Sammy Steen’s hands hung claw-like beside dirty orange rain slicks. His three-person crew of salmon fishermen had just hopped out of a skiff, slogged to shore through 200 hundred yards of ankle-deep tidal mud, and were milling around in a daze at their camp at Nushagak Point, Alaska. It was midday on the eighth of July. They had been working 24 hours a day in 12-hour shifts for two weeks. Their shift was done. The next would start at midnight. Steen grimaced as he peeled off tight rubber gloves. “None of our hands work right now,” he said, holding them out as evidence of the toll taken from picking thousands of fish from gill nets. Shredded and swollen, one finger’s digit bulged so red around a wedding band it looked about to burst. “But we’re trying to be a bit more chill now, for this next last push,” he said. “Just trying to coast into our best season ever.”
The “season” was the annual commercial sockeye salmon fishery of Bristol Bay, a manic, all-out grind by 2,400 small-boat crews to intercept as many fish as possible during their month-long spawning migration from ocean to river. For Steen, 37, a second-generation setnetter who has spent every summer on one of the most productive beaches of the single most productive sockeye fishery in the Universe, to be on the verge of best season ever was saying something.
Bristol Bay is an inlet of the Bering Sea in southwest Alaska, but the name further connotes a broader region of pristine wilderness the size of Kentucky, comprising countless rivers, massive lakes, two national parks, two national wildlife refuges, the country’s largest state park, a few small villages, and no road access.
Most of the region’s few thousand residents are indigenous Yupik and Dena’ina, whose families have lived here for thousands of years, and for whom salmon are elemental to life, culture, and spirit. In the Yupik language, the word for fish – neqa – is also the word for food.
In summer, though, 25,000 people show up to catch, process, and ship out half the global supply of sockeye for an industry worth $2 billion per year. Additional thousands come to sportfish, bear-watch, and otherwise enjoy the rare spectacle of a fully functioning ecosystem.
Nushagak Point is an ephemeral spot, one of a handful of tiny hamlets where the fleeting summer, the storm of fish, and a pop-up ensemble of characters who come for both intersect for six intense weeks, and then vanish.
Fishermen arrive around the first of June. Boats and nets are repaired, rookie crew members initiated, and old ones catch up on life since last summer. There are celebratory barbeques around the first fish caught — campfires, whiskey, hand-rolled cigarettes. “It’s a lot of work to get here,” Steen says. He makes the trek from Colorado. That work entails “planning, buying, shipping, crew, travel. But once you’re here, it’s like family.”
It’s an eclectic family. A random sampling of off-season occupations encountered bay-wide include sheep-shearer, music producer, chef, fly fishing guide in Chile, Christmas tree dealer in Manhattan, fashion designer in Indonesia, corporate executive, trapper, longshoreman, and an artist whose girlfriend is a famous actress. There are church groups and immigrant families who fish in teams. There is a disproportionate number of teachers and ski bums, and a disproportionate number of tattoos. And then there are the local crews for whom Bristol Bay is simply home. It’s a little bit organic farmer, a little bit Deadliest Catch, and a little bit Burning Man. Each camp and live-aboard vessel is an unfilmed reality show.
The fishermen might get 80% of their catch in just a handful of peak days, and what you don’t want is a showstopper. “That’s the only anxiety you feel,” Steen says of early-season prep work, “Making sure the minutia is tightened up, so nothing goes too wrong when it turns into a shitshow.”
Even after everything is checked and rechecked, there is still risk. Run sizes peak and trough roughly on the decade, and prices fluctuate too, from 50 cents per pound one year to maybe $1.50 the next. So if you catch just 50,000 pounds on an off year, the math after expenses can be painful. But if you catch 300,000 pounds and get a good price, your little crew gets to divvy up half a million dollars.
Fish trickle in throughout June, and then, inevitably, the horde makes its move. In 2022 it came on June 29th. Sarah Braund, another lifelong Nushagak Point fisherman, described the day as perfectly calm, “but the water was alive, wavy. From fish. You walked through it, and they were hitting your legs! I didn’t want to put my net in.”
But the net must go in. “There’s no mercy after that,” Steen added, “It’s eat, sleep, fish.”
Bristol Bay salmon are of purely wild origin. Born in rivers and lakes, they migrate to saltwater after one or two years. After two or three more years at sea, they return to freshwater in one of the biggest movements of biomass on the planet. Tens of millions of five-pound silver bullets shooting upriver on a sacrificial mission to sniff out the very same stretch of water in which they were born. There they spawn and die, their bodies becoming ocean-derived fertilizer for a hungry land. The waterways, forests, and countless organisms like bears, bugs, and birds are all intricately reliant on each generation of salmon, and vice versa.
