It’s coming up on a week now and I’m still sore. Arthritic knees and overweight, somehow I thought climbing above treeline for a deer would be fun. Roy came down from Haines with his son and grandsons. We loaded up the boat and headed for “magic mountain”. I had the old Thermos Canastoga tent I bought for $25 from my fish biologist buddies in Kodiak who said that’s what they paid for it. We all fit in it nicely.

Took about an hour and a half to run to the location. Roy and his son hadn’t been there in years, but we soon found the place. Another boat was anchored in an adjoining cove, and so we’d both be hunting the same alpine area. So much for the wilderness to ourselves.

We got the tent set up, then got a fire going and cooked dinner. Stories of past hunt here usually went something like “and when we reached the alpine, there’s a deer. And there’s a deer. And there’s a deer”. Already we were talking about how many deer we needed to limit ourselves to, unless we wanted to make two trips up the mountain.

The grandson with the watch set it for 4 am. I heard it go off, but nobody got up, and so neither did I. We eventually did rise, eat some breakfast on a campfire, then shouldered our packs and started up the mountain. I had a liter filter water bottle, and that was soon gone. I figured this would be like every other place I’d hunted in Southeast Alaska, and there’s be a little creek to refill water bottles at regular intervals. I was wrong. Many days of dry and 70 and 80 degree days made for little water. The water in the first creek we came to was not moving and I didn’t dare drink it, even though my water was gone and I was one big sweatball. It was going to be a long day.

We climbed on from that creek for another hour or so, and came to another creek. The water wasn’t exactly moving, but was pretty clear, so I filled my bottle, and sucked the water past the filter. I drank it all, and refilled.

Onward we climbed. Water became more plentiful and worry about a lack of water was past us. In about hour four, we came to some sort of weather or communication station. A small building with a solar panel and wind mill generator that powered what I don’t know. We were now on the final push to the alpine, and we could see the summit. We lolligagged quite awhile at the building before continuing to above treeline.

Like any mountain ascent I’ve done hunting, the top is always further than it looks. It took at least another hour to get up to the open country of the alpine. This is where we were supposed to see deer after deer and decide how many to take because if we take too many, we have to make another trip to retrieve them. Roy pointed out a meadow where they shot 2 deer and then had a grizzly sow with cubs come out of the woods nearby and how they had to speed up their butchering and leave the carcass to the bears. Roy sends me around to one side of the slope to the summit, and he and the rest of the crew go the other way. Again, I think it’s a short walk from here to the top, but it’s longer than it looks. Lots of nice country where a deer could be, and as I come over every little rise to look at new country, I expect to see a deer or hope to hear a shot from Roy. I find one or two pieces of deer scat that are dry, but I think maybe it’s so hot they dry quickly up here. Still, it doesn’t look too fresh. I only find one tiny patch of deer heart, one of the deer’s favorite foods at this elevation, that has been grazed. As I work my way around, the slope up gets more sheer, and going around is not an option because it looks pretty sheer going to Seymour Canal. So I start to head around the base of the summit towards where I last saw someone heading to the top. Then I just sat my butt down and thought- we never discussed what to do if we got split up, etc. Bad planning. I decided to just sit there and wait and hope I would see the crew moving below me if they came off the top.

As I looked down on Stephens Passage, I’d tend to think of this area as more wild than others because it was distant from Juneau and Petersburg. That’s not exactly true. There were cruise ships coming and going. Tour boats taking people to Tracy Arm. Fishing boats tendering salmon to Petersburg. Lots of activity, even this far from any town.

About 30 minutes later, I heard the sound of gravel moving. I looked for the sound and it’s Roy coming down the mountain behind me. Boy, am I glad to see  you, I said. He said the boys had gone around the other direction coming down where they thought I should have come up. Soon, they come into view and join us. The hunters with the boat in the other cove at the bottom apparently were the ones who pitched the tent at the summit, but the hunters were not there. No one in our crew had seen a deer, nor had we heard any shots. I think it was the first time I’ve ever been deer hunting that I was happy not to see a deer. My pack already seemed heavy and I knew the trip back was not gonna be fun. I remember people older than me telling me going downhill at their age was harder than going uphill. I was now at their age and knew just what they meant. The trip down was not going to be pretty as it was, and a deer in the pack would have been more of a challenge, but I’m sure I would have done it. Just would have added to the misery.

