August 9, 2013 — Conservationist blogger Hal Herring spent five days exploring and fishing Alaska’s Tongass National Forest earlier this month. This is the third of five reports.
From the air, the Tongass National Forest is revealed in a way that is hidden from the sea or the forest. We are flying east out of Juneau and up the Taku River, named for the Alaska Native group that once controlled trade here from the hinterlands all the way to the sea. Below the floatplane is some of the most abrupt and difficult country I’ve ever seen—from the saltwater the 2600-foot mountains rise sharp, impossibly steep, the timberlines low on their flanks. Yellow alpine grasses surround pothole lakes and tarns.
Everywhere there is water—150 to 200 inches of rain falls here every year. Remnant snow fields, drain in lacy curtains of whitewater down narrow chutes and falls. The forest a solid canopy; a high-latitude, somewhat refrigerated rain forest. The plane crests a long set of peaks and below us the vast glaciers unfold, miles and miles of jumbled, deeply fissured ice, white and pale blue and, yes, somewhat terrifying. These are the southernmost icefields in North America, and the river that divides them—the Taku—claims the world’s largest run of Coho (silver) salmon, a run that shares space with the estimated 2 million salmon that spawn here every year: kings, sockeye, chums, and pinks (humpies).
Every native fish species of Southeast Alaska thrives here with the salmon—steelhead, Dolly Vardens, bull trout, rainbows, grayling, whitefish, and the region’s largest population of cutthroat trout. The estuary formed by all this water is almost 7000 square miles in extent, and it is the nursery for the shrimp, crab and halibut that provide yet another fishery at the river’s mouth. From the sky on this late July afternoon, the Taku is a braided maze of mud and shoal and piles of dead trees, the water in parts brown with mud and milky green with the tons of pure stone powdered by the implacable ice. Where a part of the glacier’s wall has collapsed near the river, a sapphire-colored ellipse is revealed, the very color of the deepest ocean, to which the ice is going now and from which the ice came, all those thousands of years ago.
Read the full story at Field and Stream