When 26-year-old Tirzah Bryant was a kid, she knew how to watch the cottonwood trees along the Yukon River for the sign that it was time to fish for salmon. “We know that the fish are coming when the cotton’s flying from the cottonwood,” she said.  But run collapses and successive fishing closures along the […]

When Stan Zuray began noticing white spots, a mushy texture and a weird “sour watermelon” smell in the Chinook salmon he was pulling from the Yukon River, he knew something was going wrong. That was back in the 1980s. By about 1990, he and others just stopped fishing what he calls “the ass end of […]