Aleknagik Orientation

I've decided to resurrect this blog from the dead in order to start recording my thoughts, observations, experiences and photos from my initial research season here in Aleknagik. Whether or not I actually get any readers, I haven't written recreationally in quite a while, so this is also an opportunity for me to scrape some of the rust off of my creaky old skills.

My plan is not necessarily to record the events of each day (although sometimes I will do this), but rather to think aloud "on paper" about concepts I find interesting in the natural and political worlds. These will be topics ranging from conservation, ecology, and fisheries management to natural history, local culture, a personal sense of place, "Alaska" as an ideal, and more.

To begin with, let's orient ourselves. Before I left, many people asked me exactly where I would be in Alaska, and I had a difficult time explaining it to them, not least because my own Alaska geography is so fuzzy. Picture the state of Alaska as a clenched fist with the thumb dangling out toward the bottom, like giving the thumbs-down sign. The thumb is the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands, the gap between the thumb and the hand is Bristol Bay, and the outward bulge of the forefinger is, roughly, the Yukon Delta. If you follow the curve of the thumb about halfway up between its base and the first knuckle of the forefinger, that's my general location in southwestern Alaska. I am currently in the village of Aleknagik (pop. 250), 20 miles from the "town" of Dillingham (pop. 1500), at the southern end of a chain of glacially-formed lakes connected by short rivers. The lakes are long and narrow, and they zig-zag their way north in a tiger-stripe pattern, ringed by spired peaks. This is the Wood River System, so called because of the southernmost outflow of the chain, the Wood River, which oxbows its silty way through the coastal plain and pours out into Bristol Bay. This lake-river system, plus some other huge lakes, are all part of the Wood-Tikchik State Park, a park larger than the State of Delaware, and the largest in the U.S.

The field camp I am living in at the moment is part of the University of Washington's system of field research stations dotted around SW Alaska, comprising the Alaska Salmon Program, an institution with a sixty-four-year-old history of ecological, evolutionary and economic study of the region's storied fisheries. I'm here both as an hourly wage slave and a new student in Daniel Schindler's lab, slated to work with all the other grad students and investigators on every project for two months so I can absorb lots of information, get the lay of the land and begin cooking up my own ideas for a masters' thesis, which ideally I'll begin working on this school year.

As today is Day Two, I'm still reeling from the transition between urban Portland and the bucolic Willamette Valley, and the muskeg backcountry of Aleknagik. Coffee and wireless Internet are in abundance here in camp as they are in any corner of Portland, but trying to ride a fixed-gear bicycle on the road (singular) would probably land you face-down in the muskeg as you dodged the cow moose and her calf trotting across the pavement. We also have an abundance of float planes, black spruce and mosquitoes, and a giant chest freezer stuffed with 500 pounds of sockeye salmon fillets--the camp's meat supply, caught right off the dock. The fashionable footwear is a calf-high Xtra Tuff rubber boot, and yesterday three orphaned grizzly cubs came gamboling through camp.

There will be more to come, but I am off to prepare for my long afternoon of fieldwork--pit-tagging coho in off-channel habitat (deja vu Klamath, anyone?) on one of the streams that drains into Lake Aleknagik.