{"id":22195,"date":"2020-01-19T10:00:06","date_gmt":"2020-01-19T18:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.nrs.com\/?p=22195"},"modified":"2020-01-16T16:35:05","modified_gmt":"2020-01-17T00:35:05","slug":"rowing-through-a-minefield-mining-tourism-and-the-chilkat-watershed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.nrs.com\/duct-tape\/2020\/01\/19\/rowing-through-a-minefield-mining-tourism-and-the-chilkat-watershed\/","title":{"rendered":"Rowing Through A Minefield: Mining, Tourism, and the Chilkat Watershed"},"content":{"rendered":"

A mining development is ready to explode just up the highway from the Tlingit village of Klukwan in rural Southeast Alaska. I check the area\u2019s only radio station daily for reports about permits, lawsuits, and feuding townsfolk\u2014all swirling around the controversial Constantine-Palmer Project\u2014as I bump along in a box truck pulling stacked rafts down washboard roads. <\/span><\/p>\n

Some will say that I\u2019m just a raft guide, working six months of the summer rowing tourists from Ohio down glacially-fed rivers and that I shouldn\u2019t be concerned about mining feuds that have been waged for decades. But, in a matter of years, gone goes my way of life if these mining efforts come to fruition. I\u2019m trying to earn enough for a burger tonight and enjoy the remoteness of these Alaskan villages. Yet I\u2019m afraid, in order to continue doing so, I\u2019m also going to have to pick up a megaphone and fight to keep these rivers they way they\u2019re supposed to be\u2014wild and clean.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Klehini River<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Haines, Alaska, located 21 miles down the Chilkat River from Klukwan, is famous for its tourism opportunities. Cruise ships bring tens of thousands of vacationers up the Lynn Canal to explore the remote coastal town each year. Multiple adventure flicks have featured Haines as a heli-skiing Mecca. But nothing draws more tourists than the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve<\/span><\/a>, home to North America\u2019s largest yearly gathering of bald eagles. <\/span><\/p>\n

Rafting through this place is an almost ethereal experience as the locals\u2014bears, wolves, and (of course) eagles\u2014crowd the silty banks in search of true northern gold, Pacific salmon. Adventure companies make millions of dollars a year off of the tourism industry connected to the Chilkat, Klehini, and Tsirku rivers that converge in this preserve. Despite cries of alarm rising from the native village of Klukwan, the citizens of Haines, and concerned Alaskans up and down the coast, the Constantine-Palmer Project threatens to poison this confluence of subsistence, recreation, and wilderness. And I, a boater in awe of this Alaskan Valhalla, am crying out with them.<\/span><\/p>\n