Nature Pictures Added July 19th, 2007

This is my first-ever lake trout, caught on a spinner before we stopped to unpack the fly rods near the beginning of a 4-day float trip. I caught another of about the same size soon thereafter. The coloration is incredible compared to other lakers I've seen -- a much more believable cousin to the brook trout.

This is my dad's first wild Alaskan rainbow trout.

The Fireweed here grows thick along many roadsides in Alaska, including the Richardson Highway here with a view of the glacial Delta River and the Alaska Range.

Baby moose along an Alaskan highway.

My dad scrambles along the rocks at the base of this canyon as an 18-inch, wild Alaskan rainbow gives him the best fight he's ever had from a fish.

This is my biggest and certainly best stream-resident rainbow to date, a wild 19-incher pulled from a Class III-IV rapids. It's also the first fish ever to take me into my backing.

This isn't quite the size of salmon I was looking for on this trip...

A Bonaparte's Gull cruises low over a rapids.

A Bonaparte's Gull perched on a rock.

Here my dad drops his largest resident rainbow ever, after a spectacular fight. It's a good 18 inches.

Here I'm netting a nice rainbow in the rapids.

Mean-looking 17-inch rainbow.

Turbulent Class III-IV waters.

This float trip gave us a couple views of the distant peak of Mount Wrangell, an inactive volcano.

Here's my first Alaskan salmon, a small king that put up a fun fight.

This is the glacial Tanana river, a major Yukon tributary. The water is so opaque with glacial silt that you can't see half an inch into it.

The sun slooowly sets over a crystal-clear grayling stream.

A beautiful arctic grayling.

Unfortunately the lighting didn't allow me to show it very well in my photos (though you can kind of see it here), but this is probably the clearest river I've ever seen, and definitely the clearest of its impressive size.

Alaska has the right idea here. I would like to see them add another digit to that number, but they're still doing pretty well compared to everyone else in that regard. It shows, too -- there doesn't seem to be very much litter along this highway.

The Gulkana Glacier is an iconic landmark for north-bound travelers (or, I suppose, south-bound travelers looking north) on the Richardson Highway. Thankfully, its silty runoff drains not into the Gulkana River drainage but into Phelan Creek in the Yukon drainage instead.

This is one of the clearest lakes I've ever seen. All the white smudges in the foreground are midges hovering over the bushes.

The lack of access on this large river makes combat fishing the norm for anyone who hasn't planned ahead and got a permit from the native tribe controlling the land above the river. It's a choice between this and trespassing. I fished for about 20 minutes before I got tired of it and headed to a different stream.

This glacial river's blue-green water is incredibly opaque, but much prettier than the gray-brown of most other glacial rivers. It is also fishable, though I prefer more clarity.

There's a fish-cleaning table right IN the river at this landing. Driving out on the gravel bar is the norm, too. It was a good place to field-dress my sockeye salmon. Tossing the guts out into the river has them devoured by hungry gulls within seconds. That's illegal in many places, but in Alaska it's the preferred way of dealing with fish waste: these ecosystems are driven by dead salmon and fully equipped to deal with it.

A professional photographer (whose name I forgot to get) just happened to be nearby as I finished up my sockeye fishing with this hefty limit of fresh, tasty salmon. He took several pictures with his good camera, which hopefully he'll be sending me soon, and he snapped this one with my point+shoot camera.

The Copper River is another of Alaska's major glacial drainages, hosting huge salmon runs which spread out more thinly into its clearwater tributaries to spawn.

This panorama is best viewed full-size.

Another panorama of the huge Copper River.

These seagulls live at the salmon-cleaning station during this time of year.

A raven flies over the Copper River.

A raven returns to its cliff-side nest along the Copper River.

This is a pretty cool silhouette of a bald eagle carrying some food, even though it isn't terribly well-focused or well-lit. I was actually driving when I took it (though it was on a no-traffic campground driveway, so it wasn't unsafe) and the eagle swooped into the roadway right in front of me, then flew around to the side and gave me this profile.

Here's a nice view of the Alyeska Pipeline from the highway.