Tag: Sheefish

To say Clarence Putyuk Wood-Griepentrog has deep ties to the people, land, and wildlife of the Brooks Range is an understatement. He lives in the village of Ambler on the Kobuk River and hunts, fishes, and traps the surrounding country as his Inupiaq ancestors have since time immemorial. His grandfather Clarence Wood, who passed on in 2019, is a legend in Alaska for his skills as a hunter and traveler across the Arctic. Wood-Griepentrog credits his grandfather with helping teach him to hunt and travel the land.  

Wood-Griepentrog loves the Brooks Range fiercely and feels blessed to be part of its rich beauty. He points out that the land, water, wildlife, and his culture are all connected and that the proposed Ambler Road threatens every facet. That’s why he’s fighting to safeguard the Brooks Range from a project that he believes will irreparably harm the place and his way of life. 

Here is his story. 

What do you love most about living in the Brooks Range? 

It’s beautiful and untouched and has been passed on from generation to generation. The caribou. The moose. The fish. The connection. We’re all part of this land. 

Are there particular species of fish, wildlife, or plants that are especially important to you and your community? 

Caribou are most important for us because that’s where we get most of our meat. Come fall, everyone is out on the river and on the tundra waiting for the caribou to come. Generally, we let the first ones go. Caribou communicate with pheromones left by their hooves, so, caribou following can tell if vanguard animals are stressed. It’s beautiful, clean meat. It replenishes us. It’s vital to our lives and survival. When we’re out hunting, we eat dried meat. A big favorite up here is heart and tongue soup—sometimes we throw in brisket. Caribou have always been part of our culture and I’m ever so thankful for them. 

My first memory of caribou goes back to when I was in diapers. I was probably two or three and we were out hunting ptarmigan when I saw a group of caribou coming along. I thought they were dogs at first and told my parents, “Look at the puppies.”  

Over the years, more and more things have changed. For multiple years now, caribou have come by later and later in the fall. Over the years, I’ve been blessed to see the peak of the caribou and now I’m seeing the crash. It’s brutal and decimating to witness. 

What is the most important species of fish to you and your community? 

Either sheefish or salmon. I prefer salmon, but it’s hard to go wrong with either. You can do so much cooking-wise with either. 

What is your favorite animal to hunt? 

Moose. You see them nearly all year long. Especially during the winter, you’ll see dozens. During the summer, you watch them grow. Then fall comes along, and a switch goes off and they’re really challenging to find. It’s a big game of cat and mouse. They’re such beautiful, powerful animals.  

My favorite part of the hunt is butchering and packing the animal out. I take pride in my meat and my work. I do my best to respect the animal. It gave its life up for me and my family. The least we can do to respect it is to take good care of the meat. 

Please share a favorite hunting or fishing memory or story.  

I have tons of those. One was when I got my first caribou. I don’t remember how old I was. A few days before I got mine, my younger brother also got his first caribou. It was a beautiful, fat one. It made me a little jealous, ha! I wanted to one-up him. I remember how proud he was and how nice his caribou was. 

Another memory is being on a bluff with my grandfather watching massive amounts of caribou migrate through in the fall. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. My grandfather played a big part in teaching me how to hunt. He was really respected and well-known here. He traveled everywhere across northern Alaska. Man, he saw some changes. He shared a lot of meat and fed a lot of families. We share different foods with different villages. If one village does not get a certain type of food, another village will share and trade that type of food. It’s a big sharing community up here. 

What concerns you most about the proposed Ambler Road. 

It threatens the wildlife. It threatens the land. It threatens our lifestyle.  

Just the dust from the ore contaminating everything. The wind is always whipping up here. All the toxins are terrifying. You can’t beat nature, especially up here.  

I’m terrified of the tailings ponds contaminating waterways. Salmon are already under attack across the state. Over on the Yukon River, people who have fished for salmon for thousands of years can’t fish anymore. I don’t want to see that happen to us.  

What’s the biggest misconception you’ve heard about the proposed Ambler Road, and how have you responded? 

These are foreign mines. The money is not going to stay here.  

If the road is built, it’s not going to drop prices for villages. You still have to ship everything here.  

There isn’t any reasonable job potential for us locals. Why would they hire us? We are hunters. We are not miners. We are subsistence people. We’re not going to get those jobs.  

