll be on a river known for bigger rainbows. Muddler Minnows, Egg Sucking Leeches, and egg patterns will get the job done on 'bows as well as grayling. Also bring Glo Bug imitations, nymphs in various hues, black Bivisibles, Woolly Worms, and bulky, gaudy flies for roily water conditions.

Northern pike are not why most flyfishermen go to Alaska, but if you want to fish for them, carry an 8-weight, sinking line, and gaudy streamers.

BAITCASTING AND SPINNING Take different rod-and-reel combinations to be prepared for any situation. For rainbows and grayling, go with an ultralight spinning outfit rigged with 4-pound-test line; for salmon, pike, and char, a medium-action spinning or levelwind rig; and for kings, a 7-foot medium-heavy rod and levelwind bait-casting reel filled with 20-pound-test.

Flashy spinners such as Mepps and Rooster Tails will be all you'll need for rainbows. Pike will take topwater plugs and flashy spinnerbaits, while drift lures such as Spin-N-Glos catch a variety of fish under all conditions. Remember to pack plenty of ball-bearing swivels and weights.

ACCOMMODATIONS

LODGES A week's stay can cost $5,000 and more, but you'll have your own cabin, with living room, bedroom(s), and bathroom. The meals, served at a main lodge, will be first-rate. At the better outfitters, a plane or boat will take you to the best fishing every day, and you'll be accompanied by a guide who will help you find the fish and tell you what to use. This may be the best choice for anglers who have never been to Alaska before. You'll get a taste of fishing in the state without having to worry about arranging transportation or food.

Consider booking two places for your first trip—four days at one lodge, four at another elsewhere in the state. This way, if the fishing is not up to par at Lodge No. 1, then your trip is not a bust, as the angling action at Lodge No. 2 might be great.

REMOTE FISHING Don't want to be pampered at a lodge or to stay in close proximity to other guests? A remote fishing adventure is an attractive option. Throughout Alaska there are innumerable air charter services that will take you almost anywhere you want to fish. They'll help you plan an itinerary and put you onto waters that are fishing well right now. Flexibility is the word: You can book for a day, two days, or a week. Daily trips would leave early in the morning out of a base town such as King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula, drop you off at a remote stream where you can fish all day, then get you back to your motel for the night. Many of these air services also have spike camps and Quonset huts, where you can stay for one to five days, exploring waters that haven't been fished all season. Also, you won't see any other anglers—a far cry from some of the areas in Bristol Bay, where many lodges crowd angling clients into the same well-known hotspots.

RENTAL CABINS If your dream is to go to a remote location and do things on your own, consider renting a U.S. Forest Service cabin. Alaska has two huge national forests: the 17-million-acre Tongass, which covers most of southeast Alaska and contains 120,000 acres of lakes and more than 20,000 miles of streams; and the 6-million-acre Chugach in south-central Alaska, which has 70,000 acres of fishable lakes and 8,000 miles of streams. There are more than 200 Forest Service cabins in these national forests, and they rent for only $25 to $45 a day, sometimes with a boat included. Make sure you book far in advance, as these are popular destinations.

An Alaska Trip Planner: 12 Gateways to Adventure
Listed below are select information sources for lodges, fly-out services, and rental cabins that I have personally used or that have been recommended to me by people I trust. You can also surf the Web, or go to sportsmen's shows and check out booths representing lodges.

[1] ALASKA ANGLER Run by well-known Alaskan angler and writer Chris Batin, this advisory service will help you plan your trip in its entirety, or simply provide tips on how to plan your own. There is no greater source for fishing anywhere in the state. ALASKAANGLER.COM

[2] BOARDWALK LODGE If you want great fishing and a five-star lodge experience, look no further than Boardwalk. Located on Prince of Wales Island, and endorsed by Orvis, Boardwalk is well located for anglers who want to fish salt- and freshwater. With some of the best food in the state, and a killer hot tub that overlooks a salt flat, this is a place you've got to try. A four-night stay will run you $4,200. BOARDWALKLODGE.COM

[3] BROOKS LODGE On the Brooks River in Katmai National Park, this is one of the most unbelievable places I've ever been to. The lodge itself is first-rate, comfortable, with great food. But in this case, who cares? It's got location, location, location. The fishing on the river is unique, with 10-pound rainbows common, and salmon runs occurring on schedule each year. Just keep an eye out for bears because they are all over the place—with many headed up to the falls to do some salmon fishing of their own. You can watch them from the river, giving them their space, or hike to the viewing platform at the falls and admire them from a safe perch. Four-night stays go for $1,765. KATMAILAND.COM/LODGING/BROOKS.HTML

[4] FOX BAY LODGE Based in King Salmon, Fox Bay has jet boats on the Naknek or will fly you to rivers throughout the area. Take your choice of what you want to fish for—king salmon, huge rainbows, grayling, or Arctic char are all available practically at the lodge's front door. Three days' fishing with a guide costs $2,400. FOXBAYLODGE.COM

