July 14 -- southward to Anchorage

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This first shot was taken at the hotel just outside Denali. All the rest were taken from the train.






I've been talking about silt. Some of the streams are not glacially fed, and those are very clear. Salmon spawn in clear ones. We saw salmon several times from the train on July 14. They were huge (nearly a yard long, I think), and dark purply-red, and I didn't get any pics.






We learned a lot about salmon. Salmon have a huge impact on the whole food chain in a lot of Alaska, including us arrogant wingless bipeds. Salmon feed all the fishers on their way upstream. When a bear eats part of a salmon, and a smaller critter (a mink, maybe) hauls the rest of the salmon farther into the woods, the mink eats, and so do other critters farther into the woods. Decaying salmon feed the soil, feed the plants (aquatic and otherwise), nourish the whole web of life.

There are five kinds of Pacific salmon (chum, sockeye, king, silver, and pink), each kind with its own habits, preferred spawing times and places, nicknames, and uses by man. For example, chum is also called "dog salmon" because it is commonly dried and smoked to feed to dogs all winter. King ("Chinook") and silver ("coho") are prefered for people to eat.

All of the Pacific salmon hatch in fresh water, swim downstream to the ocean as youngsters, live and mature in the ocean for years, find their natal rivers when the urge to reproduce is strong, and finally travel upstream in their hundreds of thousands, looking for the clear water in which they hatched. Those which make it all the way back to their birthplace deposit the next generation there.

I now have a much better understanding of why it's a big deal when rivers are dammed and salmon can't get back upstream. It's not just an academic "well, it's too bad for those particular fish." It's devastating for the whole ecosystem upstream if the salmon don't come........ (And I haven't even mentioned one of the variety of creatures who eat salmon eggs, salmon fry, small salmon on their way down to the ocean....)


This next pic was taken immediately after the previous one, so you can get a better idea of the setting for that stream.






More silty water. (Salmon travel through it to get where they are going, but only spawn in clear water.)






How to decide which pics to leave out?






Note fireweed.....






It was an 8-hour train ride from Denali to Anchorage. I did some knitting. A dishcloth, in the blues and greens of Alaska, with yellow for the sun we were lucky to see so often (southeast Alaska being very rainy indeed).






What an amazing place.






Wow, eh?






Approaching more concentrated human habitat..... We traveled hundreds of miles on the train, and only rarely did we see any evidence of humans other than the train itself.....






The last pic I took from the train before we arrived in Anchorage.





In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, a link to the next one is here.

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