National parks in continental U.S., as massive as they may be, always feel like parks: apex predators gone, roads marking the park boundary in every direction. In a way, that’s great; you can actually take your kids camping and you don’t even need a large-caliber firearm. Up here, it’s different. We could’ve walked 600 miles to the Arctic Ocean or west to the Bering Sea, and all around was land full of grizzlies and black bears and vast herds of migrating caribou, thousands of wolf packs and elk and moose and more fish than anyone could eat in a lifetime. But to the southwest, only about 60 miles away, where the sun still shone, was the mine site.
“Wait, do you feel that?” Woody asked. “Is that lightning?”
I stared at her.
“Why are you looking at me like that? Oh, God, is my hair standing up?” Woody asked. She was well aware that electrical charge builds in the air in the last few instants before a direct strike.
“That’s got to be the wind in your hair, right?” said her worried husband, Reynolds.
“That is not wind,” I replied.
“Okay, it’s time to run,” Oberlatz said. “Right now.”
And we did, scattering like ants across the broken slope, running and running as thunder cracked and lightning struck directly where we had been standing only minutes before.
—-
We paddled off the beach the next morning and felt the acceleration as flat water slipped downhill. A pale-gray gyrfalcon shot from the sky with extended claws and nearly slaughtered a merganser duckling right before my eyes. Big sockeye salmon slithered in schools in the clear current; looking overboard I could see hundreds of them. They moved so slowly, I imagined I could reach in and pull out 10 pounds of dinner.
Oberlatz stopped us before sunset, and we hauled the canoes onto a sandy bank to camp. I tied a fly to my line and waded into the creek. The salmon, Woody pointed out, weren’t biting. The way their life cycle works, they hatch in eggs under the winter’s ice, in streams like this one, and then they swim out to sea with the spring melt. Spending years in the North Pacific, they suddenly reappear, as if by magic, at the mouth of the stream from which they first emerged, loitering in the brackish interface between saltwater and fresh. That’s where commercial fishermen generally catch them, in a carefully orchestrated season that leaves enough adult salmon to swim back up their ancestral streams. These survivors cross lakes and find their way through second and third tributaries, taking first this fork and then that one, until they reach the very stretch of water in which they first popped out of an egg. This is why salmon are so unusual: Clean oceans aren’t enough to keep them alive; salmon require a clean inland world, too.
Once they’re ready to spawn, salmon lay eggs in the gravelly river bottom, cover the eggs with more clean gravel, and then simply die — millions of them, in creeks and streams all over this area. To see them in that state, as we did — adrift after spawning, life ebbing out of them — is to understand how profoundly salmon are a keystone species, critical to the health of an entire ecosystem. Not only do they feed all those grizzlies and eagles, and not only do their eggs support other fish in the streams, but by dying and therefore dumping hundreds of millions of pounds of nutrients onto these riverbanks every year, they give birth to the riparian habitat that also supports the moose and the caribou, and therefore the wolves who prey upon them.
“If you lose the salmon,” Woody said, “you really lose the whole thing. The mine isn’t just about one species.”
Suddenly, Holter’s fly rod bent in half. Silhouetted black against the pink evening sky, he held his ground in water to his hips. He dragged the fish back, into the shallows, then picked up a king salmon.
Woody was just trotting down to make sure he let the thing go — a great defender of fish, she tragically ensured that we ate not a single one — when we both heard one of the guys yell.
I couldn’t make out what he said, but his tone sounded serious. I splashed to the shore in time to see a large grizzly bear not 15 feet from Holter.
The shouting startled the bear, and he jumped into the river. We watched his big head and furry ears float away.
—-
We had to cover 35 miles the fourth day, so we woke early and pushed into the current. Grizzly tracks covered the mud along the river’s edge; we saw grizzly shit, too, and wolf prints and wolf shit and moose prints and a moose’s leg bone gnawed free of meat. We also saw big schools of sockeye swimming in the glassy water, as well as arctic grayling and rainbow trout, some two feet long; they follow the salmon, eating eggs that tumble free.
Sometime in the afternoon we came to a place where the rapids looked so thick with downed trees that we had to step out of the boats to scout. Hip-deep in the water, while the ice-cold current pressed against our chest waders, we held the canoes steady and tried to see.
“We had a big spring melt this year,” Oberlatz said. “It took out this whole valley.” This is exactly the kind of natural event that makes the proposed Pebble earthen dam so vulnerable. Oberlatz pointed out places where the forest had been flattened well away from the river, in wide flooding. Dead trees hung sideways across the main current, forming shoulder-high sweepers that could knock you out of your boat; other trees, half-submerged and bristling with branches, could trap a person underwater.
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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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December 23rd, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Thanks I had a a great read
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October 31st, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Hello, just stopped by doing some research for my 7 for all Mankind website. Amazing the amount of information on the web. Wasn’t what I was looking for, but very nice site. Have a nice day.
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