[5] ORCA ADVENTURE LODGE Located on the Copper River Delta, on the eastern shore of Prince William Sound, not far from Cordova, Orca also has three "out" lodges—Hidden Cove, Sunshine Point, and Tebay Lakes. All four lodges offer great fishing for trout and salmon. Flyfishing instruction is available, and the main lodge has a stocked fly-tying area if you want to tie your own. Prices range from $450 to more than $1,000 per day, depending on which lodge you go to, where you fish, and how many people are in your party. ORCAADVENTURELODGE.COM

[6] RAINBOW BAY RESORT I'm headed to Rainbow Bay this summer, so stay tuned for a report. But I met with owner Jerry Pippen, and I've got a good feeling about it. With fly-outs to rivers around the Iliamna region, comfortable cabins, and a dinner menu that sounds out of this world, Rainbow Bay looks like it's got it right. $6,250 for eight days, seven nights. RBRLODGE.COM

[7] ROD & GUN RESOURCES Booking trips worldwide, this agency has various top-flight lodges to choose from, including the Alaska Wilderness Safari Camp. Described as "an adventure camp for millionaires," the lodge is on the Alaska Peninsula. Accepting a limited number of guests at a time, Safari Camp serves true gourmet food and offers helicopter service to rivers throughout the region. $4,495 per week, plus $400 for air charter from King Salmon. RODGUNRESOURCES.COM

[8] SLAB CREEK Run by pilot Kevin Kellogg, and located in King Salmon, this fly-out service makes daily trips into the backcountry, taking you to prime rainbow and salmon fishing. Boats are available on the Naknek River, in case weather prevents flying. $470 per angler per day. SLABCREEKGUIDING.COM

[9] STEPHAN LAKE LODGE Nestled in the Talkeetnas, Stephan Lake is in an extremely remote and wild area. The rainbow and grayling fishing are superb, the food is excellent, and lodge owner Jim Bailey will keep you entertained with tales of the Alaskan bush from the minute you step into the spacious lodge. Three days, $1,700; five days, $2,200, including round trip from Anchorage. STEPHANLAKELODGE.COM

[10] U.S. FOREST SERVICE This is one of the best deals in Alaska, if you don't mind doing things yourself. Cost is $25 to $45 per night, depending on location. RESERVEUSA.COM

[11] WATERFALL RESORT In southeast Alaska, Waterfall, a former salmon cannery turned into a top-rate lodge, has access to some of the finest saltwater salmon fishing in the state. Guests fly to Ketchikan, then on to Waterfall by floatplane. Fish the salt in state-of-the-art Almar cabin cruisers for monster kings, or try some stream fishing for rainbows and pink salmon just a short hike from the lodge. The food here is awesome, and there's a great game room and sauna for après-fishing relaxation. A three-night, four-day stay will run you $3,475. WATERFALLRESORT.COM

[12] WOOD RIVER LODGE The first place this author ever fished in Alaska, a floatplane ride out of Dillingham, Wood River Lodge is on the banks of the Agulowak River, designated by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game as the state's most productive rainbow water. Comfortable waterfront cabins are all a very short walk from the main lodge. Maximum number of guests is 16. Rates are competitive. WOODRIVERLODGE.COM —JAY CASSELL

The Great Alaskan Cast and Blast

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:00:00 -0500

I was waist-deep when I heard shouts ringing off the canyon walls. I glanced up from a deep slot of slate-green water and grinned. Fifty yards upriver Scott Wood's fly rod was bent double, the line arcing deeply toward a cliff of black tundra-capped rock. He caught my eye and for a few seconds held the cork handle outstretched in one hand, the rod tip dipping and bobbing. I got the message: This was no grayling.

I reeled up and jogged along the gravel bar with half my line still trailing in the water. Wood's was the first Arctic char of the trip, and I wanted a good look. The char of Alaska's North Slope are little-known fish, spending their summers in the Arctic Ocean and then storming coastal plain rivers in late summer and fall to spawn in gravel beds raked up by glacial melt. This one was a beauty: 8 pounds, give or take, its belly sheathed in orange spawning colors, gemlike halos of purple and pink glittering from its dark flanks.

"This was one hot fish," Wood said, cradling the char underwater. "Jumped four times, and he never gave up." He glanced downstream toward the Shublik Mountains towering over the Canning River. Somewhere behind them, 40 miles away, was a shelf of tundra where our pilot would pick us up in four days. To find it we had topo maps, a GPS, and a crumpled sheet of notebook paper scribbled with coordinates: 69 53 039/146 23 242.

