Red Summer

I look out the plane's copilot window and from up here the view is perfect and flat in all directions except to the south, where sixty miles away the ground rises in a cone-shaped volcano: the snowcapped Mount Peulik. The sun leans heavily toward the north pole and the land abruptly ends as it disappears into Bristol Bay, which from the air, on a clear day, looks like a flat plate of tinted glass. Looking east and west the flat tundra landscape spreads outward, disappearing at the bend of the earth.

My destination is the small village of Egegik, 350 miles southwest of Anchorage on the western side of the Alaskan Peninsula, a stretch of land that extends out from the mainland 475 miles, and averages 50 miles wide. Cut off from the interior by a vast mountain range, the peninsula is geographically isolated, even from Alaskans. At its farthest point west the Aleutian chain begins, a 1,200-mile strip of islands aimed at Russia in the shape of a kite's tail. The only way to Egegik is by sea or plane, and by sea one must navigate the violent waters of the B ... read full excerpt from Red Summer: The Danger, Madness, and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village ebook