A gold and copper strike bigger than the Klondike is setting up America’s toughest environmental battle since the 1950s. DANIEL DUANE goes deep into the Alaskan wilderness to see what’s at stake.
Photographs by Corey Rich
The Cessna 206 bounced and fell and rose again in the rough air, rattling the gear we’d packed tight behind our seats. “Whoa, Nellie,” said someone behind me. Our bush pilot was running us and our boats out for a five-day expedition on the remote Chilikadrotna River — “the Chili,” as they call it around here. We were 180 miles west of Anchorage on the Alaska Peninsula, flying as low as 150 feet over lakes bigger than Tahoe that the pilot described as “so clean you could drink every last drop.”
Old-growth spruce forest climbed snowy mountainsides clear to the horizon, and unnamed rivers and creeks spidered across the green tundra, never passing a bridge or a home. It looked a lot like those westerns they film in the Canadian Rockies to create the illusion of a wilderness that goes on forever. Except out here, it’s not an illusion.
“My goodness, will you just look at all those fish!” said Carol Ann Woody, our expedition biologist. The engine noise was deafening, so Woody had to bark into the mouthpiece of her headset: “What a great year this is going to be! I’ve never seen so many sockeye in my life!”
Woody, in her late 40s, with thick, blond-streaked brown hair, is one of the most prominent fisheries scientists in Alaska, so I knew that if she sounded breathless, it was for a reason. I pressed my nose to the cold window and saw zillions of red dots clotting the water — salmon by the tens of thousands, laying their eggs. In every creek after that, for miles and miles, were the same giant masses of spawning fish.
“That’s a grizzly, isn’t it, off to the left?” said Woody’s husband, Joel Reynolds, chief biometrician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which means he makes sure all biological field research uses consistent data-gathering methods. A huge guy, 6-foot-6 and lanky, Reynolds was folded tight into his little seat, excitedly trying to point.
I didn’t see the bear, but I saw the next one Reynolds spotted and the one after that: brown blots running full-speed through tall, waving grass. Even though I was about to spend a lot of time on the ground with them, I still loved the idea of thousand-pound carnivorous predators roaming as if they owned the Earth.
And it reminded me why Dan Oberlatz, a transplanted Californian who now runs a successful Alaskan backcountry guide service, brought me to this place: Engineers with the Northern Dynasty mining company claim to have located a half-trillion dollars worth of gold, copper, and molybdenum out here. That’s an awful lot of precious metal, and potentially thousands of jobs in an economically depressed area. But extracting it will require digging the largest open pit mine in North America (a two-mile-wide hole visible from space). A pair of earthen dams (one, the world’s largest at four miles long) will hold back 10 square miles of chemical waste. If this toxic lagoon ever leaks — ever — it will poison not only nearby streams and rivers but also the key spawning grounds for the largest sustainable salmon fishery on Earth, 200 miles downstream in Bristol Bay.
When we passed through the bend, I heard my canoe-mate scream. Directly ahead was a 10-foot grizzly.
This venture, called Pebble Project, could be just the start. The Federal Bureau of Land Management has recommended opening nearly a million surrounding acres to mineral exploration, effectively creating a vast industrial district where there’s currently wilderness. It’s all shaping up to be the biggest conservation fight since the early 1950s, when a proposed dam inside Dinosaur National Monument wound up turning the Sierra Club into a big-time environmental advocacy group.
Woody, Reynolds, and Oberlatz, for their part, hoped to show me what every American stands to lose in this most natural of natural environments — a wilderness like the lower 48 hasn’t seen in 150 years. And they hoped to do it in a way no helicopter ride ever could, with an unsupported run down a wild and remote river, right into the heart of this threatened landscape.
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Port Alsworth, Alaska, population 103, hugs the southern shore of Lake Clark, a narrow, 50-mile-long body of water an hour west of Anchorage by plane. No roads connect the town to any other human settlement; everybody flies in and out, and two gravel airstrips double as the only streets. No stores, either: To buy groceries, locals have to pay one of two air taxis to take them to Anchorage.
I arrived two days before our river trip, joining Woody, Reynolds, and a Sierra Club activist named Lance Holter at Oberlatz’s cabin. Woody, I learned that first night, had been a federal fisheries biologist in Alaska for 15 years, right up until she began speaking out about Pebble’s threat to Bristol Bay salmon. Rather than be muzzled on the topic by her bosses, she chose to resign and commit full-time to fighting the dam.
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March 16th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Mr. Duane,
I am glad you had the chance to see some of the Great Alaskan Wilderness and realize what is actually at stake. Did anyone on your trip mention to you the $300 million a year the Bristol Bay fishery is worth? That doesnt even include processors/wholesalers, shippers to get product to market, grocery stores, restarants or many other outlets that utilize this resource.
