For Alaska salmon fishing, the summer of 2022 is the best of times and the worst of times.
In the Bristol Bay region, the sockeye salmon run and harvest amounts set new records, as was predicted in the preseason forecast. As of July 18, the run had totaled over 73.7 million salmon, with a harvest of over 56.3 million. The previous record was set just last year, with a 67.7 million run of sockeyes and a third-biggest-ever harvest of nearly 42 million of the fish.
But along the Yukon River, a prized salmon run is heading toward a worst-ever season.
The number of chinook counted by sonar while swimming up the river at Pilot Station, a village near the Bering Sea coast, was the lowest on record for this time of the year, the department said.
Things are looking grim for the rest of the summer, Fish and Game said in its most recent update: “The drainage-wide run may be under 50,000 fish, which is so small that escapement goals may not be met in any tributaries.” Chinook fishing has been closed all along the river and its drainages.
The Yukon chum salmon run, which starts in the late summer, is also looking grim and “is anticipated to be critically low,” meaning that even subsistence harvests will be closed for at least the start of the fall season, the department said.
Fisheries activists are pointing to both cases — a healthy Bristol Bay return and weak numbers on the Yukon — as evidence supporting protective measures.
Opponents of the controversial Pebble Mine say two consecutive years of record sockeye runs demonstrate the value of protecting the Bristol Bay watershed, site of the world’s biggest sockeye runs, from that proposed development. They are urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to invoke a rarely used provision of the Clean Water Act to preclude any wetlands-fill permit for the mine.
“Salmon have provided for the people of Bristol Bay for thousands of years due to our ancestral stewardship of our pristine lands and waters. We’re grateful our salmon continue to return home in record numbers but our watershed is still facing the grave threat of mines like Pebble. The EPA must finalize Clean Water Act protections for the headwaters of our fishery this year,” United Tribes of Bristol Bay executive director Alannah Hurley said in a statement.
Advocates for Indigenous communities dependent on Yukon River salmon, meanwhile, say the continued poor returns there and in the Kuskokwim River demonstrate the need for action to reduce ocean bycatch, the accidental harvest of Western Alaska-bound salmon in nets used to harvest other species.
Several groups have requested a meeting with Gov. Mike Dunleavy to discuss the run failures in the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim regions. And so far, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has not put stricter bycatch rules in place, said Serena Fitka, executive director of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association. “In a crisis, we cannot wait for more research to be done,” she said by email.
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