PEOPLE OF THE TRANSBOUNDARY REGION
Len "Pete" Peterson, Taku River Reds
Len “Pete” Peterson came to Juneau in 1970 for a teaching job that was supposed to last two years. He never left.
"I eventually earned enough to get my own gillnetting boat in 1981. It paid for college for my kids.” [more from Len] Heather Hardcastle, Taku River Reds
“We were always out there with mom and dad,” Heather Hardcastle recalls. “One time, that net got caught in the prop. My mom stripped down to her skivvies, put on a snorkel and mark and jumped in. It was pitch dark and the water was 55 degrees. She got the prop untangled. I thought she was a rock star!”
[more from Heather] Brenda Schwartz-Yaeger, Owner, Alaska Charters & Adventures
"These wild Alaskan salmon, or maybe they're wild Canadian salmon, they're feeding the world."
"Yes, that's British Columbia, and yes, this is Alaska, but as far as the fish, and the nature, and the essence of the river, there's no line there." [more from Brenda] |
Mike Erickson, Alaska Glacier Seafoods
"Huge, huge, huge... I mean, it doesn't get any bigger, this is it. It's like the farmer who depends on rain for his crops, we depend on our environment for these fisheries that we're all involved in."
[more from Mike] Richard J. Peterson, President of Central Council (Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska)
“The native people in Alaska are as much apart of the environment as the trees and the fish. We are a resource. I don’t know if there’s any way in western culture to describe exactly how we relate to the land.”
[more from President Peterson] Ryan Peterson, Filmmaker
"I wanted to understand and film the place from the inside out. The upper watershed [of the transboundary Unuk River] is especially remote and I thought it might make for some special shots. So we flew into a lake at the headwaters in B.C. and followed it to the ocean in Alaska, being about half on foot and half in these lightweight boats called Alpacka Rafts. It definitely gave us both a taste of how rugged the place is and exactly how crazy it is to consider putting North America’s largest open-pit mine in the middle of it."
[more from Ryan] |
Quotes adapted from Beyond the Lines by Chris Santella and XBoundary by Ryan Peterson. Full article can be found in TROUT Magazine Winter 2015.