We three adults took naps on the sunny hillside while the grandsons ran around the field. Lots of pretty flowers up here I’d never seen and Roy knew all their names. It must have been near 80 degrees. The rest was all I needed, and wish we’d done this when we first got there. Or better yet, wish we’d hiked up and stayed over up here instead of up and down in one day. Of course this was a clear, dry, hot day that is not the norm. We could have slept on the open ground or under a tarp in a space blanket in our extra clothes and been fine. I blew the deer call many times hoping a deer might be somewhere out of sight and come to us. Nothing moved.

At some point we called it a day and started the trek back. We now knew where to fill up on water. Several steep spots were pretty rough on my feet, and I still have black and blue under several toe nails as if I dropped a brick on my foot. Never had that before. My buddy Bob taught me a long time ago, you always keep beer at the boat. Or in this instance, in camp. That gives you something to look forward to all the way down. That’s what I did.

The going down was steady. On the way up, we stopped frequently for rests. Or maybe just waiting for me to catch up. The way down was easier to keep going, letting gravity do the work. Body parts still hurt, but it didn’t take your breath away. I saw one or two fresh scat in the woods on the way down, but that was it. Just not many deer in this particular area right now. I would find out there were deer taken in other nearby peaks, and wish I’d left a note on the boat in the nearby cove to ask if they did any good.

I stumbled into camp behind everyone. Ryan and Roy already had beers and passed me one. I sat down on a log on the beach in the sunshine, glad to be home.  A cruise ship went by with Earth Wind and Fire blaring out from what we assumed was the top deck, from shore to shore. Maybe a 70’s cruise.

More beers and some dry clothes. What a day. I was glad to be back and glad I was there.

I took an extra day of whale watch duty Saturday for a captain with a sick dog. Good things happen when you help others.  After my trips, I went to the fuel dock as usual. A cruiser was filling up and I asked how fishing was. They proceeded to fill me in on some extra hot coho salmon fishing. They had caught so many they had to come to town for more ice from their distant cabin, and so got fuel while they were at it. Of course, I set my sights on going there the next day. I cast my net far and wide for someone to go with me. Anyone. You think people that live in Alaska are always up to go fishing and hunting and trapping. I can tell you if you live in an urban area (by Alaska standards) like Juneau,  they are not. I think I asked 10 or more people to go. Oh, did I mention the weather?  It’s about 80 degress. And did I mention the ocean conditions?  Nearly flat calm. Not a single taker. Not one.  My nephew would rather lay on the couch in his underwear and watch TV all day than go fishing. Not my favorite nephew John. He’d have been up and ready to go at 4 am. But unfortunately he can’t get here from Pittsburgh on that short of notice.

So I went to our cabin first to tidy up a bit as friends of friends are coming next week and maybe we’d go there for dinner. I got up when I got up, and headed to the hot spot. I got there 8 ish after about a 1.5 hr run and turns out I wasn’t the first boat. I put my gear down and had my first fish in about 20 minutes. Not a real big coho, but not bad either. Maybe 6 lbs dressed,   I trolled around more and although the downrigger released several times, I caught now more, so I headed towards more boats in the distance. As I passed a point, boom. There goes the rod. I was fishing a red flasher and yellow and red hootchie. It was gear I still have from commercial trolling. That hootchie was a favorite for cohos when there weren’t pink salmon around, because when there are pinks around, they’ll bite anything red. The second fish was a soaker. 12 or 15 lbs. As soon as I got the fish landed and the gear down, another one was on. I lost that one, which was smaller. I caught 2 more in the next 30 minutes and had 3 nice coho in the bleed bucket.  I got to cleaning, thinking I’d be done soon. More and more boats showed up.

Then the coho went off the bite for awhile. It took me a couple more hours to get the last 2 for a daily limit of 6. I’m sure if I’d had another rod, we’d have caught 12, and maybe faster. When you have more than one rod down, you can fish at different depths and with different lures so if one works, then you switch the other to be the same. Anyway, I left shortly before 2 pm for home. I passed a ton of boats on the way home.

The parking lot of the boat ramp at N. Douglas was full with trucks and trailers parked all along the highway above.  I was lucky to not have to wait and got my boat pulled right out. I got home and immediately started to process the dressed fish, which I had on ice gel pacs.

I steaked all six fish. I heard the neighbor munchkin across the street yelling so called out and asked if her dad was home. She said yes. I said to send him over if he wanted some fish, and I gave him the tail section and a couple more steaks for his tribe.  More good karma.

