August 19, 2013 — The return of big chinook salmon to the Kuskokwim River of Western Alaska is over for the year, and some are wondering how much damage the cellphone might have done to a once-magnificent run of fish.
Subsistence fishermen in the Bethel area reported good fishing through the season, and most everyone seems happy with the fish they've put up for the winter.
This season didn’t resemble the turmoil of 2012, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed the fishery to protect the chinooks and a rebellion broke out along the river, only to be followed by a series of difficult trials in the spring. So a summer with people fishing and catching fish was a good thing.
'Case of the missing salmon'
There is only one small problem. They caught too many kings, as the chinooks are also called. The spawning goal for the Kusko will not be reached this year, state fisheries biologist Kevin Schaberg said.
In Bethel, the regional hub near the lower end of the 702-mile-long river 400 miles west of Anchorage, people are talking about this as "the case of the missing salmon."
Far upriver there is a different view. A resident of Sleetmute, some 305 miles upstream put bluntly:
"You want to know what the feeling is here? The feeling is they've been exterminated by the people in Bethel."
"The last I saw up here in the Takotna (River) there were only about 90 kings that showed up," added 77-year-old Ray Collins of McGrath. "Somehow, we've got to reduce the catch down in the lower river."
McGrath is about 520 miles upstream on the Kuskokwim, some 200 miles farther than Sleetmute. The returns of salmon to the Taknota River near McGrath were all but wiped out by miners trying to feed themselves and their dog teams during the Alaska Gold Rush, but they came back in later years and runs by the end of the 20th century were in the range of 400 to 700 fish per year.
Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch