In midsummer half of Anchorage and the Matanuska Valley, it seems, empties out to come down to the Kenai Peninsula to dipnet salmon. If you come to the Kasilof River you will encounter "the fence."
The recently completed fence is along the south shore of the Kasilof River estuary in an area of dunes (possibly beach ridges). It's meant to keep out hot-rodding four-wheelers, mud-dogging pickups and dipnetting campers gone wild.
The mouth of the Kasilof is home to a fragile habitat thinly vegetated with beach rye and beach peas, and in the summer is a nesting area for migratory birds. In the fall and winter it's a place of harsh and stunning beauty.
The Kasilof River mouth has a long history. There were two Dena'ina villages and upstream are archaeological sites from an earlier Yup'ik-speaking culture. A Russian redoubt was built there in 1786 and in 1882 the second commercial cannery in Alaska was built on the north side along with an Alaska Commercial Company trading post. I can stand in one spot and point out places that illustrate 3,000 years of history.
And the river is home to one of the world's great remaining wild salmon runs.
Two things have impacted the place. First, all-terrain vehicles have gained popularity. While their size, cost and horsepower have increased, there has not been an accompanying rise in ethical restraint. The dunes became a convenient place to spin brodies, jump hills, chase waterfowl and generally run amok. ATVs have their place; they are great for hauling firewood, homestead chores and village travel. But they are a plague when indiscriminately operated in wilderness or semi-wilderness areas by children or adults with little sense of the cumulative impact of their actions.
Second has been the rise in popularity of the dipnet fishery. Where else can you pull up to a grassy area with your camper and a trailer full of ATVs, send the kids off to four-wheel, set out a net and bring in more fish than you can eat in a winter? Perfect, if it were not for the fact that the result is to denude the beach grass, giving the wind-driven tides of autumn full access to the sand flats.
If these trends continued the likely result would have been a silted-up river channel with who knows what impact on the salmon. Something had to be done. Action came on two fronts.
First, through a series of meetings the Kasilof and Cohoe communities called for a special use management area to regulate harmful activity. To be sure, not everyone was in favor of this step. A small ad hoc group calling itself the Cohoe-Kasilof Community Council protested the size and scope of state management. But most residents and organizations saw the trends and supported the special use management concept, which was instituted by DNR in late May.
On a second front, the community built the fence. Lacking a local government, the Kasilof Regional Historical Society obtained a grant for $60,000 to build a fence to try to keep ATVs and campers from turning the sparsely vegetated dunes into an erosional wasteland.
These days $60,000 doesn't construct much, certainly not a mile of installed steel guardrail. But an unlikely coalition of concerned community folks -- commercial fishermen, sport fishermen, dipnetters, conservatives, liberals -- well, maybe only a few liberals -- organized by two dedicated historical society members, Brent Johnson and Catherine Cassidy, built a first-rate fence from scrounged material. They were given more or less free rein by an acquiescent if slightly perplexed state bureaucracy.
You had a commercial fisherman, Brent Johnson, running a Bobcat with a post driver attached, assisted by the head of the Kenai River Sportfishing Association, Rickey Geese. You had folks hauling guardrail and bolting it together in backbreaking labor. Real Alaskans who know which end of a wrench to use and whose Carhartts are worn and sweat-stained through honest labor. Nobody got paid. Remuneration came in the form of hard work for a good purpose. Had this been a normal government job the cost would have easily been four or five times as much.
Time will tell if the fence will keep the dune destructors at bay, but it can't hurt. So if you come down to the Kenai Peninsula to dipnet this summer, bring your outdoor values, respect the place, enjoy our salmon and take only what you need. And leave the place as good, or better, than you found it.
Alan Boraas is a professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College.
Alan Boraas
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