Wood, photographer Dusan Smetana, and I were 65 miles and a $2,000 floatplane ride from the nearest road—which happened to be one of the most famous in all of Alaska. The Dalton Highway is a schizophrenic ribbon of gravel and busted, buckled, and washboarded asphalt that trails the Trans-Alaska pipeline from just outside Livengood (about 75 miles from Fairbanks) to the gritty oil town of Deadhorse. Already we'd logged six days on the Dalton, fishing and hunting our way from the spruce woods south of the Yukon River to the tundra plains that lie within spitting distance of the northernmost edge of North America. When it opened 30 years ago, the Dalton—known then as the Haul Road—opened a swath of Alaskan frontier as wild as any remaining on the continent. Halfway through our two-week road trip, we'd already seen just how wild that country remained. And how much fishing and hunting we could cram into 20 hours of daylight each day.

Our immediate task was to take a big bite out of the backcountry accessed via small airstrips along the road. For our unguided, do-it-yourself float on one of Alaska's most remote rivers, we lashed gun cases, dry bags, and camera gear to the raft stern like toy bags on Santa's sleigh. The boat bristled with rods and bows. We planned to herd a 14-foot raft along wind-whipped flatwater, labyrinthine braids, and deep pools fed by creeks plunging off the Brooks Range. Along the way we'd float through herds of migrating caribou and camp on gravel bars lit up by late-summer lightning storms.

But first I had to gawk at this fish—born and bred and hooked and landed 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Just then a Cessna bush plane roared out of the upstream canyon, blue fuselage against towering black bluffs, fat tundra tires hanging low. It was our pilot of the day before, Tom Johnston, dropping caribou hunters on an upstream stretch of the river. He dipped the plane's wings for a better look at Wood's fish, then turned west to climb into the endless blue sky. It was the exclamation point to a scene of utter Alaskan essence: a kype-jawed Arctic char on the line, grizzly prints in the sand, Dall sheep on the cliffs above, and a bush plane roaring off a gravel-bar airstrip, leaving us blissfully behind. Wood slipped the fish into the river, and I headed back downstream. For the moment I was fishless. There was work to do.

RAPID TRANSPORT
Eighteen hours earlier I'd pressed my face against the glass of that very same bush plane. From 1,750 feet above the Arctic coastal plain I could see the past, present, and future scroll below the Cessna winging east from the Happy Valley airstrip. The tundra was scored with weird geometric shapes—centuries-old ice wedges, ice-filled earthen mounds called pingos, thermokarst lakes trapped atop permafrost craters. I watched the plane's shadow glide across Fin Creek and the Ivishak, Kavik, and Echooka Rivers, the last one a braided plain of gravel choked with a frozen skim of aufeis. And then there was the future, at least in the short term: the glacier-fed Canning River, hemmed in by cliffs 3,000 feet high. During months of discussing logistics with bush pilots, biologists, and locals, one location came up time and time again. If you have only one float trip to make, I was told, make it on the Canning. Flowing down the western boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Canning held the promise of Arctic char on the line and big flocks of willow ptarmigan.

Now Smetana manned the oars while Wood and I took turns in the bow, lashing the water like mushers gone mad. Wood's first fish came early and easily, and Smetana hooked a deep-swimming hen while I stroked through a swift side channel. Then the Canning went tight-lipped. Mile after mile we floated under soaring benches of tundra. We fished slow, deep holes where fast currents spilled over shelves of gravel, and we waded across roaring main-stem runs that threatened to sweep us downriver with every step. I was feeling the heat. Ours was not a group to keep tabs, but the spotlight is on when you're the last man in the raft with nothing to brag about.

Hours later we ground to a stop on a gravel bar, grabbed rods, and split up. I fished my way across downstream channels, pounding every piece of water within casting distance. After a half hour I dialed back the pace, hunting for the sweet spots—current seams, pockets of calm flow, deep troughs—before casting. That's when I put a fly just on the far side of a shelf of gravel and felt the line go taut.

Arctic char are known for violent strikes and brawling leaps that give them a good look at their troubles. But this fish dawdled upstream with a Day-Glo Orange Woolly Bugger stuck in his jaw. I struck again, to make doubly sure. That did the trick. Stripping line from the reel, he rocketed across a barely submerged gravel bar, dorsal fin knifing the air. He stopped only long enough to leap, a thrashing, dark silhouette against pale rock and sand. As he zipped across a second bar, spewing a rooster tail above the cobble, I ran with him over the rocks, rod high, laughing and hooting before halting his run.

Wood was waiting back at the raft. "Did you see it?" I asked. He blinked, uncomprehending, then slowly grinned.

"A dark shadow?" he said. "Hurtling through the sky?"

"You got it." I laughed. "The monkey is off my back."

