Anchorage Daily News

Fly-fishing guide Jon Kent first wondered what had gone wrong with King Salmon River on the Alaska Peninsula when no lunkers showed up in June.

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"We've had slow runs before," said Kent, who's worked the Bristol Bay stream for 21 seasons and runs Painter Creek Lodge with his wife, Patty. "Anybody who has ever fished wild salmon knows that sometimes they're late."

But no salmon returned in July either, at least not on the river's upper section, which drains the flank of the icy Mount Chiginagak volcano and part of a national wildlife refuge about 350 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Then things got really nasty.

"The whole river was starting to turn orange," Kent said. "There was this weird reddish foam and scum starting to come down the river."

So Kent took a boat upstream to the headwaters and discovered a natural catastrophe in progress: red gunk flushing from Volcano Creek into Mother Goose Lake and, further upstream on Indecision Creek, dead plants and a sulfuric stench. Gulls were missing from an island, fish from the lake. Even the brown bears were gone.

He notified state biologists and scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, who were already scheduled to visit the area to study at Chiginagak's hazards and geologic history.

"No bears, no birds, no fish," is how the 56-year-old Kent put it. "It's like someone dropped a bomb on the place."

Something had poisoned the river and shut down the valley's salmon-based food chain. It also eliminated the lodge's summer season, canceling trips for up to 60 sport fishermen and putting six people out of work.

Blame Chiginagak's leaky plumbing, say volcanologists who returned from the scene last week.

A new 1,300-foot-wide crater lake near the 7,005-foot summit gushed through its glacial rim earlier this summer and spilled a foul slurry of volcanic sediment, water and ice, said volcanologist Janet Schaeffer. In addition to damaging the upper King Salmon system, the water also leaked into an unnamed drainage on Chiginagak Bay in Shelikof Strait, on the Cook Inlet side of the peninsula.

"For some reason there was increased heat activity in the summit region and it melted that ice cap," Schaeffer said. "It seems that this may be some kind of cyclical event. ... We do see evidence that this has happened before."

The big flow deposited ash and rock on the mountain's south glacier and flooded Indecision Creek up to 6 feet deep before spreading downstream. It left part of the now-polluted river with a reddish "bathtub ring" and an acidic pH level of 3, according to volcanologists who conducted a hazards assessment in late August and early September.

The water remains so acidic that it would kill fish and be unrecognizable to salmon looking for home, said state commercial fishing biologist Paul Salomone, with the Department of Fish and Game.

"I think if there were fish in there when the event happened, they got toasted," he said.

Chiginagak is a little-known volcano with no recent history of blowing its top or spewing lava. It's not one of the 28 volcanoes, like Mount Spurr 80 miles west of Anchorage, actively monitored by the observatory. But Chiginagak isn't dead.

Sulfurous smoke steams from its north flank, and Kent said he saw a big plume rise a few years ago. There's no evidence that the volcano is about to erupt, but Schaeffer and the other scientists left behind a portable seismic station to find out if it's stirring. They won't have data for several weeks.

A spectacular sight, with a jagged rim and glacial cap, the volcano "is actually quite small," Schaeffer said. Ancient lava floes on its flanks "are clearly defined and really they travel less than two miles from the crater."

All five salmon species and other fish normally swim up the King Salmon River during the summer, Kent said. But during an August trip to collect genetic samples of sockeye salmon, Salomone found no fish in Mother Goose Lake. Up to 6,000 reds should have converged on the drainage.

Because the tainted waters no longer smelled or tasted like their natal stream, it's not clear how many salmon even tried to make it home, the scientists said. Many fish probably didn't recognize the stream and went up other rivers.

A Pilot Point resident saw dead salmon early in the season, Kent said. But the lodge owner saw few dead fish as the summer progressed.

"We haven't seen any evidence of large fish kills, mainly because the fish didn't make their run into the lake," Schaeffer said. "It looks like they found other sites."

Scientists don't know exactly what led to such an acidic discharge or how long it will take the river to flush out, Salomone said. Schaeffer said the observatory hopes to compare notes with volcanologists in other regions about spills from crater lakes.

"According to what the geologists and volcanologists say, it's some kind of iron oxide," Kent said. "It's sort of this lethal brew of heavy metals."

The loss of one season's salmon run in that river would have negligible impact on the region's commercial fishing. Salmon returned to streams feeding the intertidal portion of the King Salmon River, Salomone said. And more than 1.2 million salmon were harvested this summer on the adjacent Ungashik River system, with an estimated 750,000 fish making it upstream to spawn.

But the 2005 season at the Kents' Painter Creek Lodge was ruined.

When it became clear that no fish would be coming, Kent called the 50 to 60 clients who had paid $4,300 for week-long fishing trips. He offered these very serious fly-fishermen a chance to cancel or postpone until next summer, and almost all of them took it.

"I had to close it. I mean, about 80 percent of our clients every year are repeat customers. You can't take their money if you know there is no fish."

In the end, Kent laid off his summer guides and kitchen staff.

"It's catastrophic business-wise, to say the least," he said. "You're losing this year and half of next."

He said a former homesteader on the river told him that the same thing happened in the 1970s: a red stain moving downstream, no fish swimming up. The King Salmon River recovered that time. Kent hopes it will rebound again.

"What can you do?" he said. "Anyway, I think the worst of it is over. I'm proceeding along the premise that we're going to be open next year. It's just a matter of flushing itself out."

Daily News reporter Doug O'Harra can be reached at do'harra@adn.com.