Photo:
Willows yellow from drying or disease along Frances River
I just got back from the southern Yukon where I went to do research on observations of environmental change by Kaska Elders. The weather was alternating between being very hot (up to 30C) and rainy, though there had been little rain early in the season, and a light snow pack the winter before. During a trip up the Liard and Frances River by boat with one elder my collaborator Linda and a Japanese anthropologist and I helped the elder put out a small forest fire that was burning in the moss at a camping site along the river. Berries seemed to be a couple of weeks ahead of normal in terms of ripening, but crops seemed poor, perhaps because of poor weather when the flowers were pollinated. People speculated that perhaps the bears were bolder because the berries were poor. I found a correlation like that in nuisance bear reports down on the Skeena River in the Terrace area in the 1980's. Just as I was getting ready for a trip down the Alaska Highway to the Toad River area to speak with some Elders there, a young Kaska friend told me there were two fire balls down the Cassiar highway. The next days the smoke was quite perceptable far to the east of the area the fire had ignited. I began to hear that the highway was closed south out of Watson Lake....not encouraging, as I needed to go that was to go down to the Skeena River to do some follow-up on last year's research on tumplines. Rumours began to circulate that the community of Lower Post would be evacuated...I returned with some anxiety to Watson Lake through the smoke plume, and when I arrived, massive smoke clouds filled the sky to the south, rising like a thunderhead at the west end, right down where the Stewart-Cassiar runs. At the barricade I was told they would likely convoy traffic through first thing the following day....there was some rain in the night, and indeed I was able to get through. At that point about 10 km of the highway passed through the smoking fire. Its estimated size then was about 3000hectares. Last I heard it was up to 15,000. The fire sparked my thinking about disturbance frequency, and whether the fire frequency may be changing....given that the boreal forest renews itself through episodic conflagration, it was hard to tell if this fire was unusual, or within the normal range of fire occurrence. Last year there was a large fire north of the Yukon border along the Cantung or Nahanni Range road....and when I was there in 2004 there were large fires at Contact Creek and at Swan Lake on the Alaska highway...this was one of the questions we asked the Elders about. When I got down to the Skeena River, the weather was so dry there were virtually no mosquitos....unheard of...and river levels were at a near record low. Sockeye salmon escapement is at about 1/3 normal for the second year running, and this reduction is not attributable to salmon farm sea lice as no fish farming is permitted off the north coast of BC. So--likely collapse of food chains in the mid Pacific due to global warming is the cause. Allen Gottesfeld, who works for the Gitxsan Watershed Authority pointed out this disturbing fact to me....commercial salmon fishing is now virtually extinct in Prince Rupert, formerly a city of canneries, and food fish for Tsimshian and Gitxsan are running low, prompting shifts to less preferred species (coho and spring/king salmon instead of the diminishing sockeye).