FORTUNATE FOG
Over the next three days we floated across a landscape where it seemed that all of Alaska's finest attributes were crowded chockablock one on top of the other. Beneath Mount Copleston a thunderous waterfall poured off the tundra into a deep pool where we landed seven char—silver-sided hens and black-mouthed males with hooked jaws. Then the soaring, stegosaurian ridges of the Brooks Range gave way to softer hills nodding with Arctic poppy, which ebbed into recumbent plains of sedge and grass that fell away to the earth's curved edge. Late at night we camped on gravel bars where golden eagles soared low, hunting for ground squirrels. Breaking camp one morning, we found ourselves in a push of migrating caribou. Three dozen bulls, cows, and calves picked their way across an upstream gravel bar. We sat on dry bags and life vests to watch the parade in the gray light of an oncoming rain. Bodies crashed into the water, hooves clawing at the gravel for purchase. Three young ones chose poorly. Swept into the swift current at the base of a 40-foot cliff, they retreated midstream, swimming with all their might, only their heads and white tails visible above the water. "What a place for an ambush," Wood said. "Work your way up that gully to the willows, hunker down, and pick your bull."

"Next time," I said. We nodded.

Still, this time, not much went precisely according to plan. We had obsessed over the minutest details of the trip, but so far we'd been blindsided by an Alaskan heat wave and hemmed in by 5 million acres of wildfire. Small-game populations were at an ebb in their boom-and-bust cycle. We worked for every bird and fish.

But the Arctic has its own systems of compensation, and they don't always pay in the expected coin. Day after day of scorching, blue-sky weather came to a halt when we woke up on what was scheduled to be our last morning on the Canning. A dark bank of gray mist and rain cloaked the northern horizon, extending as far east and west as we could see. "There's never been more fog anywhere in the world," Wood fretted as I dug out the satellite phone. A female voice at our pilot's base on Kaktovik Island confirmed our fears: We were fogbound. It could be two hours. It could be three days. Look for the plane, the voice instructed. And don't go anywhere.

We slumped onto a pile of gear. "What now?" Smetana asked. For the moment the answer seemed to be—nothing. Glumly, we dug out the fleece layers that had lain unused in the bottom of our clothes bags. The temperature was dropping as quickly as our spirits. We would look for the plane; we would go nowhere.

Suddenly Smetana sat bolt upright. "Ptarmigan!" he yelled, pointing toward the base of a high ridge of tundra on the far side of the airstrip. "Under those birds!" I looked up just as a pair of falconlike jaegers stooped on a small flock of ptarmigan, causing three to flush. I pounced on the gear mound and dug out my bow. Wood grabbed a shotgun, and we started running.

For the rest of the day we tundra-marched for ptarmigan with gun and bow. We double-teamed the flocks, an archer in the lead and the scattergun as backup when the birds took to wing, watching for hunting jaegers and glassing from windswept ridgelines. We killed ptarmigan on the flat shelf that doubled as the airstrip and far into the tundra, with endless views of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Back at camp we traded 10 feet of tinfoil for a long slab of caribou backstrap from some hunters riding out the fog a quarter mile away. Then, huddled in the lee of the riverbank, we fried ptarmigan hearts, livers, gizzards, and breasts, and sautéed medallions of rich, dark caribou meat in olive oil and as much garlic as we could dig out of the bottom of the food pack. We pulled up our collars and sprawled out on life vests spread atop boulders. "The best thing to happen to us was missing the plane," Smetana said as we traded shots of whiskey, wondered when we'd make it out, and toasted our good fortune at being marooned in the Arctic.

ROAD REDUX
When we made it back to Happy Valley, I humped the first load of gear from the plane to the Jeep and opened the driver's door. A torrent of stench mushroomed out of the car. Eyes tearing, I found the source: a white trash bag atop my clothes duffel, its soggy bottom bulging with fetid eggshells, old bacon, and the decaying entrails and carcasses of four Arctic grayling. I came up for air just in time to see a cackling Smetana peel off in the Wrangler, laughing and holding his nose. Wood eased into the passenger seat, his face buried in the crook of his arm. "Nice work," he said. With the windows rolled down and the sunroof wide open, we could breathe normally as long as we kept the speedometer pegged above 50 mph.

Happy Valley was one of 29 work camps strung along "Skinny City," the 800-mile-long pipeline construction zone that stretched from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay. The camps had more than 16,000 beds and housed 60,000 workers over a three-year period. Now little is left of them, save for their accompanying airfields and a few maintenance outbuildings. Throughout its planning and construction phase, the Trans-Alaska pipeline and road drew ovations of support and furious opposition. The project was characterized both as a benign "pencil mark across a sheet of paper" and as a "broad and portentous scar across an empty and innocent land." Once the oilfields at Prudhoe Bay run dry, the pipeline, like the enormous construction camps, will be dismantled and trucked away. But the road will remain, "as permanent as the pyramids," bemoaned one detractor.

In fact, there's a current push to rasp away the rougher edges of the Dalton and make it an even more popular traveler's destination. The entire route is scheduled for blacktopping sometime in the next five years. There are plans for more visitor centers, campgrounds, and surfaces kinder to RVs. Road tripping the northernmost highway in Alaska is never going to be a lark, but now's the time to do the Dalton while it still retains more than a few sharp teeth.

