This summer, I was invited to come out on Eyak Lake with CRWP GIS specialist Ashley Taylor as she mapped the spawning beds for the Watershed Project. In June, we paddled the shoreline along Skaters Cabin to the small plane airport – looking for gravel beds to update a survey on spawning areas along the lake’s edge. The Copper River sockeye run had started, and I had been out on the ocean fishing a few times. It was really neat to see hands-on the work that the CRWP is doing for the salmon making their way home. Our salmon fishery here is managed for a healthy future of fish runs, and the commercial fishing schedule is created around a healthy population of salmon returning to their spawning beds. An important part of this is healthy spawning beds for them to return to, and that’s the valuable work I got to see Ashley taking on as we paddled along the lake’s edge, noting the gravel beds.

In late August, I went back out again with Ashley to survey another section of the lake – Middle Arm. Right away, as we launched our boats, you could smell the fish in the lake – the ones that had spawned and were decomposing, leaving their nutrients behind to feed the trees that grew along the border. We paddled across and into Middle Arm, and as we rounded the corner into that finger of the lake, the waters started to simmer with a thick mass of deeply red spawning salmon swimming slowly in the shallows. It was so powerful to see how many were back there, just a wild ribbon of red bodies that had made it this far – all the way through the ocean and back to their home waters. It’s a really beautiful thing to get to witness a healthy salmon cycle. After a summer on the water, harvesting wild fish – I’m so grateful to get to see a healthy return of fish continuing their rhythms on Eyak Lake.