Glad you might also understand that the final price of a leakage by the mine would not be just valued in dollars but as a costly loss of such a grand resource as our environment actually is.
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David Otness Reply:
March 17th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Thanks for articulating to a larger audience what is truly at stake here.
I have lived in the Bristol Bay country and there is no way on earth Pebble can be developed without harming if not destroying a significant part of the salmon runs.
Trace amounts of copper disrupt a salmon’s ability to navigate, it has been proven; as has their ability to hide from predators when another salmon fingerling emits distress pheromones they can no longer discern, triggering an escape function.
It should also be considered that this is part of the North American Flyway and massive amounts of swans, ducks, geese and shorebirds transit this area two times a year, nesting in the watersheds of the Yukon Flats, the Kuskokwim and Bristol Bay.
They will want to land on the toxic lakes when bucking into the southeastern storms of the equinox.
They also must run the gauntlet of Tar Sands development in Alberta
twice a year. Same story, toxic lakes that use propane cannons to scare them away when most vulnerable and tired.
500 birds died in one sitting last year when the cannons were unattended.
We have choices, hard choices to make as we sit at the pinnacle of mankind’s achievements.
Will we fail ourselves and heirs to the earth or is this where we begin to make the choices we would wish to be remembered for?
Would you eat a gold fish or use that gold to buy a farmed salmon?
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March 17th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I visited Alaska in August 2008 and was totally overwhelmed by the raw beauty and magnitude of the wilderness. I now proudly display the “Stop Pebble Mine” decal on my car here on the coast of North Carolina. I flew to Port Alsworth, backpacked and drank water directly from the lake. Returning to Anchorage, I flew to Nondalton and saw the spawning salmon in the river below. We,as humans, have messed things up enough. Leave this area ALONE!!!!!!
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March 22nd, 2009 at 4:29 am
What a spectacle? I wonder who else will be motivated to have a travel adventure up there now? Great eco-tourism opportunity, no?
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March 23rd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Good story. You did a nice job summarizing the issue with Pebble Mine and describing one of my favorite rivers in Alaska. The sad thing is that there are hundreds of wild rivers in Alaska like the Chilikadrotna, and nearly everyone of them faces some threat from development or human encroachment. Most of the great salmon streams starting at Lake Iliamna and continuing down the Alaska Peninsula lost their pristine character when fishing lodges were built on the big lakes that feed them. The only reason why Twin Lakes (headwaters of the Chilikadrotna) and Turquoise Lake (headwaters of the Mulchatna) were spared was because they are located within the wilderness boundary of Lake Clark National Park. I was very sad when a lodge was built just recently at the outlet of the Alagnak River on Kukaklek Lake as this was the last of the big lake and river systems that was not developed. The ‘wild and scenic’ status does not protect these rivers from this type of development.
One comment: you mention thousands of elk in Alaska. The only elk I am aware of in Alaska are the roosevelt elk that were introduced to Afognak Island near Kodiak and in southeast Alaska and the farmed elk near Delta.
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April 9th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Having fished the Bristol Bay area 5 times now (looking forward to my 6th this summer), and investigated fishing opportunities for trout and salmon around the world, it is clear that this area of the world is unparalleled as a fishery. Losing it would harm not only the fish, and the fishing industry, but the entire bioenvironment of the region-everyting from the bugs to the bears would be adversely affected and the world would lose a tremendous resource. The problem I see as I visit each summer is that while people like us debate this issue and hope the mining project will not occur, the reality is that every day in this area there are helicopters in the air, and people and equipment on the ground moving forward with the implementation of infrastructure needed for this mine to be created. In other words, we’re talking while they’re working. Unless powerful people with the ability to stop this activity are engaged quickly, all of our words and worries will be wasted and our worst fears realized. If anyone knows how to get the right people to put a stop to this, please let the rest of us know. So far, postcards to congresspeople and local government officials have seemed meaningless.
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Trudy Glass Reply:
April 17th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I have been in touch a friend who forwarded this to a former EPA regional supervisor. Hopefully that will be of some benefit!
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October 13th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Thank you all so much for your positive comments, as well as the eloquently written article. As a Yup’ik Eskimo born and raised in Bristol Bay, it is especially concering because we depend on our fisheries and wildlife for subsistence food and commercial income. We’ve been carrying on our Native hunting and fishing traditions for thousands of years. It’s a David vs. Goliath struggle, and I hope that a pristine bountiful renewable resource that can be here for another thousands of years will be preserved against a short term toxic proposal like the Pebble Mine. It will last a few decades and leave generations upon generations a permanent scar. It’s a human rights issue, so thank you all for your support and please join us in protecting Bristol Bay!
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