Hot Times in Alaska (No Skiing)

I just got home from a trip to the fishing lodge in Alaska that we have listed for sale.  This is the same place I went to last August and did the infamous skiing-on-caribou-poop trip report on EpicSki.

This lodge is located halfway down the Alaska Peninsula, which ends at the Aleutian Islands for all you geography buffs out there.  The lodge sits on a wooded bench at the lofty elevation of 435 feet above sea level. Just above the lodge are the foothills of the Aleutian Range, which is the volcanic mountain range that runs the entire length of the Alaska Peninsula and also forms the islands of the Aleutian chain.

This semi-dormant volcano, Mt. Chiginagak, towers above the entire landscape around the lodge. 



Its summit elevation is only 7,005 feet, but it rises almost from sea level.  The view above is what you have if you're fishing just a little downstream from the lodge. 

This photo, by Janet Schaefer of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, shows the crater of the volcano.  The lodge is located in the green valley almost directly above the summit in the photo:



Anyway, last year I skied a couple of fairly big snowfields on August 19 on a small sub-summit above the lodge at 2,700 feet.  THIS year, almost all of that snow is gone.  They've had an incredibly dry winter/spring/summer and the recent temperatures in much of Alaska have been off-the-charts hot. 

No skiing for me this year.  I didn't even take the skis.

I just went fishing this time.

Because of the low water and warm temperatures, most of the migrating salmon were staying in the lower parts of the rivers, so we rode boats downstream to get to the fish.  A typical day would start with a wonderful breakfast at the lodge:



And then a boat ride that almost always includes lots of wildlife sightings like bald eagles (I think these two must have been twins):



Arctic terns:



Caribou:



Tundra swans:



And king salmon like this one I'm holding:



A couple of days, we flew out in a small plane to a smaller stream that's loaded with rainbow trout and arctic char.  Here's what a plane looks like taking off from the lodge airstrip:



Here's a big arctic char that ate a mouse imitation skating across the surface:





And on one day, I took a hike above timberline with one of the owners of the lodge.  We found a little bit of snow, but not much:



And a very cool mound of rocks and vegetation that was covered by a giant spider web.  This was at the 2,700 foot elevation point and there were bugs of every possible kind flying and crawling around on this thing:



I always hate to leave that place.

Heh.

Up there, brown bears take over the role of potentially nasty critter that you need be aware of. 

We actually had what could have been an unpleasant experience with a bear.  We were on our way down a ridge on our hike, still well above timberline, when we came over a little knoll.  I happened to be looking down the ridgeline when I noticed what seemed like a big beige rock in a spot I didn't remember a big rock as we were coming up.  About a half second later, I realized this was not a rock.  It was a very big blonde grizzly bear with its head down sniffing the tundra for rodents.  He was about 200 yards away from us across very smooth terrain and UPwind, which is not a good thing.

I tapped Patty on the shoulder and pointed.  She and her husband own the lodge and she's very bear-savvy.  She sized up the situation and didn't like it.  We were totally in the open and if it wanted to, a big bear could cover the distance between us in a few seconds.  She whispered that we should crouch down and move sideways off the ridge.  The bear had already lifted his head and was looking right at us.  As we started crabwalking away, he took a few steps toward us, but more like he was trying to figure out what we were than actually threatening us.  All of a sudden, he decided he wanted nothing to do with us and just bolted off the ridge down into the next drainage (called Bear Creek, appropriately enough).

Once he disappeared, we still needed to walk down the ridge he had just left in order to get back to the lodge.  Of course, we didn't know how far he had gone, just that he had left.  Patty had one hand on the bear spray and we spoke VERY loudly as we walked.  Once we got by where he had been, we walked over to a little open knoll and looked down into the drainage.  There, about five hundred feet below us was our bear, just sitting in the open looking toward us.  We looked at each other for a couple of seconds and then he got up and galloped away down toward the alders lower down near the creek.  End of encounter.