This happens every year, sustainably, for free. What’s more, there are probably more salmon returning to Bristol Bay today than at any other time in the last 1,000 years. Modern records and analysis of ancient lake sediments tell that run sizes have fluctuated from lows near 3 million fish to highs of around 50 million. Since 2014, however, every year’s run has exceeded 50 million. In 2022, a record-shattering 79 million sockeye returned home.
Incredibly, the fleet harvested 75% of this number. This sounds paradoxical. How can you kill most of a population and have it come back stronger than ever? The State of Alaska manages for sustainability using principles of escapement theory. That is, fishermen put out nets only after enough salmon have “escaped” out of the bay into the rivers in a volume sufficient to reproduce the total. The offspring of this Goldilocks number then have low competition for abundant food and habitat, such that 4 to 10 adult returning salmon can come from one spawning female. “That's the principle,” says Dr. Daniel Schindler of the University of Washington, whose department has studied the runs for 75 years, “that fisheries be allowed only to take the surplus but never bite into the principal.”
But, Schindler explains, something else has been ratcheting up run sizes to extraordinary levels. Over the past 40 years, global warming has been melting ice sooner in spring and freezing up later in fall. Under this new regimen, baby sockeyes’ growing season is longer, warmer, and more rich with food, allowing more fish to survive their early, most vulnerable life stage. They are, apparently, climate change winners.
When asked, though, whether the hot tub temp might get uncomfortable, Schindler demurred. “You mean whether there’s a time bomb in there waiting to go off? I don’t know.” The warming trend will certainly continue, and big population swings have always been natural, but the end result is too murky to see.
Meanwhile, for those who make a living with these wild creatures, there is deep respect for the interconnectedness of the ecosystem, and this is where one of the biggest conservation battles of the 21st century enters the story.
In 2001 I was a fly-fishing guide working out of King Salmon, a hub town on the Naknek River. There was a bar there, sort of like that bar in Star Wars, where a garrulous bunch of guides, bush pilots, and commercial fishermen would gather. Pool tables, shuffleboard, Willie on the jukebox, plenty of yelling, lots of testosterone, the occasional brown bear strolling by out the window. One night we were sidled up, and a guide friend mentioned she’d recently flown over a zone north of Lake Iliamna. “Have you guys seen what’s going on up there? All those camps and drill rigs and helicopters?” We had not. “Supposedly they’re mining gold? Or looking for it or something?”
What she had seen, and what has dominated table conversations here ever since, was early exploration of the Pebble deposit: 100 million ounces of gold and 80 billion pounds of copper under the tundra at the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers, two watersheds that together produce half of all Bristol Bay sockeye. To get it out, the foreign-owned Pebble Partnership has proposed one of the world’s biggest open-pit mines. They also propose earthen dams as tall as skyscrapers to contain 11 billion tons of toxic waste, new gas pipelines for power, and roads through wilderness to a new port, all of which would open the area up to more development on adjacent mining claims.
The idea of a mining district in the middle of Bristol Bay’s salmon nursery has caused deep consternation because open pit mining is particularly destructive in wet environments. The ore body, uncovered in the process of digging, chemically interacts with the atmosphere to create compounds lethal to organic life. And the process of extracting the metal from the rock often requires the use of chemicals such as arsenic, cyanide, and mercury.
Mines are permitted based on how they propose to deal with these byproducts, in perpetuity, and that’s what can really gum things up. Should any of these toxins seep into the adjacent water table, ever, whether through good faith accident or catastrophic failure, salmon will be immediate victims. Examples from this century alone of riverine mining disasters in British Columbia, the Amazon, Siberia, and elsewhere prove the hubris of perpetual containment.
This risk is not one worth taking according to 80% of Bristol Bay residents and a diverse coalition of tribal, trade, environmental, and governmental organizations. Peter Andrew is a resident, a commercial fisherman, and board member of the politically powerful Bristol Bay Native Corporation. He’s one of countless steadfast activists working to protect his homeland. “We recognized early on that if we don’t work together – commercial, sport, subsistence fishermen, and people who rely on this protein resource worldwide – we’ll enable this threat. We’ll really have to work hard, and we have.”
