Arriving at the five-star Bristol Bay Lodge, you’re welcomed to the “BBL family,” a business that launched in 1972 and is now run by seasoned guide, then manager and now owner, Steve Laurent. Laurent has a gentle but commanding presence having spent 29 summers in the Alaska backcountry sharing the rivers and mountains with guests and calling tents home for hundreds of nights. The lodge is complete with hot tub and sauna, and the highly trained staff takes care of every need, from stocking refrigerators in your room of the cabin to running daily loads of laundry.

For Laurent, who has now traded his tent life for lodge life as he runs his 20-plus guide operation and is also a talented pilot and photographer, his experience at Bristol Bay reflects a decades-long commitment to a place he truly loves.

“This was a calling,” says Laurent, 53, who first visited Alaska in 1990 as a college student at the University of Minnesota. “I talked to my dad and said, ‘Hey, I may have an opportunity to guide in Alaska. What are your thoughts?’ He said, ‘Listen, those are things that if you don’t seize that opportunity you might regret that in life.’ Now, 29 years later, we still laugh about it because I’m now an owner of a world-famous lodge in Alaska.”

Entering its 48th year, BBL is a well-oiled machine, taking guests deep into the Wood-Tikchik Wilderness to chase a variety of fish, and operating on six different rivers highlighted by two backcountry camps where guests stay overnight. Each day, clients rotate rivers and guides often accessed by floatplane and guests stay a few nights at backcountry camps, a signature moment for most trips to BBL. A trip to Bristol Bay is much more than a fishing trip, though. It’s a backcountry immersion experience where you happen to have a fly rod in hand.

“This is the greatest fishery on the planet for wild salmon,” says Laurent during one of the lodge’s five-star dinners, this one including massive helpings of Alaskan king crab legs. “You have to wear a lot of hats when you own and operate a lodge in Alaska. I love logistics but you can’t do it yourself, you have to have a great team.”

Running BBL consists of up to 29 staff members, three de Havilland Beaver floatplanes, and as many as 29 guests at a time over the course of a summer. “We’re busy,” says Laurent, a smile emerging from his brown and gray-flecked goatee. “I still lose 10 pounds a summer.”

One of the many unique aspects of the BBL fishery is the variety of options in these waters. Bristol Bay is home to the largest salmon run on the planet, including all five species: sockeye, coho, Chinook, chum and pink. But it doesn’t stop there. Starting in May and June, a massive king salmon run graces the waters in the Bristol Bay fishery, followed by the aggressive bite of the silver salmon, anchor-sized rainbow, dolly varden and grayling that pepper the catch throughout the season ending in mid-September. It’s not uncommon for rainbows to approach the 30-inch mark and king salmon north of 30 pounds to smash your line (though 50-pound salmon are not unheard of).

“Bristol Bay is one of the last places on earth of its kind and they’re not making any more like it,” Laurent says. “You can’t really describe it.”

At 663,268 square miles, Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas, the next largest state in the country. On March 30, 1867, the U.S. purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire for $7.2 million, or about 2 cents per acre.

• Alaska holds more than 3,000 rivers and 3 million lakes, the largest being Lake Iliamna covering 1,000 square miles.
• In 1985, auto dealer Les Anderson caught the largest king salmon ever recorded on a rod and reel. He landed the monster on the Kenai River. It weighed in at 97.5 lbs.
• Bear Necessities: There is approximately one bear for every 21 people in Alaska.
• Alaska has more coastline than the rest of the U.S. combined, about 34,000 miles.

The de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver is a single-engine, propeller-driven short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft developed and produced by de Havilland Canada. It’s primarily operated as a bush plane but has also been used in utility roles including cargo and passenger hauling, crop dusting and U.S. military search and rescue duties. Sir Edmund Hillary used the DHC-2 in his South Pole expedition from 1955-58 and the plane was named one of Canada’s top 10 engineering achievements of the 20th century. When manufacturing was discontinued in 1967, some 1,600 of these planes were in use.

Wood-Tikchik State Park sits north of Dillingham, Alaska. At more than 1.6 million acres and about the size of Delaware, Wood-Tikchik is the largest and most remote state park in the United States, comprising more than 50 percent of all state park land in Alaska and 15 percent of total state park land in the country. Wood-Tikchik was created in 1978 and employed no staff for its first five years, and even now sometimes a single ranger is tasked with patrolling the entire park, often by aircraft.

Life of Coho: Coho salmon, also known as silver salmon, can grow upwards of 30 pounds but most adult “silvers” run between 10 and 20 pounds. They mostly eat insects until they grow into small fish and shrimp hunters. Female silvers return from the sea to their original spawning ground in rivers to lay eggs, which hatch in late winter. The fry remain in streams for three years before returning to the sea as smolt. After about 18 months of feeding and growing into adults in the ocean, coho head back to their home stream to spawn. As the silvers swim upstream into freshwater, their sides turn red and their backs dark. They die within a few weeks of spawning and become food for bears and eagles, and as they decay their bodies release valuable nutrients into their home streams.

