Chinook and chum salmon dry on racks near a home along the Yukon River in this undated photo. (Photo provided by USGS Alaska Science Center)
I grew up in Tanana, Alaska, spending summers fishing the Yukon River at Rampart Rapids with my family and our 20 to 30 sled dogs. Salmon wasn’t just food: It was our life. It fed our families and our dogs, who were not only companions but essential workers and transportation in a vast, roadless region.
In the 1990s, when I was a kid, king and chum salmon were abundant. Families used fish wheels and set nets — sustainable methods passed down for generations.
Today, that way of life is vanishing.
King salmon runs have collapsed. A once-iconic symbol of Alaska is disappearing. Just last month, Alaska Airlines suspended its ceremonial red carpet fly-out of the first Copper River king salmon of the season — a clear sign of a deeper crisis already felt in coastal and river communities.
Chum salmon, the lifeblood of rural dog teams, are also disappearing. When I was young, Tanana had more than twice as many sled dogs as people, with upwards of 500 dogs in the village. Today, there are exactly 19. Not because people stopped caring, but because there simply aren’t enough fish to feed them.
Flying in commercial dog food is cost-prohibitive. A 32-pound bag of mid-grade food costs about $85, including freight, and feeds a 20-dog team for just three days in the off-season.
Despite efforts to rehome sled dogs to less remote areas, the heartbreaking reality is that when the chum runs fail, many dogs must be put down. And with them goes a deep part of Alaska’s heritage — our independence, culture and a subsistence way of life.
As a teenager, I worked with Stan Zuray, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to collect data that confirmed what fishermen already knew: King salmon were getting smaller and the runs weaker. Despite clear warnings, meaningful protections came too late.
Now, an even greater threat looms offshore.
Industrial trawlers in the Bering Sea are devastating salmon stocks. Every year, tens of thousands of king and chum salmon are unintentionally caught and discarded as bycatch — hauled up and tossed overboard, dead.
Even worse, these factory trawlers are stripping the ocean of forage fish essential to the food chain, species like herring, capelin, and especially pollock. Around 3 billion pounds of pollock are removed from the Bering Sea annually. Pollock aren’t just a product for fast food; they’re a cornerstone of the marine ecosystem, feeding salmon, seabirds, marine mammals, and more. Without them, the entire food web begins to unravel.
While small communities bear the burden of conservation — sacrificing their fisheries, their food security, and their culture — massive industrial fleets continue to harvest low-value fish for fast-food sandwiches and imitation crab.
If this story sounds familiar, it should. Look at the Columbia River: once home to legendary salmon runs, now a cautionary tale of habitat destruction, overfishing and mismanagement. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to restore Columbia River salmon and they are still failing. The truth is once wild salmon runs collapse, they rarely, if ever, come back.
The Yukon could be next.
The upper Yukon has now been closed to Chinook harvest for five years, with a seven-year moratorium set to extend that to 12. That’s 12 consecutive years on one of the most iconic and remote rivers on earth without a single legally harvested Chinook salmon. Entire generations are growing up without the traditions that once defined life on the river.
The science isn’t in dispute. Warming ocean temperatures and rising disease rates like ichthyophonus are making things worse. But industrial trawling is an immediate, human-caused crisis—and one we can do something about.
Once wild salmon runs are gone, they’re gone.
Once cultural knowledge is lost, it doesn’t return.
Once a way of life tied to the river disappears, it’s gone forever.
This isn’t just an environmental crisis. It’s cultural erasure, unfolding in real time.
Alaska’s wild salmon are iconic but they are not invincible. Without immediate, bold action to rein in the destruction caused by industrial trawlers, the future of wild salmon and the people who rely on them will be lost.
We can’t afford another decade of excuses. The time to act is now.
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