Karluk River

About

Karluk River, Alaska — Oldest Sockeye Research Site, Kodiak NWR. The story begins long before the scientists. For over 7,000 years the Karluk was the single most important salmon fishing site for the Sugpiaq (Alutiiq) people of Kodiak Island. Karluk village, at the river mouth, was the largest Sugpiaq settlement on Kodiak before contact — home to as many as 1,500 residents during the peak salmon season. Today it ranks among the most extensively studied archaeological sites in Alaska, a record in the ground that matches the river's record on paper.

That productivity was no accident of history. The Karluk drains a landscape almost perfectly built for sockeye: clean spawning gravels feeding into Karluk Lake, a large natural nursery lake where juvenile fish rear before heading to sea. The pairing produces sockeye runs whose escapement goal runs from 1.4 to 2.5 million fish. Chinook are monitored too, under ADF&G's Chinook Stock Assessment program, with an escapement goal of 3,000 to 6,000 fish — a run that has averaged about 8,000 since 1985.

Such abundance drew industry as surely as it drew science. When the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries built its counting weir at Karluk in 1880, it made this the longest continuous salmon research site in North America. The Karluk Cannery, built by the Alaska Packers Association in the 1880s, became the foundation of Kodiak's canned-salmon industry for nearly a century. The Baranov Museum in Kodiak still preserves Karluk-canned salmon from the era — tins that carried the river's name across a continent.

Protection arrived in 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt established the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, setting aside 1.9 million acres of Kodiak Island — the Karluk River drainage included. The refuge was created primarily to safeguard the Kodiak brown bear and the salmon runs that sustain it, and in doing so it ensured the Karluk would remain a wild salmon and steelhead fishery. The upper lake and river are designated wilderness; the lower river's tidal flats support commercial set gillnetting, a working coast layered over a protected one.

The research never stopped. NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center has carried the weir's work forward through 2010 and beyond with the Karluk Sockeye Salmon Studies program, extending an unbroken thread of observation that stretches back to a weir built when Alaska was still a customs district.

For those who float it, the Karluk reads in three chapters. The Upper Karluk, at the Karluk Lake outlet, holds wild steelhead and sockeye. The Middle Karluk — the stretch anglers call the Portage — carries sockeye and king salmon. The Lower Karluk, near Karluk village, is silver-salmon water with a strong fall run. The river also carries an ADF&G Wild Steelhead Stream designation, a formal nod to the sea-run rainbows that share its gravels with the salmon. Operators such as Kodiak Legends Lodge run silver salmon and steelhead trips here, on a river where the fishing and the science have always been the same story told twice.