Taku River

About

Taku River, Alaska — Largest SE Alaska Salmon Producer, $8M Economic, Tlingit. The T'aakú Ḵwáan — the Taku Tlingit — call this watershed home, and have for at least 4,000 years, long before any map fixed the river's course. The Taku formed the traditional trade route between coastal Tlingit and interior Tahltan Athabascan nations, and its salmon runs supported one of the largest pre-contact Tlingit populations in Southeast Alaska. The T'aakú Ḵwáan maintain traditional fishing rights on the river today, and stewardship of the salmon remains the river's defining human story.

Euro-American activity arrived in stages. The Taku River watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s to support the regional timber industry of 1850 through the 1910s and the railroad expansion of 1860 through the 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The exhaustion of old-growth stands in 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s brought large-scale logging to an end. Sustained Euro-American contact had come with the late-1800s commercial drift-gillnet fishery at the river's mouth, followed by the mining and exploration era of the 1920s through the 1940s in the upper watershed.

The river was also among the first in the region to be measured. The USGS surveys of the 1870s through the 1890s, the gauging-station establishment of the 1880s through the 1910s, and the state geological survey streamflow assessments of the 1910s through the 1930s were the first comprehensive hydrological studies of the Taku. State water pollution control studies in the 1950s through the 1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 through 2000 followed, addressing more than a century of logging and industrial impacts.

The Taku's geology stays in motion. Between 1987 and 2004 the river repeatedly surged with glacial lake outburst floods — dramatic releases of impounded meltwater — that drew sustained study from the U.S. Geological Survey, which monitored the floods and water quality from 1998 through 2003. Today gauge 15041200 records an average of about 16,000 CFS, with a historical figure near 14,400 CFS, on a Class II–III river running an optimal 3,000 to 20,000 CFS.

The watershed carries older industrial scars too. Historic mines in the Tulsequah River drainage, a tributary feeding the Taku, have raised lingering water-quality concerns downstream and across the border, from Juneau, Alaska, to Atlin, British Columbia. Since 2015, ongoing concerns about acid drainage from the abandoned Tulsequah Chief Mine on the Canadian side have become a flashpoint for U.S.-Canada transboundary mining disputes, with Juneau-area Tlingit tribes and ADF&G pressing for cleanup and stronger protections against proposed new BC mining development.

Amid the disputes, the fishery endures. All five species of Pacific salmon return in numbers that generate more than $8 million in annual economic activity, and the Taku hosts the largest Chinook run in Southeast Alaska and northern British Columbia. The river is jointly managed under the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty between the U.S. and Canada. The Wild Salmon Center has designated it a Salmon Stronghold to Watch, and its upper watershed lies within the Taku Wilderness, designated in 1990. Anglers reach it by jet boat — Canyon Island sits 15 miles upriver from the mouth, the Taku Lodge reach 20 miles up for kings and sockeye, and the US-Canada border marks the end of the 54-mile US reach.