Fish "harvesting"

Life at the moment isn't super exciting; I'm working my tail off on my thesis so that I don't feel as guilty about taking so much time off over winter break. Plus, we've entered the "shoulder" season: it's much too cold for summer activities, but there isn't enough snow yet for skiing. I've decided that for the next few weeks I'll start posting some photos and stories from the summer. I'm not sure if I'll keep updating the ol' website or not. This seems much easier.

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Being an Alaskan gives you certain privileges, such as an annual dividend from the government and the ability to go "dipnetting" in the famous Copper River near Chitina (pronounced Chit-na). Dipnetting is so many things rolled into one. But at its core it's basically the "Great Alaskan Get-Together". Alaskans of all sorts drive to the tiny town of Chitina, which is a couple hours from Valdez, which means the middle of nowhere, to stick their nets in the glacially-fed Copper River. And then you wait for salmon to jump in your net.


To get from Chitina to the fishing holes, you have to drive down an extremely rough, one lane dirt road that is on the edge of a cliff. Eventually you come to a spot where the road has been "closed" due to high slope instability. Many people drive right past that spot, others use four-wheelers, or dirt bikes. We had intended to bicycle, but upon arriving at the closed road sign, we were informed that the fishing were running so hard that we wouldn't have to go to the better fishing holes down the road. So, at 12:30 am we scrambled down the steep slope (45 degrees?) to the water's edge, tied our nets to a tree so that we wouldn't have to continually fight the current, and watched the fish come. It was almost like they wanted to be eaten.


Each household is allowed to catch 30 fish per year - if the salmon are running hard you can get your limit in a few hours. By 5:00 am we had caught 64 salmon (for three of us), all of them about the size as those in the picture above. Anybody that's done any fishing knows the work has just begun. We then hauled the fish up the steep slope, drove a short ways to a clear stream and cleaned the fish. After putting them on ice, we started heading home. We rolled into Fairbanks sometime in the early evening, and crashed.


The next two days were spent filleting the fish, and then freezing or smoking them. We figured that we had spent something like $0.60 per pound of salmon. At a store, that same salmon would cost closer to $10.00 per pound. It was a lot of work, but well worth the effort.