KVICHAK BAY -- Last summer, after all the other fishermen had gone home at the end of the Bristol Bay salmon season, Corey Arnold stuck around Graveyard Point. A photographer and commercial fisherman, Arnold described the scene at the old cannery as eerie and empty. When the people left, grizzly bears showed up, a sure sign that it was time for Arnold to leave.
The bears just added to the run-down, barren feel of Graveyard Point, the abandoned salmon cannery that serves as home base for about 120 fishermen for six short weeks each summer. They spend their days catching hundreds of sockeye, or red, salmon near the banks.
It's from here -- where there are rusted canning vessels, broken boardwalks and literal human skulls poking out of the ground -- that a group of fishermen are helping to change what it means to catch fish in Bristol Bay.