smidge of midge: Fish Fence: Alaska Pt. II

John looks askew at some Nutella.

As soon as I landed in Anchorage John and I made a flurry of phone calls to see what we could make happen. He was stationed alone at a place on the coast of Lake Clark Natl. Park, across the Cook Inlet from the city of Homer at a place called Silver Salmon. Since there was a storm coming in it was imperative that I get a flight somewhere immediately or it would be a few days before I could try again. In that case I figured I would rent a car and see some of the Kenai peninsula but my first priority was to get to Silver Salmon. Eventually we found a flight for me that was going to a lodge there to pick up for people who were trying to do what I was but in the opposite direction. I took the rather bumpy one hour flight and found John waiting for me on the beach where the plane landed.

The weir, or fish fence. The video camera is mounted in the stainless steel tank with sandbags on top of it.

We walked up the beach to the ranger station and went to work immediately. The first sight that greeted me when I saw Silver Salmon Creek was that of two bears fighting in the water, the first of many "National Geographic moments" as John and others would say. I didn't take a photo because we were rather far away and I felt that I had already held John up enough but it will at least register in my mind as my first brown bear sighting. At Silver Salmon John was in charge of maintaining a fish fence, or wier in the parlance. The idea here is to build a fish barrier that every individual must pass through on their way upstream. Most weirs are operated by people who actually count the fish that go through them. This particular station however was one of them new-fangled video weirs.

Clearing the wier of debris.

This weir had a thin channel that each fish had to swim through, like all the others, but on one side of it was mounted a camera and two large floodlights. The camera was connected to a DV-R chip that was activated by a motion sensor tripping a two second video recording. In the background a large ruler was mounted. With this setup then John and his colleagues could monitor how many, what kind, what sex, how large, and when each fish moved through this particular area. Rather slick!

Digging in the dry bag. Note the solar panels in the background.

While at Silver Salmon our job was just to keep the thing running, which sounds easy but is in fact a lot of work. The first obstacle is that it takes around an hour just to get there. We walked about 2/3 of the way and paddled a canoe for the rest. Once arriving we had to clear the fence of debris and make sure that it was fish-tight. Then we had to check the electronic components including the recording hardware as well as the batteries and solar panels the power the rig. Around the whole thing was an electric fence to keep bears out. One day we had to haul a couple of very large batteries out to the site and that took some cooperation with the local ranger who brought them to the canoe with an ATV since we couldn't carry them that far, or certainly not on a rapid timescale at least.

John fishing.

Of course visiting a weir does not necessarily a full day make, nor did the weather cooperate at times. One of the days the wind was far too strong for us to practically (and perhaps even safely) make the canoe trip to the monitoring site and so we decided to go fishing. As you might expect the silver salmon were running in the Silver Salmon and it didn't take too much work to hook some beautiful fish. I didn't have a fishing license yet at this point so I was on bear lookout. Bears are crawling all over the place at Silver Salmon and there was only one day out of five that I did not see a bear and most days I saw more than one. At this time of year they are feeding on the fish in the creeks but at other times they are foraging in the salt marshes along the coast.

"...any fish down here?"

There are lots of bear rules at Silver Salmon as you might expect. Most of them center around not rewarding bears with food, to keep them from associating people with food which can in time lead to people as food, and how to avoid negative encounters with them by making noise or what to do or not to do if you suddenly come across a bear. One rule is that you cannot fish if there is a bear in sight. Bears however have a knack for hearing the splash of a fish being landed and so if a bear shows up while you have a fish you either have to cut the line or let out a lot of slack to remove that cue. If you have already killed the fish then you need to get it into a metal box and defend that from the bear. There were a couple humorous bear stories while I was there, including one person who either didn't have a bear box or didn't know how to use one so they stuffed the still struggling salmon into their coat and tried to hide it from the bear while their wife cowered behind a tree. Luckily things turned out well for both man and beast in this instance.

A fresh dinner of silver salmon.

It was a lot of fun living at Silver Salmon. John and I slept in a disused sauna; he on the bench and I on the floor. During the day we would cook and at at the small ranger station, a log cabin that had been built by her husband. One day we made fresh-caught salmon over the grill and I have to say that was extremely tasty! Even though the rain and wind was a constant presence we had a good time walking the trails and observing bears. Once in a while we would see some nice birds including eagles, merlins, osprey, and kingfishers.

My legalism almost got the better of me.

Once the weather improved on Thursday we decided it was probably time for us to get out of there. Finally the sun came out and we heard from Park Headquarters in Port Alsworth that a plane would be coming to get us. I think it helped that the ranger station needed some propane as well meaning that they could kill two birds with one stone by sending a plane. We packed our things up and headed down the the airstrip/beach with a bunch of guys from Colorado and Austria who had been fishing that day.

This Merlin alighted very close to me while I was talking with Kevyn the ranger.

Another "bear rule" is that you have to clean your fish on the beach and leave the waste in the surf, again to minimize the bear's association between people and food. So while we were down there these guys started to clean their fish, which they had a lot of as there were a lot of them and each dude had three salmon. It didn't take too long for a grizzly to come barreling down from the north end of the beach, right around the time that our plane was coming in for a landing. A few minutes later as we were packing our gear into the small plane another bear come running from the south. John and I were stuffing our things into the little Cessna while the bears munched away and the tourists looked on.

One of the Park Service's Cessna 185s.

I loved flying around in these little planes. I had only been in two others before; once for my 13th birthday back home in Michigan and another time with my brother in Iceland two years ago. This flight was much more smooth than my first one and took us through some dramatic mountain valleys at low altitude. As we took off the bears scattered and I barely felt the plane lift off of its big sand tires and into the air.

A bear eating fish guts in the surf as we boarded the plane.

During the flight I caught a nice glimpse of Iliamna Lake, one of the largest lakes in the US and a critical part of the Bristol Bay Salmon fishery. There is a big group of people from University of Washington-Seattle who work on this fishery and some of them stay on an island in the east part of the lake. Finally we came up on Lake Clark and Port Alsworth were the pilot took us down. He was an interesting guy and at one point compared me to Absalom when we were talking about how my hair got caught in the door before we took off. I thought that was a pretty obscure piece of knowledge for a bush pilot and it made me curious about the man.