It’s been an emotional ride, though, he says. Like oil drilling in the Arctic or cutting down the Amazon, the issue has become an international cause célèbre, pitting the wholesome values of the region’s fishery and unspoiled wilderness against the metal needed for machines and gizmos. Along with this has come politicking at the highest levels. President Obama personally visited in 2015, and his Environmental Protection Agency used the Clean Water Act to preemptively ban large-scale mining. The Trump Administration reversed that action, but later dealt the mine a harsh blow by flatly denying its initial permit application. Currently the Biden Administration is seeking to reinstate the broader protections put in place by the Obama EPA.
“That’ll protect it for now, but it’s all subject to the next administration,” Andrew says. “As long as that metal is in the ground, people are going to want it. So the next major step is trying to find a solution for permanent protection.”
This thinking is echoed by AlexAnna Salmon, administrator of Iguigig, a tiny village on the Kvichak River not far from the proposed mining district. She muses on the possibility of a federal buyout of the state-owned mineral rights: “It's not just state [of Alaska] interests here, especially considering our tribal sovereignty, this food that goes all over the world, the people who fish here. It’s a bigger issue. So we’re going to need to request federal attention.”
The Kvichak’s water is clean and clear, like pure H2O. Iguigig has a water treatment plant, but residents prefer it straight from the river. “If you have the water, you’ll have all else,” Salmon says.
She and her sister Christina stand at a plywood cutting table at the river's edge in front of town. Like families across Bristol Bay, they gather in July to “put up” enough fish to last a year. Teenage sons pluck the fish from nets downriver, then boat them to the sisters who break them down. A horde of smaller kids buzz around the table. “The littlest kids will spend a lot of time in the water by the cutting table,” Salmon says, “playing with little fish, watching the birds, coming to understand the ecology.
They watch the older kids too and start to learn a sense of work ethic and pride, not wasting, knowing what we need.” The curved blade of her ulu slips along a sockeye’s backbone, revealing brilliant red flesh. The fish will be hung in a smokehouse. Others will be frozen or jarred. “As a mom, too, I've learned exactly how many jars I need to last us through the winter, and the satisfaction to know there is nothing healthier I can be feeding my kids. You want to feel valued, loved, and for the kids too to have a sense of freedom … When the salmon come back to the Kvichak, there is wellbeing. That’s the cycle and the relationship you’re part of.”
The finely tuned work on display at their table clearly transcends the mere collection of food, but Salmon is quick to avoid sentimentality. “You know, it doesn’t matter where you come from. When you come here, you recognize right away how important it is. The deep connections we have make a great story, of course, but the tip of the iceberg is all you need to understand: food, water, clean environment.”
On board the 32-foot drift gill-netter Lucky Bear, the late evening tide is switching, and Peter Andrew drops into fish hunter mode. Andrew is a big man with an outsized smile. At 59, this is his 51st year fishing. Like everyone, he’s been run ragged by the season, but is still having a blast. The evening’s foul weather barely raises a mention. “All my capital expenses are paid for, so I don’t have the level of stress as some of these guys!” he says, gesturing toward one of the few hundred other fishing boats cruising near us. “You see that boat? One point two million dollars. He can NEVER. STOP. FISHING!” The boat does look way fancier than the Lucky Bear.
Andrew’s three-man crew, like him, are local guys from villages along the Nushagak and Togiak Rivers. As they pull anchor and get underway, each trains his experienced eyes in the middle distance off all sides. “You’re always gathering info to anticipate where they’re gonna be,” Andrew explains. “We look for jumpers. You might see one and then nothing. But then you might see a school. Kinda like tuna - hundreds or thousands of jumpers all at once!”
Andrew drives on, hunting for a sign in the gray water. Conversation in the cabin turns to how surprisingly well fishermen have been paid in recent years. Given such abundant supply, one might expect prices to go down, but the sad truth is Bristol Bay sockeye are increasingly the only ones left. Other strongholds of the North Pacific – the Gulf of Alaska, Southeast Alaska, British Columbia – are flagging, and salmon habitat is gone or fading everywhere south of there.
“Here we are at the very edge of the Western Hemisphere, in our last pristine environment, and we're having to battle mining companies,” Andrew laments. “There is no more after this.”
Out on deck calls of “Jumper!” come from the crew with more frequency, and Andrew gives word to deploy the net. It’s nearly dark as the white mesh-floats pay out behind the stern. And then there, right away, illuminated in a spotlight that shines down from the flybridge, are 79 million heads and tails exploding in the net.
