Today we awoke in Takla. The air is crisp and the lake broad and blue. Helen cooked up a breakfast.
We went to the community meeting house to hear from the elders. They spoke about the salmon abundance that used to come to Takla, but is very poor now. Only the early Stuart sockeye come this far up the watershed. They talked about pine beetle arriving causing more and more trees to go rusty red. The women talked of paddling 17 km along the lake as if it was nothing. This area around Takla includes the headwaters of three huge watersheds the Fraser, Skeena/Babine, and Arctic.
We then drove for 200 km further up the watershed past Talka with Suw-thlote a.k.a. Margo French. Margo is a wealth of information and she knows the area extremely well. She explained how if the Fraser is not too warm and the water high enough the early Stuart sockeye arrive in good condition with only a tinge of pink. She told me the lineage of rivers Driftwood to Takla Lake to Middle River, to Trember Lake, to Tachie River, to Stuart Lake, to Stuart River, to Nachako, to the Fraser at Prince George. The lake/river/lake/river pattern is why this area makes so many sockeye as sockeye need lakes to rear in as smolts. They have fought off the Amasay gold mine, by banding together. She took us to the highest spawning grounds of the early Stuart in Driftwood River. It felt sacred to be at the end in the Fraser sockeye spawning grounds. We were level with southeast Alaska. The water was about 5 degrees Celsius.
Margo is standing guard over these headwaters with Linda Charlie and Irene French and Kathaleigh George and others in Takla. Takla is a place of people who live off the land more than anywhere I have been. We are similar in Echo Bay, but not to this degree.
Margo feels strongly that there should be a 20 year moratorium on commercial fishing of the Early Stuart. The people of Takla would like this fish to come back to them and they are working to protect the many little rivers that these sockeye need to spawn. After I told Margo about the salmon farms that her fish were exposed to she felt strongly that salmon farms should come out of the ocean onto land. She fed us canned groundhog with bear fat dip and wind dried Bear Lake salmon. It was delicious.
I was alarmed to see Milfoil on beaches of Takla Lake where the Ankwell Cr. spills out.
The wind of Takla smells of snow and sweet valleys. These people are depending on everyone downstream and in the ocean to get their fish back and they are doing what they can to protect the headwaters of the Fraser, Skeena and Arctic watersheds.