They give us a few big door prizes. They wine and dine us. Then our land is ripped away from us. Just take, take, take. They’ll get what they want, and we won’t get anything. 

Why should people elsewhere care? 

This is the Alaska frontier. This is one of the last untouched ecosystems in the world. You can only industrialize so much before you take too much and lose that. 

What are the most valuable resources of the Brooks Range? 

The true renewable resources: fish, wildlife, the land, clean water. They offer clean living. The subsistence lifestyle is invaluable. I’m blessed to be a part of this beautiful land, and I want to continue to be part of it. Everything is connected up here. You start tearing stuff up and… 

_{Photo credit: Clarence Putyuk Wood-Griepentrog}

Sign up for Hunters & Anglers for the Brooks Range updates here.  

Hunters & Anglers for the Brooks Range is disappointed by yesterday’s decision to approve the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s 2016 revised consolidated application for the Ambler Road Project. This 211-mile industrial road would cut through one of the most remote, wild, and exceptional hunting and fishing destinations in North America, threatening fish and wildlife habitat, rural subsistence traditions, and the backcountry experiences that make the Brooks Range unique. 

By enabling a foreign-owned company to export raw minerals overseas, the Ambler Road project would deepen U.S. dependence on foreign mineral processing and supply chains. This would directly undermine the goals articulated in recent Executive Orders 14272, 14153, and 14241—which emphasize reducing reliance on adversarial nations for critical minerals and strengthening American control over strategic critical resources. 

We respectfully urge the Administration to take a closer look at this project’s costs and consequences. A thorough and objective review may lead to a different conclusion, one that better reflects our shared values of conservation, national security, and responsible resource development. 

HABR will remain fully engaged on behalf of hunters and anglers in Alaska and across the nation to conserve the Brooks Range—America’s most wild and remote hunting and fishing grounds—for future generations. 

Sign up to join the nearly 20,000 hunters and anglers committed to standing up for the Brooks Range HERE.   

Flexibility is a required trait for backcountry trips and ours was no different. In a land as wild and remote as the Brooks Range, you don’t dictate your day, the weather and country make the schedule.  

Our plans changed even before the 1953 Beaver touched down. Instead of landing on Lake Minakoska as originally intended, we diverted to a gravel bar along the Kobuk River. While this meant we could get to good fishing sooner, I was excited to land on the lake. Our 90-mile float trip down the river would end at the village of Kobuk, but that was days away and ahead of us the Brooks Range stretched rugged, remote, and wild. There were no roads. No buildings. No cell service. Mountains, braided rivers, and the quiet promise of adventure awaited. 

It was hard to imagine that this is the same place where the proposed Ambler Industrial Road would pass through. The 211-mile corridor would cross nearly 3,000 rivers and streams slicing through the southern foothills of the Brooks Range. Built not for public access or American industries, but to serve foreign-owned mining operations, the road poses a direct threat to everything this place represents for those of us who hunt and fish here. 

Wolf Tracks and Grayling  

Lucky for us, after the plane was unloaded, James — TRCP’s digital marketing manager from Missoula, Montana—and I wandered upriver in search of fish, while veteran guide Greg Halbach made camp. We were on this trip because of Halbach’s generosity and love for this river, its fish, and the landscape. A champion of the Brooks Range, Halbach founded Remote Waters, a custom Alaska outfitter with a mission to take people deeper into the wild where life moves with the rhythms of water, weather, and wildness, rather than itineraries and lodges.  

That first evening, we found a perfect hole and landed over a dozen Arctic grayling. I even hooked into a chum salmon on my 5-weight rod, an unexpected battle that ended in relief when the rod held and the salmon surrendered in the shallows. 

The gravel bar was littered with grizzly, wolf, and moose tracks, the silent evidence of all the creatures that we had yet to see. We lit a fire and ate a hot meal of rice and grayling, a small luxury. I felt deeply grateful to be there, with good company, in a place as remote and wild as any left in the country. 

Rain, Miles, and a Break in the Clouds 

The next morning greeted us with steady rain, a theme that would repeat itself throughout the trip. We floated about twelve miles through squalls and caught more grayling, some pushing sixteen inches. That evening, the cold had started to creep into our bones, and with layers soaked through, we were thankful for the shelter of the tepee tent at camp. 

