In this guest blog post, Anchorage resident and Trout Unlimited organizer, Melanie Brown, reflects on her recently completed commercial fishing season with her family in Bristol Bay:

Another season in Bristol Bay has come and gone. Another year of the tides replacing the time of the clock. Ebb and flow, in and out, breathe, pulse, set, pull, and pick. Elemental strength of nature harnessed within the objects of our harvest. They come in droves and sometimes it seems as if they are driving the tide instead of riding it in to their river of origin.

These are the things that make each year of fishing in Bristol Bay sometimes indistinguishable from one year to the next if you stack enough years on top of one another. This is what brings us back year after year. We who participate in this harvest partake of not only a shared experience of the present, but of a pre-historic past. The salmon remind us of how strong we can be when we sometimes forget and I pray that this collective experience will continue far into our futures.

Salmon, amen.

(Melanie Brown, second from right in the photo, is a lifelong Alaskan who setnets in the Naknek River district of Bristol Bay.  She supports the Environmental Protection Agency using its authority under section 404c of the Clean Water Act to protect Bristol Bay. She asks that you do the same.)