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3. Exciting adventures and misadventures in Alaska in 2014

I finally found time (with my dad's help) to post about several of this year's adventures. I was too busy early in the summer, finishing my Ph.D. and starting my new research project, to get out fishing. In August, my dad (having just retired from the Wisconsin DNR) flew up to Alaska to help with fieldwork. We didn't have enough fieldwork to justify hiring a technician this year, but it was too much to do with day-to-day volunteers, so his help for a couple weeks was extremely useful.

We blazed a trail at a small-stream study site and tested a bunch of equipment.





Later that same day, we met up with my wife at Denali National Park and celebrated our 4th anniversary with an exciting packraft float down Class II-III Riley Creek.

That night my wife's parents flew in, so my father-in-law came out to help us record data on Chinook salmon in the Chena River.

After that, dad and I traveled to a large spring creek study site to set up the camp our study will use for the next few years.



We accomplished a lot of productive technology testing and fly fished for big grayling to gather diet samples.



After finishing fieldwork at all of our sites, we took a few days just to hunt and fish.

Our first and most exciting trip was a caribou hunt in the Alaska Range. We hiked in about 13 miles and floated out about 15. My dad wrote up his account of the hunt, too. We saw some epic scenery, and courted disaster multiple times--the story is worth a read!





After that adventure we took a day in Fairbanks to recuperate before heading to the Kenai peninsula, where we fished the Kenai River for trout and did a saltwater charter out of Homer.



We broke up the 12-hour drive back to Fairbanks by spending a night in Talkeetna, where good weather the next morning encouraged us to take a spur-of-the-moment flightseeing tour over Denali National Park with K2 Aviation.



A week or so after dad left, Lena and I participated in the Denali Park road lottery, driving our vehicle in and seeing some great wildlife.



A few weeks later was my first trip to the bush to help some USFWS scientists with technology I developed during my Ph.D. See sights in Kotzebue, sights from the trip to camp through the village of Selawik, photos from the Selawik River, traveling from Selawik to Kotzebue, views of Denali Park the flight back.