By day three, everything was damp. Gear, clothes, even our spirits were starting to grow soggy. But the weather began to lift as we floated. When we reached a spot Greg knew held northern pike, the trip took an exciting swing.  

The pike were on fire. Casting streamers and mouse patterns, we watched these toothy torpedoes explode from the water, aggressively hammering our flies. At one point, James and I even pulled a double with these toothy predators. 

We landed dozens and kept a 27-incher for dinner. Greg filleted it right on the bank, revealing bright orange flesh, and cooked it into a hearty chowder. That afternoon, the sun came out, the first real warmth of the trip. We dried gear, explored the gravel bar, and found a trophy moose shed on a walk.  

Sheefish and the Heart of the Kobuk 

The next few days settled into the simple pattern of float, fish, camp, repeat. The pike fishing remained excellent, and James caught the biggest of the trip so far at 28 inches. We continued to add more grayling to the tally. I had a mystery hookup early one morning that snapped off quickly. Maybe a sheefish? Maybe a chum? Either way it added to the anticipation of what lay ahead. 

On day five, the wind picked up, pushing us downstream with force toward the confluence of the Pah and Kobuk Rivers. And I’m glad it did. As soon as we hit the seam, James hooked into his first sheefish. The“tarpon of the north” leapt and dove, pulled and ran in an incredible fight. When Halbach finally tailed the fish, I saw the reverence he had for this species and this place. I wanted to catch one. 

By the end of the day, we’d landed eight, including a 40-incher I brought in from the boat. The rain returned that evening as we scrambled to pitch the tepee and camped near the confluence, eager to fish it again. 

And fish it we did. The next morning brought a short reprieve from the rain, and the sheefish were still there: big, aggressive, and thrilling to catch. James and I even managed a double. We ended the day with twelve landed sheefish, plus a few more pike and grayling. 

Gates of the Arctic 

Floating the Kobuk, it struck me just how wild this place is. For days we saw no one, only the tracks of wolves, the occasional moose, and the endless sweep of the river braiding through valleys. The Kobuk Valley sits on the western edge of the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, the northernmost national park in the country and one of the most remote. There are no roads into the park, no established trails, just wild country where caribou migrate by the thousands, the waters are full of fish that have never seen a hook, and where you can go days without hearing another human sound. 

That remoteness was the essence of our float trip. Each river bend revealed new gravel bars to explore, fresh tracks to puzzle over, and another chance to cast a fly into water that likely hadn’t been fished all season. The farther we floated, the more I understood how rare it is to experience this kind of solitude in the modern world and how much would be lost if an industrial road corridor were ever punched through this landscape. 

Arrival in Kobuk Village 

By day nine, the river had widened and slowed as we neared Kobuk Village. Skiffs lined the shore and fish dried on racks. At the airstrip, kids chased each other across the gravel while adults stood chatting. More than 40 Alaska Native communities depend on this region for subsistence fishing for sheefish and salmon, hunting caribou, and gathering plants in the same way their ancestors did.  

The proposed Ambler Industrial Road would put these opportunities and traditions at risk. The industrial traffic, airstrips, spur roads, dust, light pollution, noise, and the danger of toxic spills would fragment and degrade habitat. Caribou migration routes would be disrupted. Subsistence hunters would have to travel farther and spend more money to put food on the table. 

When our Arctic Air flight lifted off, we traced the river backwards from above like a silver thread winding through green. We passed Walker Lake and the wild sweep of Gates of the Arctic. From the air, we marveled at the unbroken country, one of the last intact mountain landscapes left on Earth. It was impossible not to feel how much was at stake. 

The Brooks Range is one of the most remote, wild landscapes left in America, a place where entire watersheds remain intact and wildlife still follows ancient migration routes. Here, rivers like the Kobuk run clear and cold, supporting sheefish found almost nowhere else on planet, along with salmon, grayling, and northern pike. The valley is crucial habitat for the Western Arctic Caribou Herd, which still migrates hundreds of miles from the coastal plain in the north to the boreal forest in the south, a journey that has shaped this region’s ecosystem and culture for thousands of years. 

On top of all of this, there is something harder to measure that would also be lost if the Ambler Road is built. The silence, the remoteness, the feeling of floating through a place where the modern world hasn’t yet left its mark, would be gone forever. 

Sign up to join the nearly 20,000 hunters and anglers committed to standing up for the Brooks Range HERE.