Following Rainbows, Southwest Alaska's Wood-Tikchik State Park

Following Rainbows Southwest Alaska’s Wood-Tikchik State Park

by Scott Stouder
First published in Fish Alaska Magazine
September, 2003

“Did you fish for kings on the Kenai?” my neighbor in Oregon asked when I told him I’d just returned from Alaska.

“Nope,” I replied. “We were in Wood-Tikchik State Park.”

“Where?”

It’s a common question in the Lower 48. Say “Wood-Tikchik” and most folks think you’re uttering a tongue twister, not naming a world-class fishing destination. Even many Alaskans don’t know that Wood-Tikchik State Park is Alaska’s largest state park or that, at 1.6 million acres, it contains a quarter as much land as all of America’s state parks combined.

More important, all five species of Alaska’s Pacific salmon, four species of trout—even northern pike—ply the thousands of miles of rivers and lakes within its borders.

In size, Wood-Tikchik Park hardly puts a dent in southwest Alaska’s vast 40 million acres, but it’s the cradle of Bristol Bay’s salmon-rich watershed which draws its water from the Wood River Mountain range. That mountain range outlines the park’s western boundary and defines its geography. During the last Ice Age, glaciers carved huge divots in the tundra as they ground east out of the mountains. When they melted, they left a series of long, stacked-up lakes connected by short rivers. The water eventually forms the Wood River, which then flows into Bristol Bay.

Last summer, as our party of four finished unloading our gear from our canoes and setting up camp on the banks of the Agulapak River, I couldn’t wait to wade into this fish-epicenter with both feet.

It was 10 p.m. and I was weary after a grueling, 13-mile, headwind-hindered paddle down the shore from Lake Beverley’s Silver Horn Arm where we’d been dropped by a float plane the day before. But I wasn’t that weary. Fishing is fishing. Even if it’s done late at night. Actually there is no late night in Alaska’s summer. This far north the July sun ducks beneath the horizon for only a few hours as it circles the pole.

A line of tall spruce trees materialized like misty ghosts through the hard rain on the far side of the river as I waded into the Agulapak River where it swells out of Lake Beverley on its brief two-mile journey to Lake Nerka. The icy water pulls glacial gravel from the lake bottom and spreads it in the shallow river channels, creating a salmon spawning Mecca. In the turbulent, boulder-bottomed pools below the channels platoons of giant rainbow trout wait for the delivery of thousands of nutrient-rich salmon eggs.

Trusting my felt soles, I braced against the thigh-deep current, stripped line from my reel, backcast, and dropped a salmon egg imitation into a pool 20 feet in front of me. The small orange fly, weighted with split shot, vanished into the vortex of swirling water and reflection.

I was retrieving line when I heard a voice above the water noise.

“You haven’t hooked anything yet?”

I turned. Glenn Elison, the 53 year-old Alaska State Director for The Conservation Fund, a Maryland-based organization, was behind me. Elison works to purchase, or protect through easements, privately owned parcels along rivers and lakes in southwest Alaska threatened by development. Retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he has combined his love for fishing, and his life experience to, as he puts it, “Help save the last great salmon fishery on Earth.”

Twenty-six years of managing such remote jewels as the Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge and the Artic National Wildlife Refuge have equipped Elison with a unique knowledge of the 49th state.

“Nothing yet,” I said as I cast again, and a savage strike nearly yanked the rod from my hands. A heavy fish, stripping line like a salmon, raced across the river.

I tried to dampen the whizzing fly reel with the palm of my hand: “I don’t know what I have a hold of, but it’s powerful.”

“I’d guess it’s a rainbow,” Elison said.

I didn’t want to question Elison, but no trout I’d ever hooked felt like this. Of course I’d never caught rainbows in southwest Alaska.

“Trout in these waters grow big,” Elison said, as if reading my mind. “They get their size from food supplied by salmon.”

In southwest Alaska everything from trout to bears depends on the nutrients delivered from the sea by over 75 million returning adult salmon per year. Rainbows, char, grayling, and Dolly Varden stuff themselves with both the eggs of spawning adults and the flesh of young fish. And when they aren’t directly eating salmon, they are consuming the insects and other aquatic life that thrives on the nutrients delivered by migratory salmon. Recent research has traced back to the ocean the nitrogen, phosphorous, carbon, and other organic building material essential in salmon-based ecosystems. Salmon are the bearers of this material and everything—algae, insects, crustaceans, trout, birds, trees, and mammals (including humans)—depends upon it. It’s estimated that in the Bristol Bay region alone, salmon, by dying, decomposing, and with distribution help from bears, birds, and insects, deposit over one thousand tons of nitrogen each year along the rivers, streams, and lakes. That’s a lot of life-giving.

