The story begins like this:

“Coffee Point, Alaska—Anna Hoover and I ease up and down in limestone-colored water on a warm, windless afternoon in early July, our backs to the mouth of the Egegik River. She’s distracted, perched in the captain’s seat of her 32-foot drift boat. She glances at her phone, checking the time. The state manages fishing on a tight schedule here, opening the waters to fishermen and then closing them every few hours to let some salmon travel to their spawning grounds. We’ve got five minutes until we unspool our nets.

We sit 300 miles west of Anchorage in Bristol Bay, home to the largest, healthiest red salmon run on earth, where most wild-grown grocery-store fillets caught in the United States come from. Hoover’s parents and grandparents fished here, and she has been hauling reds from this fertile finger of saltwater for most of her 34 years.

This is her first summer as the captain of her own boat. She never doubted the decision to buy it. She’s always seen herself here, her hair pulled back in a bandanna, rubber coveralls flecked with fish scales, eyes gritty from sleep deprivation, adrenaline rising and falling with the tides that carry salmon into the nets.

“We joke how there are two kinds of people—the ones who can’t stand it out here and the ones who can’t live without it,” she says. “Fishing is in my blood.”

Still, no matter how many years you fish, she says, you always get a crackle of anxiety as you slip your nets into the water. So much can go wrong—weather, gear tangling, mechanical problems, bad timing, the catastrophe of the fish failing to show up. The risk, though, is part of the draw. “Fishermen,” she tells me, “have always been gamblers.”

For her generation of fishermen, investing here is more of a gamble than ever. Twin threats hang over this place where many of America’s salmon dinners come from: a rapidly warming climate, which has already scrambled the pattern of the seasons across vast swaths of Alaska, and Pebble Mine, a proposed open pit mine at the bay’s headwaters, which has been given new life by Donald Trump’s administration. Many who live and fish here, including Hoover, worry that once the mine is built, pollution is inevitable and that together these two forces could destroy this rare, pristine ecosystem, threatening salmon, communities, and whole ways of life.

“I think of generations. So many people in the fishery have learned it from their families and want to pass it on,” Hoover says. “Around the world, people have disrespected salmon populations and their environments to the point where they are extinct or they are farmed. This place doesn’t have that—yet.”

Hoover maneuvers us into position. Two crewmen stand ready on the deck. One is a high school English teacher with a toddler at home, the other a high school student—a good kid who never gets tired. There isn’t room to mess this up. They have to make money this summer.

At 4:45 precisely, Hoover motors forward. Her net sails into the sea.”

Read the rest here.

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Here’s how the story begins:

ANCHORAGE — After just a few hours of letting the current comb through his net in the Copper River, Shane Cummings knew that something wasn’t right.

Dr. Cummings, a sports medicine specialist, had driven 250 miles east of Anchorage with a seasoned fishing party, including a few men who had gone to the river every summer since the 1960s. They motored between sandbars to a familiar spot, and slid the wide hoops of their nets into the steel-colored water.

In a good year, they could pull 70 or 80 red salmon from the river, which they would later brine in sugar and salt and bathe in alder smoke, their Little Chief smokers puffing in their driveways. They would carry Ziplocs of fish to the neighbors and set long tables in their backyards, pulling fillet after fillet off the grill.

But as the hours passed on this day in early June, nobody on the river netted a red, or even saw one. “It wasn’t usual at all,” Dr. Cummings said.

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The post For NYT: A dwindling catch has Alaskans uneasy appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how the column begins:

My grandparents came to Anchorage after the war. My parents grew up here and so did I. I never trick-or-treated without a snowsuit on. Now my kids, dressed as superheroes, run door to door on dry pavement. Rain keeps showing up in the wintertime. Snow, real snow, has begun to feel precious. My youngest son was 3 before we had enough at once to make a decent snow angel.

Since I started writing about climate and wild food in Alaska four years ago, I must have collected 100 anecdotes about things that might be related to climate change. Small things. Practical inconveniences, mostly, and strange observations.

There’s the whale meat stored in ice cellars, old-school refrigeration units cut into the Arctic permafrost generations ago, that tastes off now because the temperature has edged up.

Find the whole column here.

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“There were just dead murres everywhere. It was incredible,” he said. “I estimated 8,000 birds in a little bit more than a mile.”

Common murres are sharp-billed black-and-white seabirds that feed on small fish. In the weeks after Irons’ discovery, scientists and volunteers found thousands of dead and dying murres on Alaska beaches, the largest murre die-off on record. Sick murres also began to turn up in Alaska’s interior, hundreds of miles from the ocean.

The massive seabird die-off is part of a larger story about the health of Alaska’s oceans as sea temperatures rise. For more than a year, scientists have been cataloging smaller, unexplained episodes of animals dying on beaches — including other birds, sea otters, sea lions, several species of whales, starfish and fish. In all cases, the suspected cause of death has been linked to warmer sea temperatures, and some scientists suspect there is also a connection to the toxic algae that thrive when temperatures tick up even a few degrees.

“We are having water that is 5 degrees [Fahrenheit] warmer over a huge area. At the same time, we are having these unusual mortality events,” said Heather Renner, a supervisory wildlife biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses 2,500 coastal Alaska islands. “We don’t have any proof they are linked, but they are happening at a time when the ocean is warmer than it’s been for ages.”

Read more here.

Photos by Katie Orlinsky.

The post Is toxic algae killing animals across Alaska? (For Al Jazeera America) appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Anyway, here’s what I brought back from the trip on my phone, mainly food photos, from one of America’s most northern communities.

The post Point Hope (food) in iPhone snaps appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

(For a real treat, check out Katie’s slide show.)

Point Hope, Alaska — For the Inupiat villagers who have made their homes on this finger of land in the Chukchi Sea for generations, nothing is more important than the bowhead whale.

The calendar revolves around seasons for hunting, fishing and gathering. It’s a lifestyle Alaskans call “subsistence”, which is as much cultural tradition as economic necessity in one of the state’s most northern villages.

About 900 people live in Point Hope. The village store prices are double what people pay 700 miles south in Anchorage. A gallon of milk might be $12. Two pounds of hamburger patties: $23. In most homes, wild and foraged foods make up at least half of the menu. The village has two stores, a school, several churches and a restaurant that serves pizza, Chinese food and hamburgers. Alcohol can’t be legally possessed, sold or imported.

All year, the village looks forward to spring whaling, when crews of men thread through leads in the sea ice, quietly paddling in seal-skin boats, looking for smooth black shapes rising out of the water.
The few massive bowheads taken by villagers each year supply thousands of pounds of dense protein. Beyond that, whale meat is considered an Alaska Native soul food. Hunting, butchering and distributing the animal, village leaders say, is how elders teach young people the culture.

“Without the whale,” said Steve Oomittuk, the former mayor of the city and former vice-president of the tribe, “we wouldn’t be who we are.”

In recent years, however, the much-anticipated whale hunt has run up against a warming Arctic. A bowhead can be 60 feet long and weigh 75 tons. Successful whaling crews have always hauled the massive animals on to the ice using a block and tackle. The last few seasons, the ice has been more unstable than elders in the village have ever seen.

“It’s getting harder and harder, the ice is thinner,” Oomittuk said. “We can’t pull up the whale.”

Read more here.

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KOTZEBUE, Alaska—In this Far North village, no animal provides more protein to fill freezers than the bearded seal. A single seal can supply hundreds of pounds of meat, enough to feed a large, extended family for a winter.

The post For National Geographic: With changing Arctic ice, a short window for a traditional hunt appeared first on Julia O'Malley.