Past Happy Valley the road began its steep descent into the Arctic coastal plain. Wigeon, mergansers, white-fronted geese, and ducks I took for spectacled eiders cruised roadside ponds. On a pancake-flat prairie we pulled over to gawk at a herd of musk oxen, morose-looking animals that corralled into a circle of hide and horn as soon as we opened the car doors.

On a clear, 80-degree day like this, driving the Dalton can be a cake-walk. But soon a gauntlet of tall metal poles cropped up on each side of the road—snow poles, which truckers use to navigate when blizzards roar across the highway. I'd learned about them at a diner down in Cold-foot Camp, 180 miles south, where I'd bought a trucker a cup of coffee and asked him about the crosses beside the road. He ticked off recent accidents like a shopping list. "One guy froze to death after going through the windshield," he said, eyes steady behind boxy wire rims. "The glass just ripped his clothes off, and it was 40 below. Another fellow was ejected, and the truck wound up on top of him. A friend of mine went so far down through the snow that nobody could see him. There's no rhyme nor reason to why some of these accidents happen. You can just vanish out here."

For its northernmost 100 miles the Dalton Highway parallels the Sagavanirktok River, known simply as "the Sag." Braided into dozens of channels, the Sag freezes solid during the winter, except for a few deep channels and holes scoured downstream of gravel jetties built to protect the road and pipeline. Late in the afternoon we hiked down the spine of a 200-yard-long jetty and cast to grayling holding in the swirling current. Far across the river delta, snow and ice clung to the siltstone and mudstone clefts of Franklin Bluffs. Wood and I struck out across veins of waist-deep current, but in two hours I landed only a single char, the sole rise of the day. After a last try at a rolling run of boulder-strewn water, we sheathed the fly rods. Hiking back to the car, I hardly felt defeated. In five days of chasing char on the Canning and Sag we'd caught two dozen fish—not as many as we might have landed had the migrations been in full swing, but just enough to remember every single strike, every single run and jump, every fish writhing in my hands.

As we trudged back to the Jeeps, we came upon a burly fellow with a three-button beard, slicing salami on the hood of a late-model Toyota pickup. He'd driven up from Minnesota for a 10-day vacation hunting caribou along the Dalton, only to sit in Coldfoot Camp for six days with a busted leaf spring, waiting for parts. "Four days of hunting ain't what I planned on," he said, grimacing. "But this country don't care much for your plans. You gotta take what you can get."

END OF THE LINE
Deadhorse, Alaska, is as architecturally honest a town as ever I've seen. It exists solely to support the Prudhoe Bay oilfield, and it is spectacularly ugly: dingy metal buildings behind ranks of tracked orange and red machines, trailers on skis and skids, shipping containers, water-filled drainage pits where a few white-fronted geese dabbled. Beyond town the enormous Prudhoe Bay oilfield sprawls between the city limits and the Arctic Ocean, closed to all but oil company workers and tour-bus tourists who shell out 38 bucks for a van ride around the oilfield.

At the Prudhoe Bay Motel, a low-slung haunt of oilfield workers, we piled our gear into spartan rooms. Cans of air freshener were within reach of each bunk. "They heard we were coming," I said. That night I stretched out on a soft bed with clean sheets and a true luxury: a fat pillow that didn't sport a single zipper pull digging into my forehead. I hardly slept at all.

If Deadhorse offers an inglorious end to the 414-mile-long Dalton Highway, it does have one overwhelming saving grace: Take the Dalton to Deadhorse and you have no other choice but to turn around and repeat the process in reverse. The next morning we kicked mounds of dirty clothes into piles and spread out maps on the floor. I felt a flush of renewed enthusiasm. There had to be more ptarmigan on the Chandalar Shelf. Gobbler's Knob, I recalled, looked every bit as good. "And we never did try the Dietrich River," Wood said. Or hike down the Yukon shore to the Ray River. Big pike in there, we'd heard.

We packed the Jeeps and loaded up on snack crackers and peanuts at the Prudhoe Bay General Store, purveyor of cheap T-shirts and an impressive offering of girlie magazines. Back in the car I rubbed grit out of my eyes and caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror: a graying two-week beard, cracked lips, bloody line cuts on my knuckles, an infected stove burn oozing on one thumb. As I pulled back onto the highway, I noticed the digital compass on the dashboard. It glowed with a greenish-blue S. We had three days to retrace our steps—or make new tracks altogether.

"So," I asked Wood. "What do you want to do today?"

