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See more photos in this slideshow. Go DeeperExplore Salmon Country Salmon Restoration |
Back up the Kvichak River watershed, not far from where Woody’s team is working, Tom Robinson unhurriedly casts for rainbow trout on Lower Talarik Creek. Somewhere in the underbrush nearby, a bear huffs and grunts. It is the tail end of the sockeye run, and all around, salmon scrabble through the riffles and pair off. The wrung-out bodies of those that have already spawned drift down the creek, filling the air with the smell of dead fish.
Robinson owns the Rainbow King Lodge in Iliamna, and this particular spot — Rock Hole — has an outsized reputation in the annals of fly-fishing. “I’ve been here on this rock when the rainbows are comin’ up, and you see ’em in all these riffles just packed shoulder to shoulder,” he says. “The first time I came here, I hooked 14 of them and didn’t land one. They chewed out the lines and ran.”
“It was unbelievable,” Robinson says. “That’s when I knew this is the place.”
Robinson and other lodge owners — as well as their fishing clients — have played an important role in partnering with the Conservancy to protect land here. In the late 1990s, lodge owners turned to their client lists to raise money for a conservation easement on the private land straddling the mouth of the Talarik. The easement prevents the land from being developed and keeps it open for fishing. The initiative was one part of a larger effort to keep the region’s salmon habitat intact.
The Nushagak rises on the north side of the Bristol Bay watershed, and draws water from Wood-Tikchik State Park, the largest state park in the nation. The Kvichak, to the east, gathers its waters in Lake Clark National Park. But downstream from these parks, the rivers are riddled with a shotgun-blast pattern of open-use land that is managed by the federal government, the state and several Native corporations — for-profit entities in which Alaska Native people hold stock.
“Despite the fact that we’ve created those parks and refuges, we didn’t save ecosystems,” says Tim Troll, the Conservancy’s director of southwest Alaska programs. “What good does it do to create a Lake Clark National Park if salmon have to run this gauntlet of unprotected lands to get there?”
A big part of the concern centers on “Native allotments,” 40- to 160-acre parcels that are held by Native individuals but are at increasing risk of being sold and developed. Much of the pressure is driven by an expansion of the sport-fishing industry in the region.
“More and more people have discovered it,” says Russell Nelson, who for many years was the land manager for the local Native corporation. “We were seeing people purchase Native allotments and start lodges on them. And it was
always the best places that were being purchased.”
That threat, in fact, cuts to the heart of why Alaska is different when it comes to salmon, says Tim Troll. “In every other region, we have — primarily through the destruction of habitat — killed our big salmon runs,” he says, pointing to the Columbia and Sacramento rivers as cautionary examples. “Those fisheries are just shadows of their former selves.”
While salmon protection in the Lower 48 focuses on re-storing degraded habitat, in Alaska the focus is on protecting land that is still relatively pristine, says Troll. “The key is figuring out how to prevent that fractured land ownership from turning into habitat fragmentation.”
And that’s been the primary goal since the 1990s, when the Conservancy helped establish the Nushagak-Mulchatna Watershed Council to coordinate habitat-protection efforts. The Conservancy also partnered with the Bristol Bay Native Association and the watershed council to interview local subsistence users, in an effort to catalog their environmental knowledge and identify ecologically important spots, including salmon spawning grounds, wintertime fishing spots and caribou crossings, throughout the Nushagak River watershed.
That, in turn, led to a long-term conservation strategy — and helped the Conservancy and its partners zero in on Native allotments that were important and at high risk of being sold and developed. In the years since, the Conservancy, working with the Nushagak-Mulchatna Wood-Tikchik Land Trust, has helped to place conservation easements on several critical pieces of land, including 21,000 acres last year on the edge of Wood-Tikchik State Park. The terms of these easements allow Native allotment owners to continue hunting and fishing on their land, and generate some cash for them as well, while protecting the land from anything more than subsistence development.
Yet now, the prospect of the mine looms large over all these efforts to protect salmon and the local subsistence economy.
Nature picture credits: Photo © Bridget Besaw
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