The Alaska Experiment

There aren’t a whole lot of things that I detest more than business travel. Being taken away from your family and home to squander your days in a hotel room or in a meeting is not how I like to spend my time, especially considering that most of the time the whole point of the trip is to spend money in a travel budget so that the company gets more money the next year to have more pointless trips. Most of the time the trips are held in less than desirable places, like over crowed cities in New Jersey. This trip however, turned out to be quite different. The nature of the work itself was more hands on and there weren’t any meetings or budget spending excuses to go. Best of all it was in Alaska for a month. That is usually longer than I care to go somewhere, however in this case it afforded me the time to see the area the best I could. Being a business trip I didn’t get to do all of the cool things that you get to on vacation in Alaska, i.e. salmon or halibut fishing, whale watching, glacier climbing, etc., but I did get to make the most of my free time in Fairbanks. I was able to go to the Arctic Circle and see cool wildlife like moose and caribou. We got to see neat things like the Trans Alaskan Pipeline, Mt. McKinley, Denali National Park, and the Chena Hot Springs. I got to stand out on the partially frozen Yukon River and we even found this awesome bar that had a mechanical bull, which I rode quite well despite having a few drinks. Being a fisherman one of my favorite things that I got to do was fish for Arctic Grayling. I went, with a few of my co-workers, to a spot where the Chena River opened up into a small lake like area. Using a combination of Mepps Spinners and my own flies I managed to catch a few. They don’t get to be much bigger than a small trout and have a mouth like a bluegill. I was very excited and proud about it to this day considering I was able to catch a native fish in Alaska, and an exotic one at that. We were talking about it in a roadside bar much to the amusement of some of the locals who said we were fishing for bait, and when I thought about it they were right. When you have a place where you can catch fish like salmon or halibut that can weigh almost as much as you do an 8-12 inch grayling isn’t much to brag about. It’s probably looked at much like fishing for bluegills is around here, fun but nothing to get too worked up about. I do find satisfaction in it though as it is a species that most, self included, would have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to catch. And while my time in Alaska did not afford me the opportunity to go after more serious fish I am extremely pleased to have had the chance to fish for such a unique species.