DALTON LOGISTICS

THE 411: Before you do anything else, get the current edition of The Milepost, the bible of Alaskan road tripping (800-726-4707; www.themilepost.com). It contains tons of descriptions, ideas for side trips and camping spots, and contact numbers. Then pore over the BLM's Dalton Highway website (aurora.ak.blm.gov), and contact the Arctic Interagency Visitor Center in Coldfoot (907-678-5209). Ask for The Dalton Highway Visitor Guide. For details on hunting and fishing along the Dalton, contact the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (907-459-7207; www.adfg.state.ak.us). We made extensive use of its Sport Fishing Along the Dalton Highway booklet. Next, dial up the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau (800-327-5774; www.explorefairbanks.com) to plan where you're going to load up on groceries, last-minute supplies, and hunting and fishing licenses.

VEHICLES: We packed two full-size spares mounted on rims and 10 gallons of extra gasoline per vehicle. At the last minute, we decided against an air compressor and tire patch kit. Next time, we'll bring one. There are gas stations at Yukon Crossing, Coldfoot, and Deadhorse, so plan on going at least 240 miles without refueling—and that's without side trips and doubling back. National rental car agencies don't allow their vehicles on the Dalton, but local agencies fill that gap. For a car, contact Dalton Highway Auto Rentals (907-474-3530). For camper-topped pickup trucks, go with GoNorth RV Camper (907-479-7272; www.go north-camper.com).

SUPPLIES: Yukon Crossing, Coldfoot, and Deadhorse offer tire repair services, showers, phones, minimalist lodging, and small cafes. There are no grocery stores, however, so load up in Fairbanks.

CAMPING: There are only two designated campgrounds on the entire highway, and they're very basic. Instead, look for side roads that access woods and turnouts away from the dusty air of the Dalton.

SIDE TRIPS AND GUIDES: Airstrips along the Dalton are a perfect launching point for backcountry adventures. We lined up a flight with Alaskan Flyers (907-640-6324), but there are others (consult The Milepost). Pristine Ventures (877-716-4366; www.pristineventures.com) offers guided hunting and fishing trips in the region as well as customized information packets for do-it-yourselfers.

—T.E.N.

THANK YOU

The Dalton Highway expedition took months of planning and logistical support. We would like to thank Jeep Brand for supplying a Wrangler Unlimited and a Grand Cherokee. In addition, Weatherby, Wolverine Boots and Shoes, and LaCrosse Footwear also provided gear that was crucial to the success of the trip.

Alaska Salmon Fishing on 25 Dollars a Day

fieldandstream-editor — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 20:00:00 -0400

If I were to ask you to describe a typical salmon fishing trip to Alaska, your answer might go something like this:

"Well, you stay at a lodge that was designed by I.M. Pei and featured in Architectural Digest. The chef has studied under Escoffier himself, and the wine cellar would get four stars in the Guide Michelin if their writers would leave France alone. The boats have Persian carpeting on the decks and leather seats by Connolly. The price for five days is $12,000 before you get into tips, airfare, license, taxidermy, and that stuff. And the fishing's incredible--unbelievable."

You'd be right on all counts. Alaska's fishing is nothing short of fabulous, and some of it is indeed for the very, very well-to-do. A lot, however, is very reasonably priced, and in fact you can catch salmon in our 49th state even if you drive an 18-year-old pickup and live on government cheese.

The U.S. Forest Service has established a network of more than 200 remote fly-in or boat-in cabins scattered across Alaska's enormous Tongass (17 million acres) and Chugach (5.6 million acres) National Forests. The cabins are all located in prime fishing and hunting spots and can be reserved for only $25 to $45 per night, according to the time of year and popular demand. And a nonresident fishing license costs $30 for seven days.

The cabins are maintained in good condition, but you will not live in luxury. They have wood or oil stoves, a table with benches, wooden sleeping platforms, four walls, and a sound roof. You bring your own cookstove and fuel, utensils, air mattresses, sleeping bags, and food. There's no electricity, plumbing, radio, or telephone, and the water can't be guaranteed for drinking, so you'd better boil it first. Sounds like the outdoors, doesn't it?

Getting there is no particular hardship. Alaska Air charges about $890 for a roundtrip ticket from (for example) Seattle to Juneau, which is one of several jumping-off points. From Juneau, or any of half a dozen cities, you can charter a boat, arrange for a floatplane, or rent a skiff and motor. You can get information about transportation and prices from the local chamber of commerce of the area you'll be fishing.

WHAT IT'S LIKE
My son Jeff, his friend Scott Hursey, and I had rented a Forest Service cabin at the mouth of one of southeast Alaska's many prime, but relatively unknown, salmon rivers. There was another Forest Service cabin about half a mile away, but beyond that, nothing.

To get there, we traveled the 30-mile deep-water part of the route in a commercial fishing boat, spending one night aboard. We made good use of that night, setting a Dungeness crab trap and hauling up 18 big-clawed beauties. We took the three largest males to the cabin with us, steamed them, and used the meat, mixed with Tillamook cheese from Oregon, to make omelettes. What was left over went into crab quesadillas with chopped jalapeno peppers and onions.

