Matthew Dickerson: Salt chucks & silver salmon: Alaska, part 2

So what exactly is a salt chuck? That was one of the questions I had when I arrived at Ernest Gruening State Historic Park.

The history of the place was inspiring, and I soaked in as much as I could. But it was the surrounding scenery and landscape that moved me the most.

A lone sockeye salmon sits in the stream in front of me under a low canopy of alder. The stream is wide, gravelly and shallow: only two to three inches deep and a few feet wide.

For five days and nights I resided in a shoreline cabin partway up the Wood River system in Alaska’s Wood-Tikchik State Park. Officially, I was serving as artist-in-residence for Alaska State Parks and had come to spend a week in the state’s largest park … (read more)

On July 4, as many of us watched fireworks, the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center gave a list of 424 wildfires being tracked in Alaska — all “active, smoldering, or in the process of being demobilized.”

When I visited Alaska in 2003 with my father for a six-day wilderness float trip, bookended on both sides by day-and-a-half-long visits to a wilderness fishing lodge, I thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Alaska is neither inexpensive nor parti … (read more)

My wife Deborah and I had dinner this week with our friends Rich and Jan Warren. We met at the Bobcat Café and Brewery in Bristol, one of our favorite local restaurants and also a convenient meeting place between our home in Middlebury and theirs in Stark … (read more)

My son Mark and his wife, Ellie, both Middlebury residents and Middlebury College alumni, walked alongside me up the gravelly river shoreline in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed. Our guide and pilot, Glen Alsworth Jr. of … (read more)