At the moment, however, I was more concerned about the fish I’d hooked than the interwoven web of the salmon’s life cycle.

“I’m down to my backing,” I said as the fish powered upriver against the current.

The fish finally turned, but it gave to pressure with extreme prejudice. For every two feet of line I gathered, it took one back. Finally, the broad red stripe and full dorsal of a wild rainbow trout surfaced. If I’d put a tape to it, it would have stretched well over two feet.

Elison gently removed the hook from its upper lip and released the trout into the current. It held for a second, then turned, and with a broad sweep of its tail, disappeared back into the river.

River fishing for trout was the reason my wife and I flew to Alaska to meet Elison and Tim Troll. Troll, the fourth member of our party, is a board member of The Nushagak, Mulchatna, Wood-Tikchik Land Trust.

“We call it the ‘Mouthful Land Trust,’” he said with a chuckle when we met at the Dillingham airport.
Troll and Elison work together to purchase land and conservation easements from willing sellers of private inholdings in southwest Alaska.

“We’re focused on protecting strategic fish and wildlife habitat from being overdeveloped,” Troll said. “Our goal is to preserve the salmon, trout, and the wildness that still exists here.”

Part of that goal is focused on the Agulapak and the Agulowak (locals call them the “pack” and the “walk”)—two world-class rainbow trout rivers in the Wood River lake system. Our plans were to fish both rivers.

The following morning after releasing the big rainbow I awoke tired and stiff. And when I poked my head out of the tent, the sky hung low over the river and threatened rain. But this was no place to languish in bed.

After frying breakfast, the four of us waded back into the Agulapak and tangled with more rainbows. Elison wrestled a sockeye that put on an aerial display to rival the Blue Angels. The six-pound salmon did everything but bounce out on the bank and dance a jig.

After fishing, we reloaded our canoes and floated the two miles downriver to Lake Nerka. Because we had only five days to make the trip, we had arranged to be met there by a motorboat that sped us down the lake to the Agulowak River.

In the next two days we caught more sockeye. And we landed more big rainbows. I didn’t count how many. Actually, my desire to catch wild rainbow trout waned somewhat after watching that first big fish disappear into the current. Like hunger after a good meal, a need seemed to vanish.

Besides, there’s something about Alaska that seems to transcend acts whose value is measured by a single factor of “fun.” The land’s richness seems to instill a feeling of sustenance. Maybe it comes from watching thousands of sockeye gather at the mouths of rivers for their final upstream surge or waves of caribou floating across the tundra. Maybe seeing moose standing in the grassy backwaters or grizzlies walking the lakeshore is a reminder that others in this land take life, and wild fish, seriously.

It’s possible the feeling had nothing to do with Alaska. Maybe the fatigue from days of paddling and wading simply overwhelmed other desires. Maybe long-ago memories of catching salmon and trout strictly for the frying pan cemented predatory instincts beyond retraction. Maybe it was the constant rain. I don’t know. What I know is that the pure pleasure of being in a land where I was part of the cycle of salmon was enough. Catching fish was simply a bonus.
With millions of sockeye, kings, coho, pink, and chum salmon returning to its rivers and lakes, southwest Alaska is the world’s last stronghold of wild salmon. But for much of the last century until the late 1970s the area, which is as big as the state of Washington, was hardly a blip on the sport-fishing screen.

However, that’s not the case today. Everyone who’s ever dreamed of streams stuffed with huge trout and rivers flowing with muscular salmon has heard of rivers such as the Nushagak, the Mulchatna, the Kvichak, the Goodnews, and the Alagnak.

What’s changed is access. Not road access—the few miles of existing gravel roads huddled around the Native villages still don’t extend much beyond the village houses and outbuildings. Access has evolved around a proliferation of airplanes and boats. Travel in southwest Alaska has always been on the water or in the air, but today it’s not uncommon during the summer months to see dozens of fishermen lining popular river stretches. Every day hundreds of people are delivered to rivers via floatplanes and jet boats from lodges in Southwest. There’s literally an air-traffic rush hour at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. when the normally quiet tundra is abuzz with DeHavilland Beavers, Cessna 206s, 185s, and other small planes on floats shuffling clients back and forth.

With an increasing human population in the Lower 48 and the continued decline of salmon in the Northwest, Elison sees increased pressure on southwest Alaska—especially on the popular rivers flowing into Bristol Bay—as inevitable.

“This is one of the last great natural areas left on the planet and we need to plan for its protection now,” he says. “We’ve got a chance here to do it right and protect this land for future generations of Americans, for the wildlife and for the salmon.”

Scott Stouder lives in Riggins, ID, with his wife and fishing/ hunting/outdoor writing partner Holly Endersby. Scott has recently taken a position as Western Field Coordinator for Protection of Roadless Areas with Trout Unlimited.