In the morning we struck out across the flats in an outboard-powered skiff. Reaching the cabin required that we wait for extreme high tide. (This is a common consideration, so be sure to check the tide tables to determine when you can travel.)

On the first morning in camp, the sun had broken through the clouds for the first time in days, and in the distance we could see the snow-clad, 10,000-foot peaks of Alaska's Coast Range. Signs of deer, moose, and black bear were plentiful on the path that followed the river. We watched flocks of green-wing teal, pintails, mallards, wigeon, and Canada geese wheeling in the sky, organizing for their trip south, just as the salmon were pouring in from the Pacific.

Cohos--the fish we were after--can be as moody as Atlantic salmon. There are times when you can see them moving through the pools and rolling in the current, but you can't buy a strike with anything you throw at them. Then, for some unknown reason, they all turn aggressive. You get strike after tremendous strike no matter what you're casting.

Jeff cooked the cohos Alaska-style. He'd lay a thick tamari-marinated fillet on a water-soaked alder shingle and cook it covered on a gas grill for 15 to 20 minutes. The shingle would steam and then burn under the fish, imparting a wonderful smoky taste. A gourmet chef couldn't have prepared anything that tasted better.

HUMPIES 100 WAYS
There are humpbacked salmon, too. These are bright, silvery fish of 3 to 7 pounds, and you find them tightly packed wherever freshwater enters salt. Throwing streamer flies, we were able to get a strike on nearly every cast, and they took off on powerful runs, blasting clear of the water in high, tumbling leaps. Humpies are called pink salmon when you buy them in cans, and they are fabulous-tasting fish when they're fresh from the water. We cooked them every way we could think of and ate them at three meals a day.

But this fishing was so easy that it became boring. At one point, we made bets to see if we could make three casts without hooking a humpie, but it couldn't be done. We'd catch a few each morning to get the day off to a good start and then go do something else. We hiked up a little stream and cast barbless dry flies for 12- and 16-inch cutthroat trout and took 20-inch red-bellied Dolly Vardens on streamer flies. After we'd caught enough of them, we made a long hike across the muskeg meadows and climbed on the ice of an ancient glacier.

We watched a moose cross a beaver bog and saw mountain goats on the cliff above our cabin but turned back when we came upon the fresh tracks of a large bear and caught the scent of dead fish up ahead.

I've been to Alaska a number of times and fished with outfitters on rivers and lakes where the angling was so good and the scenery so gorgeous that I couldn't imagine anything surpassing them. But those were expensive trips.

At the Forest Service cabins, I've found the fishing to be just as extraordinary, and the scenery as beautiful. Yet there was something more. I like fishing when I want to rather than according to an outfitter's schedule, and I like living off the land, cooking my catch the way I prefer, and doing it all with people I like. It makes the Alaska experience entirely your own, and you can do it for the price of a cheap motel room.

TRIP PLANNER

THE CABINS: Complete cabin information is available from the Forest Service Information Center in Juneau (907-586-8751) or from the National Recreation Reservation Service (877-444-6777). Maps showing cabin locations and descriptions of the facilities as well as fishing and hunting information for each site are available online at reserveusa.com. Reservations can be made up to six months in advance. Many of the cabins have a small skiff with oars, but outboard motors and life preservers are not supplied. The length of your stay is limited to seven days from May through September at some cabins, 10 days the rest of the year.

WHAT TO BRING: The Tongass and Chugach National Forests are typical rain forests. At sea level the weather is mild, but you'll wear heavy-duty rain gear most of the time. You'll need fleece or wool shirts, warm-up jackets, and pants that dry quickly.

--Waders are useful in many locations, but hip boots usually suffice. On streams where the fishing is done by rock-hopping, knee-high rubber boots may be the most comfortable. Streambeds can be slippery, so be sure to have boot soles that grip.

--Take along a cellphone or VHF handheld radio to summon help in an emergency, but be aware that mountainous terrain makes reception unpredictable.

--Carry bear spray. Some people attach bear bells to their boots as a precaution when hiking in thick cover.

--Depending on water conditions, 7- to 9-weight fly rods are most useful, and you'll want both floating- and sink-tip lines. Ten-pound-test leaders are sufficient for most salmon fishing, but if there are chinooks in the area, you'll need to move up to 12- to 20-pound-test. Take plenty of flashy streamer flies in sizes 2 and 4, but don't be without small dry flies, nymphs, and streamers for trout fishing.

--Spincasters will find 7 1/2-foot, medium-action rods with 12-pound-test line and flashy gold, silver, hot pink, and fluorescent yellow lures perfect for most cohos and pinks; 20-pound-test for chinooks. --J.B.R.

Alaska Journal: Part 1

fieldandstream-editor — Sun, 11 May 2003 13:30:00 -0400

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

If you've ever wanted to visit Alaska, but haven't wanted to sell the farm to do it, we've got the trip for you. Field & Stream's Editor Slaton White has been keeping a journal of his summer salmon fishing trek through Alaska's bear infested wilds. Below you'll find his first journal entry and info on how to set up your own trip exclusively here at Field & Stream Online.

