PPS Destinations Report 

Bristol Bay, Alaska, USA

Date:       Summer 2010  

Reported by Dr. Chris Travis, Laguna Hills, Ca, USA

Alaska: America’s Last Frontier

 America has a great variety of climates, from deserts so sparse one would think there is not a living animal in hundreds of square miles, to forests and mountains where snow capped glaciers are seen year round. The Midwest has farm fields as far as one can see and Florida has The Everglade marshes and bogs that seem to conjure up stories about gators, snakes, swamps, and the wildness of it all.  Mangroves grace the landscape of the Keys in Florida where an incredible diversity of fish and wildlife thrive.  

Alaska has the kinds of stories like Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” and the gold mining stories of the 1800’s. It also brings up the stories about the wild animals the Inuit natives had to harvest to survive in this forbidding territory. These animals were so important they became part of the Inuit religion.  Salmon, trout, char, bear, moose, sheep, deer, caribou, geese, ducks, eagles, ptarmigan, and seals were all part of the diet, clothing, and tools.  

We traveled to Southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay, where, the largest salmon runs in the world occur every summer.  It is also home to the most prolific and largest rainbow trout fishery in the world, the NakNek River. Every year, this river consistently yields rainbows over 36 inches, feeding on salmon smolts, mice, ducks, and salmon eggs.  During the summer, the huge rainbows corral the salmon smolts in the shallow rapids on the NakNek River and fly fishermen wade these places and cast into huge boils of smolts and giant rainbows. It is a hoot and it helps that arctic tern and seagulls see the welled-up smolts before the angler does.  

So, you watch the tern and seagulls scrambling to pick up the fleeing Salmon smolts on the surface of the water, and cast into the boils. The whole process is called “smolt busting” and it is just like Striper Bass fishing off of Nantuckut.  The flies used are surface wakers, poppers, or streamers on floating line just under the surface of the water, imitating light colored salmon smolts.   It is incredibly visual and concentration is paramount to hook one of the largest rainbows in a river. The casts must be instantaneous and just downstream from a boil. The takes are heart-stopping!  The angler sees these huge rainbows sharking through boils just like Tuna or Stripers ripping through prey they have bunched up. Many are over three feet long and very healthy. The guides have estimated some of these leviathans to be over 20 pounds in the NakNek River. The state record of 23+ lbs comes from this drainage.

 It is not easy to hook these wary trout, but when you do, it is very tough to turn them. 9 wt rods with a lot of backing is a must, and running after them can be troubling with a river hundreds of yards wide and the current going at a very fast clip. Because the river rapids are so wide and the smolt-busting action spread out, using two handed 14 ft  9 wt rods was the way to fish.  The Kvichak, Alagnak, and Nushegak Rivers also have great reputations for large rainbows as they empty into Bristol Bay.  Lake Illiamna is the headwaters of the Kvichak, an immense lake with some of the best fishing in the world. The salmon migration is the main reason these trout get so huge. It is fortunate that most of the fishermen release the trout unharmed so they can continue to thrive in these rivers.

 Long hikes into very remote small rivers and creeks were the highlight of the trip for us. These creeks were in the Lake Clark, McNeil, and Katmai National Parks and Preserves, and we had to fly to some very remote “pot hole lakes” to get somewhat close to these gems. Some hikes were over 7 miles over tundra (tough walking), but once there, you knew no one had fished the water or even walked the creeks and rivers for a long time.  Big rainbow trout were voraciously eating just about anything that looked edible. Sockeye salmon were everywhere spawning, and of course, the brown bears were around every corner. I stopped counting at 50 on Funnel creek. It was Country Bear Jamboree. We had to circumvent some very large boars and sows with cubs on the water through Alder bushes. Very sketchy.  Fortunately, the huge brown bears were more concerned about eating the salmon. They must consume over 70 lbs a day, during the runs, so they have enough body weight to make it through the cold winter. If a brown bear has to wake in winter due to hunger, only 20% survive it!

 The lodge we stayed at is called Rapids Camp Lodge, and it is famous for many reasons. It is situated on the famed NakNek River and the giant Rapids (riffle) I was talking about. They have four planes to fly to all kinds of areas in the region, and we were able to fly into remote places on the Alaskan Peninsula where the Aleutians begin.   The Lodge is first rate, the food wonderful, and the guides love being there. There are two to a room with nice bathrooms. Everything is there including HD TV and internet access. A fitness room, sauna, and hot tub are included as well as a nice nick-nack store full of things to buy. It is a very roomy lodge, they wash your clothes, and it is near King Salmon, from where you fly into from Anchorage. Very easy.

We came to Rapids Camp for huge rainbow trout, but also picked our dates of fishing to coincide with the Silver Salmon spawning runs in August. We were not disappointed. They were especially prolific on the Alaskan Peninsula in the Egegik River coming from Becharof Lake and Ugashik River coming out of  Ugashik Lake.  The famous Ugashik Narrows, a short river between Upper and Lower Ugashik Lake, was incredibly full of fish.   Silvers, giant sea-run char, grayling (so large you swore you had a rainbow on; the state record at Narrows), sockeye, rainbows, pinks, sheefish (Inconnu), just everything you could think of were in this short river. One just had to wade into a different type of river condition and you would be into a different species of fish.  

The more northern rivers that we flew to; the Kvichak, Alagnak, and Nushagak, did not have the Silver Salmon runs in full tilt yet, so we focused on the NakNek River, Alaskan Peninsula and Katmai National Park rivers where the runs were in full bloom.   That is the advantage of a lodge like Rapids Camp which have 3 Beavers and an Otter on floats. They scout where it is happening and the anglers go where the fishing is hot.  It doesn’t hurt to be in Alaska and Bristol Bay, either. Weather was good for us and allowed us to scout and get to all the great fishing areas without a problem.  

One troubling thing that may very well occur in the area is the proposal of the largest open-pit gold and copper mine in Alaska (maybe the world) happening at the headwaters of the Nushagak, Kvichak, Alagnak, and NakNek Rivers, the main Bristol Bay drainages. The gold and copper will be leached out of the open pit by Strychnine (ya, the same stuff that kills all life). It’s called the Pebble Gold Mine and it is a very bad idea.   The tailings lake to be made will be over 12 miles long and 7 miles wide with all the copper sulfate (deadly to all fish) and strychnine, lying in wait behind an earthen dam, for the Hundred-Year storm (every 20 in Alaska) to release it into the drainage where the most prolific salmon spawning run in the world occurs.  What makes it even worse, it’s not American. The company is a foreign conglomerate that has promised the Intuits jobs and money for Alaska.  It ends up the company is going to bring in their own workers and the money to the natives is (less than) a penny on the dollar. Go figure.

 When asked about the tailings lake, the experts say it is a lake that is forever. It cannot be left alone and the poisons are there for perpetuity.  I get the idea these people are not far thinking individuals. Whose job will it be to care for the poison-lake after the mine becomes useless?  (60 years) I am sure it won’t be Anglo-Dynasty and the Pebble Gold Mine.  It will be the US government who will have to worry about Armageddon.  That is why we were really there. We will portray this proposed mine in a different light to 100 million homes in North America. We have interviews from experts in the fishing industry as well as Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, TU, and a senator from Alaska. We will show the incredible beauty of the region and how man could destroy it forever over greed.  We cannot let our kids inherit these kinds of enviro-disasters.  None of us want to hear this, but there is no time left.  

Chris