“The guides gave our group a quick one-hour fishing session that yielded 20-in-plus silver salmon, a large sow grizzly bear and a mother griz with three cubs, a lifetime cherished memory…”

Alaska is a guessing game: wake up and see what the day brings: weather changes quickly and extreme tidal fluctuations can dictate what the plan will be. Bad news hit our group on our Rainbo day when we learned we had to fly out of camp early because two converging typhoons off the coast of Alaska were bringing massive wind to this exposed piece of land. Before being whisked back to the BBL main lodge, the guides gave our group a quick one-hour fishing session that yielded 20-inch-plus silver salmon, a large sow grizzly bear and a mother griz with three cubs, a lifetime cherished memory all in the span of just one hour.

“Five minutes out,” BBL pilot T-bird radioed in and 28 minutes later we were back in the main lodge with a crackling fire in the two-sided fireplace and a three-course meal in the dining room.

Laurent is relaxed but drifts between guests cracking jokes and asking about their days. He’s put in another full week in another full season at his lodge but smiles, relaxed and satisfied. He draws a deep breath, exhales. “BBL is my livelihood,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of blood, sweat and tears here, but it’s more than that. I pride myself that I’m the same person in the spring that I am in the fall. If you love what you do, it’s easy. Just look at where you are. There’s nothing else like it in the world.”

As thick slices of apple cobbler are served for dessert, the conversation in the lodge is easy, ranging from the massive grizzlies fishing from shore, to the epic sunset that evening, to the camaraderie each guest has discovered in this wild and wonderful place. Bristol Bay, as we heard many times on this trip, is a bucket-list item to be crossed off.

BY JOSEPH T. O’CONNOR

On the fourth anniversary of National Salmon Day, October 8, 2019, five Alaskan native and fishery groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency for tabling Clean Water Act protections and fast-tracking a goliath mining venture in an area that also produces half of the world’s salmon: Bristol Bay.

If the proposal is granted, Pebble Mine would be the largest open mine in North America, unearthing some 1.5 billion tons of gold and copper, and residents fear the mine would threaten the area’s delicate ecosystem and its world-renowned fishing industry.

The 2019 season marked the second largest sockeye harvest in the fishery’s 133-year history as Bristol Bay commercial fishermen plucked approximately 43 million anadromous sockeye from their epic homecoming voyage to the freshwater rivers and lakes of their infancy— nearly doubling the 38-year average. It was a haul that emphatically justifies the 14,000 jobs supported by the fishery, a resource that has likewise sustained the region’s native tribes for centuries.

Last July 30, news that the mine proposal was again under consideration shook Bristol Bay Lodge owner Steve Laurent. Laurent is celebrating 30 years working at the lodge, located some 150 miles west of the proposed Pebble Mine site. He’s been in this battle for decades and worries an infrastructure failure at the mine would devastate Bristol Bay.

“This is the greatest fishery on the planet for wild salmon,” Laurent said at his lodge in early September. “I think it’s asinine that the Pebble Mine is even potentially back on the books.”

In an unsettled economy, nervous traders tend to shift assets into less volatile ventures. Some look to the healthcare sector or real estate plays. Others turn to gold and precious metals. “Copper Extends Its Rebound on Growth Optimism,” read a September 6, 2019, headline in The Wall Street Journal’s Business and Finance section. “Precious Metals Are On a Tear,” heralded another article in the same edition.

Shares of gold were up more than 30 percent since the beginning of summer, the article said, an indicator that a stumbling world economy, ongoing U.S trade wars with China and the threat of interest-rate hikes have investors worried. “There is so much flight to safety right now and metals is where that money is going,” Chicago- based commodities broker Bob Haberkorn told WSJ.

The debate over the mine is not a new one. For decades the Pebble Mine has been at the center of a heated controversy; on one hand, mining jobs and billions of dollars in precious metals are at stake; on the other, an entire ecosystem and a $1.5 billion commercial fishing industry in Bristol Bay, home to the largest sockeye salmon run in the world.

What is new is the timing: When the EPA loosened Obama-era mining regulations in Alaska last July 30, effectively throwing Pebble a renewed lifeline, the news rocked Wall Street. The next day, Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals, the sole owner of Pebble Limited Partnership, saw its stock skyrocket 65 percent, with shares surging from 54 cents to 91 cents, prompting accusations of insider trading. Northern Dynasty representatives have called the insider-trading allegations “entirely false.”