Intro | 'Bows | The Rivers | Lodges | Map (.pdf)

JOHN RANDOLPH

It's a chilly September morning. Chuck Yeager, America's most famous test pilot (The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe) takes a step and casts a lead-eye Articulated Leech. He works the run, casting, stepping, letting the fly swing--cast, step, swing. Suddenly the rod jolts and a silver salmon leaps and leaps again in John & Mary's pool, where the old Russian Orthodox church and slumping gray fishing shacks sit watching like ghostly sentinels of a lost culture.

For more on Chuck Yeager (above), see "American Hero and Lifelong Fly Fisher".

Gary Loomis, wading upstream of me, casts and hooks up. I cast and hook up. Fish jump and run in all directions. We shout and pump hard. Silvers, one after another, are hauled to the shore, photographed, and released. We giggle and wade forth and catch more and shout and fight them to the beach and photograph them as well. Sated with silvers, we weaken as the afternoon wanes. Then we ease back upriver and stop to watch a sumo-size boar brown bear scoop spent silvers and gorge and stare vacantly at the aliens floating nearby on his river until we head for the lodge. (Katmai Lodge is now under new ownership. For full details on it and other Iliamna-area fly-fishing lodges, go to www.flyfisherman.com/alaska/.)

I have had an affair with the Alagnak and other Bristol Bay rivers and their salmon, rainbow trout, eagles, bears, and braids since 1979. The Alagnak wanders through lake plains, bogs, braids, tundra, and forest in Alaska's unstable volcanic ground, and it never leaves me though I am far away. But it is the autumn football rainbows and silver salmon that bring me back repeatedly.

In the autumn I smell the stench of salmon--millions, thrashing in the shallows, spawning, dying, and rotting. I smell the rank stench of bears on the night and morning air and watch immature eagles flying like foolish teenagers and crash landing into the trees. I see bear cubs gamboling beside their ever-nervous mothers and lone boars, with their implacable stares, ceaselessly padding the banks in search of spent fish, or charging across the river braids behind fleeing salmon.

Gary Loomis (above) enjoys a male coho salmon on the lower reaches of the Alagnak River, Alaska.

And I see long, gray slivers sliding behind spawning sockeyes and white mouths winking as inflated rainbows gorge on eggs drifting in nature's grand fall milkshake. They are the ultimate fly-fishing trophies of Alyeska, the great land. And they only show themselves for about six weeks, when they run up small rivers in September to feast before winter. This is the most special season in all of fly fishing.

This great land of salmon rivers draining some 4,000 square miles of watersheds has no equal as a nursery of wild fish, and it creates fly fishing's greatest adventures, but it is threatened by the imminent approval of an open-pit gold mine (Pebble Mine) that could poison the headwaters of Bristol Bay forever. (See "Alaska's Pebble Mine" for more details.)

It is a sockeye-driven ecosystem because the sockeye runs into Bristol Bay watersheds dwarf the other four salmon species numbers, biomass, and commercial value. Total sockeye runs to the Kvichak, Alagnak, and Naknek in 2005 totaled over 16 million fish, with 5.4 million on the Alagnak alone. The 20-year average to those watersheds was 14.3 million. The 20-year average commercial catch of sockeye salmon in the Naknek/Kvichak District was 7.8 million. No wonder the bear and eagle populations thrive there, feeding on this smorgasbord of fish.

By contrast, the fisheries harvest in the Nushagak District for Chinook salmon over the past 20 years average (annual) is as follows: 51,080 commercial, 5,621 sport, and 13,649 subsistence. And the 20-year annualized average on coho (silvers) from all sources was 34,321 in the same drainage. Sockeyes are king in the Bristol Bay watersheds.

But it is not just the adult spawning sockeye that are important to these immensely rich fisheries of the Bristol Bay watersheds. The carcasses fertilize the generation of young that will emerge from the eggs laid in the gravel. The eggs are deposited in summer and fall, the adult fish die and rot, and the nutrients released from the decaying bodies enrich the spawning areas where the alevins and swim-up fry mature and emerge.

This emergence is one of nature's spectacular events: Clouds of fry emerge from the gravel in spring and gather in schools to drift downriver to the estuary and then to their ocean grazing grounds.

The spring fry emergence creates the first fishing opportunity of the year. The rainbow trout spawn in the same gravel in March and April and their swim-up fry feed on the same nutrients. The adult rainbows, Dolly Varden, char, and grayling are hungry after spawning and a lean winter, and, fortunately for them, the emerging salmon

fry "hatches" provide the first body-fattening feast of the year. The fry emerge in the evenings during June, and fishing with both drys and streamers to match popping smolt and mayfly hatches can be spectacular for 3- to 10-pound rainbows.


The streams and river draining into Bristol Bay host the worlds largest population of sockeye salmon (above) but are now threatened by the proposed Pebble Mine.

A feeling of expectancy is on the rivers by June because the salmon--kings, chums, and sockeye--are in the estuary, restless to begin their journeys upriver to the spawning grounds. By late June and early July the fish clog the river channels, with sockeyes running 24/7 and schools of chums pushing bow-waves across downriver shallow flats and tailouts. The bright kings hold in the deeper runs and take heavy-wire #4 chartreuse or black Krystal Buggers (or Egg-sucking Leeches) fished dead-drift on 200- to 400-grain sinking tips.

The bite on kings can go on for hours and then turn off suddenly. Then mousing for large rainbows (after the water temperatures reach 50 degrees F.) can be spectacular. Wading from gravel bar to bar, hunting eager 'bows with twitched and skittered mouse imitations can be a transforming adventure. The rods you need for all these opportunities include strong 7- (or 8) and 10-weights (4-piece for carry-on), equipped with strong reels and a minimum 200 yards of 20-pound backing.