I’ve been smoking and canning fish this year and eating so much of it already I wanted to get more put up, plus send some to my cousin Aileen who just got married yesterday and whose wedding I missed. I mixed up a 50:50 batch of salt and sugar in a big bowl. Then I dredged each steak in the dry brine, and layered the pieces in a bucket. I worked quickly so the last steaks would be in the brine within about 5 minutes of the first.

After everything was dry brined, I set the timer to 40 minutes, cracked a beer, and relaxed. I still had boy scouts tonight, so this was a good break. When the timer went off, I rinsed off each piece of fish and drained them till all were done. Then I loaded up the smoker nephew John mostly built. The 5 and half fish filled 4 of the racks and about 1/4 of the fourth rack. I plugged in the fan and will let it dry til it gets a good pellicle. That’ll be a day or two. Then I’ll put the electric hot plate in and smoke a few pieces of alder through the fish, then can the fish.

While waiting for passengers on the whale watch boat, there was a group of ravens going through the back deck of a commercial fishing boat on the other side of the dock from me to see what morsels they could find. Then it happened. One of the ravens scratched the side of his head with his foot. Exactly like a dog scratches its ear. Never seen that before.

Then we were out whale watching. A humpback whale was lopping its lonnnnnnng pectoral fins over and back, smacking them on the water. Then it started doing these short surfaces that sort of looked like a bucking bronco, with its back arched and its head down. I realized later I think it was doing some sort of one whale bubblenet feed, and when it came up through the herring at the surface, it was dragging its wide open mouth through the water, with the top jar barely above the surface and the lower jaw below. Most times a single whale lunge feeding just comes up to the surface with its mouth open, then closes it above the surface. This one did that technique later, but this bucking bronco was a brand new thing after 6 years watching from the wheel.

Leon and I met at the harbor at 2 pm. It was supposed to be a 24 to 48 hour trip, but we both were loaded with food and gear for days as you never know when running 30 miles of river and ocean in an open skiff with an outboard. Lots of things could happen. The motor could quit (we had an extra in case). You could ground the boat on a sand bar and be stuck. Fishing could be poor and you stay an extra day. You could fall in and get wet.

We left town in a driving rain and 1 to 2 ft seas. I had my back to the wind and Leon was squinting in the pelting rain to see. When we rounded Salisbury Point, the seas were a little bigger over to Point Bishop, and Leon strained to see the corks of the gillnets fishing there as we weaved around the nets until we got to the entrance of Taku Inlet, where the waves abated, but the rain did not. It did not take me long to realize the jacket I was wearing was not water proof, and my back and arms were soon wet. I’d worn chest waders, so at least my lower half was fairly dry, but I could feel the cold setting in.

I’d made this trip about 20 years ago with a friend and my older sister Jane. Somehow I forgot over the two decades what a spectacular trip it is, or maybe I’ve just grown to appreciate scenery like this more. As we got into the river proper, here come the glaciers. Their massive terminus came right down to the river.  These glaciers dwarf the Mendenhall Glacier in town, and you could easily go over and walk on them if you wanted.

Leon knew from 30+ years of making this trip where to look for glacier ice, as we counted on getting it rather than bringing our own ice from town. Once we found one chunk, we saw others nearby, and in about 5 minutes we had enough in our coolers and continued up the river. On the river across from the glacier, I saw a black bear that was standing still, looking back at us from a grassy slope. We stopped for a second to look at it and it continued on its way. Mountains border the river on both sides, rising steeply up from the river side to about 5000 feet is my guess.

The river shallows up as you get up to the glaciers, and people who have cabins up the river mostly use jet boats. We had a 40 hp prop, but luckily most of the bottom is mud so if it got shallow, we slowed down and I used a pole to test to see if we were getting shallower or deeper, and we eventually found deep enough water to get to deeper water where we got on step again. About four and a half hours later, we wound our way up to our fishing spot at Canyon Island near the Canada border.

