At the end of July, we spent about a week travelling around southern Alaska. For the last couple of years, I have traditionally been unable to keep up with everything, although I very much hope to eventually write about it all. So I’ll start with what impressed me the most. With salmon.
Somewhere around the middle of our trip, we arrived in Valdez. A little port town in southern Alaska, the terminus of the Alaska Pipeline, a commercial fishing port, and a town with quite an interesting history. I’ll write more about Valdez later. For now, it’s all about the salmon.
In the second half of July, salmon in Alaska are heading upstream to spawn. Valdez is home to a very large fish hatchery. Every year it releases about 250 million coho salmon fry and 2 million pink salmon fry. And those among these millions who manage not to get eaten one way or another before reaching the age of their first — and last — spawning run return to their native hatchery to leave behind their eggs, milt, and lives.
And during spawning season (from July through October), Solomon Gulch Hatchery is, in my opinion, the most interesting thing to see in Valdez. The fishermen, naturally, will not agree with me.
The mouth of the creek is literally packed with salmon.
Here is the mouth itself, where the whole spectacle takes place.
And here is the salmon, packed into the proverbial mouth of the creek like herring in a can.
And quite a few others are eager to join this salmon march. Enough salmon to last them a whole year.
Sea lions swim around in the salmon soup. Completely stuffed already. But you can’t exactly swim away when the fish are practically jumping into your mouth. So even if they can’t, we’ll cram them in anyway.
The sea lions don’t swallow the salmon whole — they bite them in half.
And the gulls take advantage of this. A gull has a hard time dealing with a whole salmon, so they follow the ones that have already taken a bite out of one.
They try to snatch it right out of their mouths.
The sea lions are outraged, but there is apparently no way to deal with such shameless gulls.
It’s not as if the gulls are taking the sea lions’ last piece of food. They are just really annoying.
The salmon crawl through the sea lions, too. What else can they do? But to the food on themselves the sea lions are more willing to tolerate.
I can’t eat another bite…
But I have to…
Those damn creatures keep crawling into my mouth…
Some of the sea lions still have enough energy left to lazily sort out their disagreements.
A little video from Peer:
To be continued, with other participants in the banquet…
