Replace Hades with Alexander Creek. Replace huge stones with northern pike.

For 17 days this spring, Ivey has cruised a 40-mile stretch of Alexander Creek across Cook Inlet with a crew of colleagues, targeting pike that have taken over the once- productive king salmon fishery and turned it barren for most sport anglers.

As recently as 1997, perhaps 7,000 kings pushed up the creek, and biologists estimate more than 5,000 spawned.

Today, pike as large as 30 pounds patrol numerous side-channel sloughs. Voracious predators, pike will feed on anything from mice to insects to other pike. A famous shot by former Daily News photographer Jim Lavrakas shows an open-mouthed pike with a trout fingerling inside.

In Southcentral, pike have wiped out populations of rainbow trout and Arctic grayling in several lakes. But nowhere have they decimated a salmon run the way they have at Alexander Creek.

Ivey heads a team using gillnets to catch and kill as many as possible. Fish and Game calls it suppression. Completely ridding a waterway as large and complex as Alexander Creek of pike, believed to have been illegally planted there, is all-but impossible.

Two years ago, Dave Rutz, Ivey's colleague at the Palmer Fish and Game office, estimated that three-mile-long Alexander Lake, which feeds the creek, held 16,000 pike.

"It is pike heaven," he said at the time. "I have never in my life heard of a pike population that has been that huge in a lake that size."

LAME RETURNS

Ivey's crew sets out several gill nets in Alexander's sloughs, typically capturing about 100 pike in the first 24-hour set. Once the yield drops to fewer than 10 pike per set, the crew moves on.

By the end of last week, more than 600 pike had been killed.

"It's a pretty substantial area," Ivey said last week. "There's probably an average of one side channel slough per mile. We targeted 12 sloughs in the lower river, and now we're working on 20 sloughs upriver."

Plenty of work remains.

Alexander's rock-bottom king salmon escapement goal, set by Fish and Game biologists, is 2,100 fish. Last year there were 275; in 2008, 150.

"Very low," Ivey acknowledged.

"It's a double whammy -- a combination of northern pike in the system and low king salmon returns across the whole area," he added. "But the Alexander was declining even during boomer runs to the (neighboring) Deshka."

Indeed, the Alexander returns were steadily dropping even as a whopping 57,934 kings returned to the nearby Deshka in 2004, five times more than that river saw last year.

Since the Board of Fish closed it in 2008, Alexander Creek has been off-limits to king anglers.

And while pike have taken a huge bite out of the king return there, they're clearly not the only factor. King returns to other Westside Susitna waterways without a similar pike problem have also crashed:

• Lake Creek: Down 83 percent since 2003 to 1,394 kings.

• Talachulitna River: Down 73 percent since 2003 to 2,608 kings.

• Peters Creek: Down 70 percent since 2001 to 1,283 kings.

ONCE BUSTLING

"We always have a lull every 10 or 15 years and we've seen that over the last 30 years," Rutz said. "What makes Alexander Creek different is that when the Deshka was doing primo, Alexander Creek was still in the toilet."

It wasn't always that way.

Years ago, the place was hopping with anglers over Memorial Day weekend. A 1993 Daily News story described the scene:

"King salmon anglers ... were tied in with a raft of three or four boats anchored 15 yards downstream from another raft of boats that was anchored 15 yards downstream from another collection of boats anchored side by side ...

"All the way up the Su, it went on that way. Around a bend and into the creek itself the anchored boats continued to crowd each other ...

" 'It's kind of getting to look like the Kenai, isn't it?' lodge owner Paul Gabbert of Gabbert's Fish Camp observed in reference to the most popular, most famous and sometimes most crowded salmon fishery in Alaska.

"A decade ago, the fishery here was nothing like the Kenai. Now, at least during the king season, all that seems to separate them is the absence of shopping centers and fast-food joints along Alexander Creek.

"The Kenai has the bigger fish, no doubt. But the Alexander offers better odds for catching one ...

"Six thousand or so will be caught by anglers in a good year.

" 'We've got one of the best king rivers in the state,' said Gabbert. 'That's why we get all the people.' "

The word "pike" is not mentioned in the story.

HUMANS AT FAULT

Today, the crowds have departed. Boats have vanished. Most of the nine lodges that once operated there have closed.

"There's no longer any king salmon fishery whatsoever," Ivey said. "There's one business up at the lake now, possibly two. When compared to other streams in the area, it's a pretty significant economic loss. And it may not be the same fishery when it comes back."

If it comes back.

Retired state biologist Larry Engle of Palmer blames the problem on greedy anglers who illegally planted pike in the system years ago.

"Somebody brought them in," he said. "And this is the kind of payback you get. It was one of those excellent examples of human beings screwing things up -- human error we're all paying for."

Once planted, the pike population took off. Both Alexander lake and creek offer the slow-moving water the fish prefer.

"It's real convoluted as a river," Ivey said. "In spring or during the flood season, it'll oxbow and it becomes stagnant -- vegetated and muddy. Perfect pike habitat."

WHAT'S FOR DINNER?

From the lake, pike moved steadily downstream, dominating the system and eating virtually anything they could find -- young salmon, Dolly Varden, bugs, stickleback, Pacific lamprey, whitefish, scuds, freshwater shrimp, mice, ducks.

Larger pike eventually don't get enough nutrition from tiny salmon.

"They want more bang for the their buck," Ivey said. "Larger pike become much more cannibalistic."

Because of that, in a bizarre sort of way pike stabilize the pike population themselves -- helped by the nets of Ivey and his crew.

Rutz believes the "suppression" will be effective.

"The reason why is because when pike population was at 50 percent of what it is now, that fishery was producing fairly well," he said. "If we can knock that pike population down and then do short maintenance trips, going in full scale for a week and hitting all the sloughs, hopefully that will be enough."

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Reach reporter Mike Campbell at mcampbell@adn.com or 257-4329.