The really bad thing about all this is that I had my camcorder around my neck when we spotted the bear (my still camera was in my pack). I got a few seconds of pretty good footage of the bear when we first saw him (before Patty got through to me that we needed to move RIGHT NOW) and then more as he ran down the drainage.  We viewed it that night but I didn't download it to the computer.  The next day, I was fishing and filming while we were on the arctic char stream.  When I do that, I hang it around my neck and tuck it inside my chest waders when I'm not filming.  Sure enough, while crossing the stream I tripped on a rock and fell face forward into the stream - dousing the camera with water.  The camcorder was off at the time and I immediately took out the battery.  I left it to dry and didn't plug it in again until I got home.  The camcorder now powers up just fine but it's not accessing the hard drive.  Canon told me that they MIGHT be able to salvage the footage on the drive if I send it to them, so it's on its way today.  If they can get my footage back, I'll post a video of Mr. Bear.

We actually discussed the snake thing.  They didn't think there snakes of any kind on their part of the Alaska Peninsula but they didn't know about the rest of Alaska.  Does anybody here know?  Any garter snakes or something similar?

Speaking of bears, last night I talked with the owner of Painter Creek Lodge.  The salmon are in the river in full force and the bears are chasing them.  A guide took two fishermen down the main river yesterday and they counted 24 grizzly bears visible from the boat in about ten miles of river.

Best of all...

I'm leaving this coming Friday to spend all next week chasing fish and photos up there.  Wahoo!

Photos and video to follow.

Hi, steveturner.

There's no ignorance at all in that question. 

The answer depends a whole lot on two things - regulations and personal preference.  Here in the West, there's a pretty strong catch and release ethic where trout are concerned.  That's partly because trout fishing in many areas of the west had severely degraded a couple of decades ago.  The reasons included lots of things like habitat degredation, increasing populations of people, increasing demand for water, and overfishing.  Catch and release regulations and the new attitudes about releasing trout have made big improvements in trout fishing around much of the West.  In most of the bigger public rivers, the trout populations really couldn't survive if most people were killing and eating a high percentage of what they catch.  In smaller streams, however, there are usually plenty of trout and eating some of them doesn't hurt a thing.

Alaska is a different kettle of fish (heh) entirely.  In the watershed that I'll be fishing, there are a maximum of 8-10 anglers a week spread out over miles and miles and miles of streams.  There are literally tens (maybe hundreds?) of thousands of Pacific salmon that come into those streams to spawn and die.  Following those salmon are droves of arctic char and rainbow trout that come up the streams to feed on eggs escaping the salmon nests.  There are honestly more fish than you can even imagine.

Despite those numbers, in the portion of Alaska that I'll be fishing, it's not legal to keep (and kill) any freshwater fish - which means the trout and char.  There are very liberal keep limits on the various species of salmon around the state.  There's a lodge about 40 miles from the one I'll be fishing where the owner caters almost exclusively to European fishermen who keep every single salmon they're legally allowed to kill.  They take them home and sell them, essentially paying for the expense of their trip.

The owner of the lodge where I'm going has a different outlook.  He "prefers" that his guests keep only a limited number of salmon.  That means I usually will kill one or two salmon during the week I'm there to bring back home.  Even then, we only keep male salmon (they don't produce eggs) and the ones we keep are very fresh out of the ocean (you can tell by the appearance). 

Across Alaska, there are many, many people who keep every salmon they're allowed by law.  For some of them, it's a primary source of food at a reasonable cost.  I'm not wild about people killing and keeping hundreds of pounds of salmon, but I understand the motivation for many of them. 

I guess it's a complicated - but definitely not ignorant - question.

Planes are everything in Alaska.  Hang around most any Alaskan airport and you'll see airplanes so strange you never dreamed they existed. Everybody's got at least one plane, everybody's a pilot, and they all love talking about anything aeronautical. 

Bob Lee's right (as always).  That's a Super Cub and it has very large, low pressure tires.  They use those tires to land on sand, grave bars, tundra, ice, whatever (water's not good, however ).  The Super Cub belongs to a friend of the lodge owner.  If there's a headwind, that little thing can fly at just barely faster than a hover and I've seen him land and take off on a gravel bar no longer than a football field.

Bob is also right about Alaskan fishing spoiling you for fishing in the Lower 48.  It makes most other fishing a bit boring by comparison.  Come to think of it, the same might be said about the skiing.