By Shawn Bean.
The brown bear 20 yards away is living its best life. The gravel road provides an elevated perch to watch, with great awe, a bear in a creek up to its neck, standing on its hind legs, as hundreds of migrating salmon swirl and swim by. For this sizable animal, the eddy is both cold plunge and buffet. Nearby, untold numbers of silvers stack up in a shallow stretch, unable to pass over the rocks despite their thrashing and tail beating. When the next rain comes, the creek will rise and these salmon will be able to move farther upstream as they instinctively head back to the location where they hatched.
“It’s incredible,” says Joshua Badder, co-owner of Wild Strawberry Lodge in Sitka, Alaska. “The life that they have… and the life they give.”
It’s late August in Sitka. With the exception of the gunmetal gray peaks of the nearby mountains, everything is verdant. Unlike the distant, northwestern expanses of the Frontier State, Southeast Alaska (a three-hour flight from Seattle) is a temperate rainforest that’s home to a rich and diverse biomass. Bear sightings are constant. Bald eagles are as common here as seagulls in South Florida. And this time of year, the salmon run inspires anglers to join a phenomenon unlike any other in nature.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like magic,” says Badder. “Thousands and thousands of these fish run upstream. It draws in the birds, the bears, and the people. Being in those streams in your waders, surrounded by these fish, is surreal. There’s nothing like it in the world.”
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