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Air-Hart SeaplaneTraining

Bella CoolaBritish Columbia

WaterfrontLiving

WrangellAlaska

BremertonMarina

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John hands me a salt-crusted hatchet, nods at the blue glacier and says to chop off a chunk for

my drink: “It’s the coldest ice you’ll ever have.”

That was either before or after (there was so much going on I lost track) tightening a seatbelt for a wide-eyed jet boat ride, bonking double-digit king salmon, watching bears gorge and spotting garnets in a cliff wall,

Renowned water-colorist/jet-boat guide Brenda Schwartz-Yeager is at the helm. She takes her jet boat—replete with hot-rod blue flames—roaring up shallow shifting channels around unseen gravel bars into the Stikine River, one of the most pow-erful flows in North America.

This is a Wrangell I was not expecting.

A flannel-shirted, rubber-boot-ed port town in Southeast Alaska, Wrangell sits on the northwest tip of Wrangell Island, hundreds of miles south of the hacksaw peaks in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Five miles away is a 16-mile delta of glacial slurry where 330 miles of the powerful Stikine River gushes into saltwater. It’s North America’s fast-est free-flowing navigable river. In spring and fall the delta fills with thousands of migrating birds—120 species, I’m told—and the April concentration of eagles is the sec-ond-largest in the world. It’s a mag-net for carnivores. In spring when

Wild Wrangell Alaskaby Terry W. Sheely

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the Stikine is washing out a smor-gasbord of winter dead and spawn-ing “hooligans” (smelt) it attracts the greatest concentration of bald eagles in North America, along with 500 Steller sea lions, and countless seals, harbor porpoises, black and grizzly bears, and wolves.

At the mouth we’re 35 miles downriver from British Columbia and a 200-mile boat run to a belly-churning gorge where mountain goats cling to 1,000-foot vertical walls above a maelstrom.

With a population of 2,300, the town is small enough to be out of the congestion and trinket shops of mega-cruise ships (small cruise ships land here), and big enough to have scheduled airline service, 15 B&Bs and hotels, ten charter outfitters, and a visitor center.

And there’s more outdoor recre-ation than I can pack into a week with John Yeager’s Alaska Charters & Adventures.

Wrangell is in a place yet to be discovered by time, tourists and des-tination fishermen. It’s old-school Alaska, a place that Ohio-born John Yeager found a decade ago, and where he launched his fishing business, married artist Brenda Schwartz and now lives to hunt salmon in Sumner Strait or between the mist-wrapped islands. Both Brenda and John run charter trips. John concentrates on salt- and fresh-water fishing; Brenda jets up to the Anan Bear Observatory to watch the black and brown bears gorging on salmon. She also leads nature trips describing the Stikine’s glaciers, tributaries and wildlife; Tlingit na-tive history; gold and garnet mines; and historic Hudsons’ Bay Compa-ny settlements. Brenda also shuttles kayakers into a wild slice of North America. And she fishes.

Wrangell Island has its share of adventures. There are 100 miles of graveled road for mountain biking. You can hike, camp, fish in small

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streams, photograph wildlife and pick succulent berries.

One of Wrangell’s biggest draws is the concentration of bears and birds in Anan Creek, 35 miles southeast of town in the Tongass National Forest. Accessible by boat and float-plane, then a half-mile walk, the Anan Wildlife Observatory is world-renowned for bear viewing. Black and grizzly bears, hundreds of ea-gles, seals, otters and other protein-craving wildlife are attracted to one of the largest pink-salmon feasts in Alaska. The big predators rarely pay attention to two-legged visitors.

If bears are on your agenda, plan to visit in July and August when salmon surge up Anan Creek. Fed-eral permits and reservations are required; charter outfits can make arrangements.

That timeline also dovetails into Wrangell’s July-September peak for silver and pink salmon, halibut and ling cod, and freshwater cutthroat, Dolly Varden and salmon.

Stikine kings salmon are huge: 30- to 50-pounders. The best suc-cess comes at the front edge of sum-mer, in May and June. I was there in July, but John still put us into several double-digit kings.

A regional Chinook enhancement hatchery program provides Wrangell anglers with one of the most liberal non-resident king areas in the state.

Most of Southeast has a conserva-tive Chinook limit for nonresidents of one per day. However, in the Sti-kine Delta area between May 1 and July 15 non-residents are allowed two kings per day and six in posses-sion. Kings in this area weigh from the low 20’s to 50-plus pounds.

John’s first love is king salmon —big kings. His 35-foot sport-fisher-man, Timber Wolf, is set up for salm-on and halibut, but refined for kings with a roomy back deck for long fish fights; downriggers; new electronics; twin 250-hp outboards; comfortable seating; a refrigerator; coffeemaker;

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and a cabin heater. My fishing partner Jim Goerg and

I are trolling the deep-water rocks off Elephant Nose, towing flashers and plastic squid for silvers, hoping to pull a late king off the wall. We’re close enough to the bank to see bears, moose and black-tailed deer.

The fish finder marks a small ball of bait, and then the bigger blob of a salmon, tracking the herring. We’re riveted to the game of tag-and-eat until someone happens to look at the rods and yell “fish on!” A silver is rolling across the surface in the wake, wrapped in flasher and leader.

Day Two is dedicated to Brenda and her flaming blue jet-boat; we’re about to get a Stikine adventure. The river mouth is a shifting delta with a twisting swath of gray glacial water gushing at 20,000 cubic feet per second into the transparent blue salt chuck.

Upriver are the Boundary Moun-tains marking the US/Canada line. A monstrous ice field encases peaks from south of Wrangell to the Fair-weather Mountains above Gla-cier Bay National Park. With long blonde hair flying, Brenda hurtles around bends between walls of hemlock, spruce and the white skel-etons of dead trees, dodging drifting chunks of blue ice, and looking for moose and bears. We slide past sev-eral remote and mostly empty Forest Service rental cabins.

Brenda noses the boat into wil-lows and sends the boat dog on bear patrol. It’s gorgeous trout water. In August when a fresh run of silvers hits here the light-tackle action is ex-plosive, John says.

Back on the main river we travel through wild Alaska, zig-zagging and snacking on smoked sockeye and Dungeness crab. We skitter around a bend and—poof!—we’re into Chief Shakes Lake. Floating icebergs clog our route; some are the size of trucks. Brenda noses the jet boat up to a berg. We climb out with

a hatchet, and return with ice that’s older than all of us combined and dense beyond description.

In the afternoon, I watch through snifters of steam for moose while soaking in a 120-degree hot spring.

The next day we take a serious shot at kings.

Mist has flattened the water, clouds hang in swags and hide mountain tops. We slide into the Narrows—a tight fjord where moose, bears, deer, and wolves occasionally swim.

I’m staring at an eagle on the star-board side when the port rod bounc-es, jerks free of the downrigger and folds over.

Jim takes on a 25-pound king that ate a chrome-and-red Hot Spot flasher towing one of John’s tail-less herring baits.

“We’ll keep looking,” John says. “Should be a big one around here somewhere.”

www.wrangellalaskafishing.com