Salmon running late

Copyright 2006 Lydia Hinshaw

WHITEHORSE, YT-- It can be tough to have children if you must first swim 2,000-miles to conceive them. So it has been with the chinook salmon here, who swim for about three months to cover the distance between the Bering Sea and their spawning grounds upstream from here.
At Whitehorse, there's a long, switchbacking "fish ladder" for the salmon to use to get around the dam built here in the 1950s to provide hydroelectric power to much of the Yukon. Beside the fish ladder is a building with aquarium-style windows where tourists can watch the salmon passing through.
Biologists allow the fish to collect overnight in a holding tank, and then they count them before they open the gates so the fish can keep heading upstream. As of last Sunday morning, just 22 salmon had climbed the fish ladder, an unusually low number for the first weekend in August.
For reasons known only to Mother Nature, the salmon are running late. The two pictured above were in the holding tank last Sunday, swimming in circles, eager to be on their way.
We're headed back to Whitehorse this weekend, to camp out near the fish ladder so we can check on how things are going.

UPDATE FROM ALASKA

SKAGWAY, AK -- As for us, we are suffering from bad weather, as well as lack of opportunities to get on the Internet and update our blogs.
We have had one sunny day in the past 15. After waiting and waiting for summer to arrive, we are forced to concede that we may have blinked and missed it.
Folks who have lived here for years tell us that this year has been unusual -- spring came very late, and summer barely came at all. Before the end of July, I spotted fresh snow on the tops of several mountains north of here in the Yukon.
As for here in Skagway, there may be fresh snow on top of our mountains too -- we just can't tell since we haven't seen the tops of the mountains in four days.
The cruise-ship tourists we meet each day take all this in stride. They put on their rain jackets and get off the bus to take pictures. They love what they can see of the scenery, and have no way of knowing how spectacular it would be on a clear day.
They're determined to have fun, and so are we.