Some ADFG technicians working at a camp on the river nearby stopped by to say hello.  They invited us up for coffee and I was able to hang my wet clothes by their stove to dry and change into new dry clothes I’d brought along. That changed my attitude in a hurry.  We returned to our spot on the beach and were the first fishers there for the opening of the season the next day. We got the spot Leon had fished for 30 years. We got the net out, tied one end to the shore, and strung it out along the beach, getting it all untangled and ready to fish. Leon filled a 5 gallon jug nearly to the top with water and capped it. We tied this and a buoy to the other end of the net. At this spot, you can sometimes just toss the jug and buoy into the river and the buoy and water jug will drag the net out into the back eddy in the river. As it turned out, a couple old timers came in and unknowingly fished right on top of us. They didn’t realize we were there to fish, apparently, till they were already set up to fish with their shore-side anchor not far from us. They had heard we worked for Fish and Game and assumed we were there for work. So Leon ended up using the boat to take out the float at midnight so we didn’t tangle nets with our neighbor, who also set their net next to ours at midnight.  The nets fished far enough from each other to both catch fish so it worked out fine.

Our neighbors pounded in 1 x 4 stakes about 2 feet apart in the beach, and I wasn’t sure what that was for until I saw them hang a cleaning tough in between. That’s a great idea, I thought. I would be cleaning my fish in an aluminum trough on short legs my friend Ken had made for me for the Dutch Master, and I had placed it on a cooler, which was lower to the ground than the stakes these guys used. All hands laid down for a snooze after we set our nets in near darkness to wait til daylight for the first check.

I’m not sure quite when, but we checked the net after dawn. Leon was sleeping in a sleeping bag rolled up in a tarp, and the river was licking his feet as it had come up steadily from all the rain. It took all we had from both of us to pull the net into the beach. We got over 20 fish the first check. Mostly sockeye and a few coho. Our net mesh was larger by 1/4 inch than our neighbors, so they got some pinks and smaller sockeye while we got all big sockeye and the coho. We put the net back out, and continued fishing till about noon, checking the net every hour or two. I cleaned fish in between and we put them on the glacier ice we collected from the river on the way there.  A 20 something came up to our neighbors camp about noon to fish the net, and she was very appreciative to have me show her how to troll-clean a fish after I watched her struggle cleaning fish from their net.

At noon we decided to move our net to the other side of the river after fishing slowed down and we were tangling buoy lines with our neighbors. That was a good move, as we got quite a few more fish over there. We’d run over in the boat to check the net from the boat, then bring back the fish to clean at camp. When we got all the fish we wanted for ourselves and a couple of seniors we were proxy fishing for, we cleaned the last of the fish, I made a pot of coffee for the thermos, packed up the boat, and headed for town. After raining cats and dogs for 24 hours, the clouds thinned out, and patches of blue sky peeked through as we headed for home.

The trip home was fantastic. I learned from the trip in to put my rain gear over the non-water proof coat I’d worn on the way in, and I stayed dry and warm. Plus, it wasn’t raining for the first 3 hours or so. The 3 coolers of fish weighed down the bow a bit, but with me moving back to sit next to Leon in the stern, we stopped the bow  from spraying us and we were able to get on step and move right along.   The glaciers were again impressive on the way home. The trip home was downstream of course, and took about an hour less then the trip upriver. We got into the wrong channel once, and had to get out and pull the boat back up into the deeper water and find the deeper water. I took on a little water through a rip in the waders by my right knee, but it wasn’t too bad.   It didn’t rain until we got to the channel and could see town.

Leon called his proxy when he got a cell signal as we entered the channel so he would come and get his fish when we got to Douglas harbor. We got to town about 615 pm and I carted up my gear and fish up the ramp to the car.  I delivered fish to several friends in town. To Samuel’s adoptive grandmother who is making sure he has a dream childhood; to our friend who gave us a pile of youth soccer jerseys they no longer use for me to send to my village in Sierra Leone; and to our friend the local pediatrician who takes care of the kids in town. And then several to my proxy who does welding whenever I need it, as well as advising on building projects and deer hunting with me when he can. His wife is a graphic designer who helped me with my company logo and Sara with her campaign logo.

For our house, I cut up about  5 salmon into steaks, dredged them in a 50:50 salt:sugar mix, let them brine for about 40 minutes, then loaded the smoker that my nephew John helped me build out of an old refrigerator. I then started the fan to dry the fish. When the fish dried with a nice pellicle, I turned on the electric double hot plate in the smoker and lightly smoked the fish with chunks of alder wood until the fish was fairly firm, then canned the fish.

After seeing the glaciers, I made a mental note to take visitors there when they came to town. A pretty simple trip in most weather. There’s also a forest service cabin directly across from one of the glaciers that I want to “camp” in sometime to just sit on the cabin front porch and watch the glacier for a weekend. Another trip of a lifetime.