Beautiful trip down the Richardson Highway to fish the Gulkana River, Alaska

This is one of the clearest lakes I've ever seen. All the white smudges in the foreground are midges hovering over the bushes.

There's a fish-cleaning table right IN the river at this landing. Driving out on the gravel bar is the norm, too. It was a good place to field-dress my sockeye salmon. Tossing the guts out into the river has them devoured by hungry gulls within seconds. That's illegal in many places, but in Alaska it's the preferred way of dealing with fish waste: these ecosystems are driven by dead salmon and fully equipped to deal with it.

The Gulkana Glacier is an iconic landmark for north-bound travelers (or, I suppose, south-bound travelers looking north) on the Richardson Highway. Thankfully, its silty runoff drains not into the Gulkana River drainage but into Phelan Creek in the Yukon drainage instead.

The Copper River is another of Alaska's major glacial drainages, hosting huge salmon runs which spread out more thinly into its clearwater tributaries to spawn.

This panorama is best viewed full-size.

These seagulls live at the salmon-cleaning station during this time of year.

Another panorama of the huge Copper River.

A professional photographer (whose name I forgot to get) just happened to be nearby as I finished up my sockeye fishing with this hefty limit of fresh, tasty salmon. He took several pictures with his good camera, which hopefully he'll be sending me soon, and he snapped this one with my point+shoot camera.

This glacial river's blue-green water is incredibly opaque, but much prettier than the gray-brown of most other glacial rivers. It is also fishable, though I prefer more clarity.

The lack of access on this large river makes combat fishing the norm for anyone who hasn't planned ahead and got a permit from the native tribe controlling the land above the river. It's a choice between this and trespassing. I fished for about 20 minutes before I got tired of it and headed to a different stream.

This is a pretty cool silhouette of a bald eagle carrying some food, even though it isn't terribly well-focused or well-lit. I was actually driving when I took it (though it was on a no-traffic campground driveway, so it wasn't unsafe) and the eagle swooped into the roadway right in front of me, then flew around to the side and gave me this profile.

Alaska has the right idea here. I would like to see them add another digit to that number, but they're still doing pretty well compared to everyone else in that regard. It shows, too -- there doesn't seem to be very much litter along this highway.

A raven returns to its cliff-side nest along the Copper River.

A raven flies over the Copper River.