For the next five days we'll be posting a new journal entry from Slaton. Keep checking back as the adventure continues. And, don't miss the photo gallery which will updated daily.

First Entry -- August 28, 2001
Ultimate Freedom
You know you're in fishing country when you're waiting to pick up your bags at the Anchorage airport. Gear bags big and small, assorted tackle bags, guns, and backpacks come out the door and move down the conveyor belt past a long line of anglers two to three deep. They crowd close, eager to put the city and a long cramped flight behind. Some are booked into expensive, posh lodges; others look forward to week-long fly-in float trips. Another group stands there with rental car contracts in hand, cabin reservations in pocket.

There are many ways to tackle Alaska's fabled fishing, but to me, the ultimate way to go is via a truck camper. It combines the best of all worlds--complete freedom to travel where you want (especially valuable considering the vagaries of Alaska's weather and the exact timing of the salmon runs) and the ability to set up camp along a good-looking stretch of water that suddenly strikes your fancy. Peter Mathiesen (executive producer of Field & Stream Radio and a veteran Alaska angler) and I spent a week chasing salmon while living out of a Lance Camper mounted on a Chevy Duramax diesel pickup.

The RV Factor
The Lance Slideout camper (model 1061) we used was a top-of-the-line model with a full galley (three-burner gas stove and microwave oven), large refrigerator/freezer, and a marine toilet/shower. The slide-out dining area (activated by an electric motor) was a great option that gave us plenty of interior room in which to stretch out. Sleeping quarters above the cab of the truck consisted of a pair of firm twin mattresses. Morning back aches, so common when sleeping on thin pads on the ground, were completely eliminated. The table can convert to a bed if needed; we used it for meals as well as a fly tying and gear prep station.

Given the size of the 1061, you might suppose that the camper would offer a great deal of wind resistance. Not so. Lance designed the unit to keep overall height to a minimum. The dry weight of the 1061 is also very good, less than 3,000 pounds. Lower overall height and less weight translate into better handling performance on the road. In fact, the handling performance was so good that at times Peter and I forgot there was a camper attached to the truck. (For more information on the Lance Model 1061 Slideout, go to www.lancecamper.com; for general information on RV use, go to www.RVIA.com).

Diesel Power
The camper was mounted to a 2001 Chevy Silverado 3500 four-wheel-drive dualie extended cab diesel pickup. The Duramax 6.6-liter V8 engine had plenty of torque when moving from a dead stop as well as plenty of power for passing. Best of all, itÂ¿Â¿s quiet. At full throttle, Peter and I could talk without raising our voices. On the highway, the truck averaged about 14 mpg; in 4wd, mileage was still acceptable, around 11 mpg. This is a solid package perfectly designed to handle a camper.

Blue skies are days to be treasured, as is a dday in which you can see Denali... visit photo gallery for more.Where to Go? Alaska is so big that first-time anglers who want drive-in fishing are stunned when they finally look at a map and size up the fishing possibilities. Should you head south to the Kenai? North along the big Susitna? East over the Glen Highway to the Copper River? Unlike the Lower 48, there is good fishing to be found along the roads in Alaska. And, it's public!

All you need to do is buy a good map and head out. The DeLorme Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer is a great place to start (www.delorme.com). Once in Alaska, you can also pick up copies of the Parks Highway maps, available at sporting goods stores. For this trip, we used Peter's well-creased "Anchorage to Fairbanks via Denali" park map.

Even for the well-mapped, the potential fishing opportunities are staggering. We decided that the Kenai peninsula would be too crowded, so we headed north. Highway 3 to Denali is crisscrossed with creeks and rivers, all potential places to fish. But which stream? Moose Creek? Willow Creek? Kashwitna River? Sheep Creek?

We needed input, so we stopped at 3 Rivers Fly and Tackle Shop in Wasilla to buy some tackle and ask about fishing. The clerk told us that Montana Creek was fishing real good.

A good sign at the 3 Rivers Fly and Tackle Shop...visit photo gallery for more"Pinks and chums are in there," he said.

"Silvers?" Peter asked.

"Yes, they're in as well."

So we continued north. We turned right at the sign "Montana Creek Road," drove about half a mile on gravel and turned left into a pull-out beside the creek.

"We're here, buddy." Peter said, jumping out from behind the wheel. He grabbed a pair of polarized sunglasses and stared out into the stream.

"See? Pinks and chums. There have to be good silvers in here as well." Then he stretched and said, "Can you believe it? We're just 2 hours from Anchorage. Two hours! We got fish, a warm, dry place to sleep, and only a couple of other anglers around us. Life is good!"

Check back tomorrow for Slaton's second entry and more Alaska photos!

Go to Part 2 of the Alaska Journal