Nature Pictures from Trout Streams, Page 90

My dad plays the first brown trout he's ever caught on a fly.

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.

Lena's first coastal cutthroat

Pretty little coastal cutthroat

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.