Salmon Country

CarolAnn Hester presides over a massive pressure cooker, surrounded by an array of small mason jars and large salmon fillets. Her sentences are short and lyrical, brimming with assertions. “The big secret to putting up good fish is to get the blood out,” she says. “Soak, soak, soak, soak, soak.”

Each summer, Hester comes to Naknek, a small village in southwestern Alaska, where she has a house and catches around 500 to 600 fish on her skiff. Some of the catch is frozen, but the rest makes its way to her smokehouse. To cure the fish, she soaks them in clean water and then in brine—repeatedly. Some salmon sides are smoked for three days, then cut into small strips and packed into mason jars before being pressure cooked. “This is what we call kippers,” Hester explains. She learned to make this from her mother, who “learned from an old man upriver by going up to his house four summers in a row.”

The rest of the fish spend between a week and 10 days in the small smokehouse next to her house, glowing ethereally when sunlight touches their oily surface. Each rectangular cut shrinks slightly with time but holds firmly to the tough, glazed skin. The air here is warm with the smell of woodsmoke. In the mouth, the flesh is chewy, yielding slowly. The flavor, birch and ocean, can overwhelm the tongue. Hester’s smoked salmon is so delicious that people stop by unannounced to buy what she can spare.

Many rural Alaskans—like Hester—preserve their catch for an entire year by freezing, canning, or smoking it. Preserving food is part of a cultural heritage and a necessity. Food costs in Alaska are sky-high because of Alaska’s geography and seclusion.

In summer, after the surrounding lowlands of Bristol Bay have emerged from under several feet of snow, Naknek—a village with a few hundred permanent residents, connected to one other village by a single road—becomes a bustling hot spot. Older models of cars, which were brought here by barges, roll up and down the Alaska Peninsula Highway. And people—thousands of them—fly in for commercial, subsistence, or sports fishing.

Unlike the skiffs owned by subsistence fishers like Hester, the larger vessels bobbing like a giant maritime orchestra on the water near Naknek are commercial fishing boats. While the state constitution allows every Alaskan to fish, hunt, and trap animals for their own subsistence, fishing permits can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and many Bristol Bay residents sell theirs to outsiders, especially if they face major expenses—for instance, a roof that needs replacing or their kids’ college fees. Residents account for only a quarter of the commercial salmon fishing permit holders in the area.

At the start of fishing season, each commercial boat signs up with a seafood processing and freezing facility. In June and July, tender boats carry huge hauls from the commercial vessels to the facilities, where seasonal migrant workers process the catch for retailers around the country.

The deposits were discovered here more than 30 years ago, and the prospect of the mine has been looming ever since. From the beginning, WWF, in alignment with local communities and other environmental organizations, encouraged its members and supporters to voice their concerns. In 2018, nearly 220,000 WWF activists did so, asking the US Army Corps of Engineers to deny a permit to the mine developer.

At last, in November 2020, the Corps denied the permit. And more recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) indicated its intention to protect Bristol Bay by applying Clean Water Act protections to prohibit disposing of mine waste in the watershed. WWF again asked its supporters to weigh in, this time to urge the EPA to permanently protect the headwaters, and more than 20,000 supporters heeded our call. In December 2022, the regional administrator of the EPA issued a recommendation to the headquarters to veto Pebble Mine. And in January 2023, the EPA banned the dumping of mining waste in part of the bay's watershed.

But no matter the victories, like a game of Whac-A-Mole, news of the mine’s proposed development keeps popping back up. “The mine rises to the top of people’s thoughts here,” says MacLean. “It has nearly been approved several times.”

Clearly, the fight to protect the bay is still not over. And an important piece of the puzzle isn’t in Bristol Bay but upriver, near Lake Iliamna, where a tiny village with only 35–40 residents has come to play an outsize role in the future of Bristol Bay.

So the corporation decided to offer up conservation easements on 44,000 acres of its land to The Conservation Fund, an environmental nonprofit, for $20 million. In other words, they gave away their development rights to that land in exchange for conserving it, even as the land itself remains in the hands of the corporation. The arrangement provides financial security to the Pedro Bay Corporation and its shareholders, and at the same time achieves a great conservation victory: blocking the road Pebble Mine would need.

The success of this Pedro Bay project reinforces the importance of partnerships in this region. WWF, The Conservation Fund’s partner in the project, helped raise a portion of the last $5 million needed through the Bristol Bay Victory Challenge (coordinated by the Alaska Venture Fund with 12 partners, including WWF). Other long-term goals of this five-year, $50 million effort include passing state and federal legislation to permanently protect Bristol Bay and to increase funding for Indigenous communities here.

“We are committed to protecting the terms of that conservation easement in perpetuity,” says McDaniel.

Entering an agreement like this forever isn’t easy, admits Keith Jensen, president of the Pedro Bay Village Council and one of this area’s few year-round residents. “But if it will help us to preserve our way of life and protect the salmon fisheries for my grandchildren and my grandchildren’s children, that’s a good trade-off.”

“The Bristol Bay Victory Challenge is a simple and elegant solution to a complex and long-standing problem,” says Diane Moxness, a WWF National Council member, longtime donor, and one of the challenge’s generous supporters. “In supporting the Challenge, it’s my hope that we can, once and for all, put an end to Pebble Mine and permanently protect the Bristol Bay watershed and its fisheries, while also creating sustainable economic opportunities for local communities.”

A Roundtrip Journey

Young sockeye salmon spend one to two years maturing in streams, creeks, and lakes before heading out to the ocean as small fish. They remain in the ocean for another two to three years before making an upstream journey back to their birthplaces to spawn.

In Bristol Bay, they get a little help from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Each year, the department sets certain “escapement goals” for salmon. Fishing in the bay can only begin when the desired number of salmon have escaped upriver, which increases the possibility of healthy populations of salmon returning to the bay in subsequent years.

And so, millions of sockeye salmon band together in large groups and swim miles and miles against the rushing current with unwavering determination to reach their birthplaces. As the fish near their destination, a splendid transformation takes place. Their skin turns bright red, as the red pigment in their flesh travels to their skin. This is a signal to prospective mates: They are ready for the final chapter of their lives.

When they reach the spawning grounds, females dig a few shallow cavities to create their nests. As soon as a female releases eggs, its male partner, which waits nearby, fertilizes them. The spawned-out fish—their bodies already starting to decay—remain near the nests for a week before dying and returning precious nutrients into the stream.