Copper River, Alaska: keeping wild food on the table as the climate shifts

In the Copper River Valley of Alaska, the nearest big supermarket is more than 190 miles away in Anchorage. The villages along the river have a few hundred year-round residents at most, and their small local stores are expensive and thinly stocked. So people eat what the land and river provide — caribou, moose, berries and, above all, salmon. Climate change is making that harder, and the National Park Service is paying local groups to help.

The Copper River forms the western edge of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. NPS photo / Barbara Cellarius

The river and the people

The Copper River runs 290 miles from the glaciers of the Wrangell Mountains to the Gulf of Alaska, past forest, wetland and small communities, and is famous for its salmon. Four Alaska Native peoples have ties to the country around it — the Ahtna, Upper Tanana, Eyak and Tlingit — and people have hunted, fished and gathered there for thousands of years.

Subsistence, in Alaska, is more than a food source. Wild foods are traditional foods, and harvesting them is woven into culture: sharing, working together and looking after others are its core values. Families take turns running a shared fish wheel and bring salmon to elders. Conservation is part of it too. Ahtna tradition sets rules for treating salmon with respect — wasting fish is wrong, and a person who does will find it hard to catch more.

Wrangell-St. Elias was established partly to keep those harvests possible. Rural residents of the communities tied to the park, Native and non-Native, may hunt and fish within and near it.

Copper River salmon drying and smoking in a smokehouse. NPS photo / Barbara Cellarius

What is changing

Rivers that used to freeze solid in winter no longer do, which cuts off travel across the country. Wild foods are less reliable.

Caribou. The Nelchina herd summers in the Talkeetna Mountains, more than 100 miles west of the park, and passes through it each spring and autumn on the way to and from its winter range near the Canadian border. Caribou dig through snow with their broad hooves to reach lichen, their main winter food. Wetter, warmer winters — deep snow, rain out of season, repeated freezing and thawing — bury that food under snow too deep or ice too hard to break.

Caribou digging for lichen under the snow. NPS photo / Kyle Joly

Wildlife managers expect recovery to take 15 years or more. People who relied on caribou may lean harder on salmon — and warmer water brings salmon its own trouble, from heat stress to lost habitat.

Salmon. Chinook (king) salmon have been returning to Alaska's spawning grounds in low numbers, forcing repeated closures and restrictions.

Chinook salmon. USFWS / Ryan Hagerty

The COVID-19 pandemic added another lesson. Supply chains faltered everywhere, and the strain was probably worst in rural Alaska, where so much food comes in from out of state — a reminder of how much it is worth not to depend on the outside world to fill a freezer.

Two projects on the river

With money from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Park Service is funding projects that rural Alaskans have chosen themselves. "In Alaska, people are part of the ecosystem," said Mark Miller, the park's ecologist and the project lead. Two are run by the Ahtna Intertribal Resource Commission (AITRC), a nonprofit on the Copper River that represents the eight federally recognised Ahtna Tribes.

Preservation workshops. From 2025, AITRC holds two workshops a year on canning, smoking and other ways of keeping salmon from summer through winter. Properly canned salmon keeps for years. The workshops are open to everyone, with Tribal citizens and young people especially in mind, and AITRC is recruiting knowledge-holders to teach traditional methods that are being lost. "COVID-19 … made us realize that it's really important to be able to preserve food from summer to winter," said Kelsey Stanbro, AITRC's ecologist. Her hope is that a few people trained will teach their families and friends.

Canned salmon. NPS photo / Barbara Cellarius

Weekly river calls. Every Thursday at 11 a.m. through the fishing season, a teleconference brings together state fishery managers, researchers and subsistence fishers along the river. The rules are simple: be respectful, wait your turn, say your name and where you fish. On a typical call the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reports how many sockeye its sonar has counted and why the Chinook season is closing early; a researcher asks fishers to return radio tags from tagged salmon; a fisher near Chistochina says she has caught little and her village is worried about feeding families; another downriver says fishing is slow there too and many fish are smaller than usual.

Fishers only have to report their catch at the end of the season. The calls fill the gap in between — fish sizes, water levels, signs of disease — and give people a place to question agencies directly. "It's nice to have a platform where people can feel a little more comfortable asking state and federal agencies questions," Stanbro said. For scientists, the observations point to changes worth measuring. The model is the Yukon River's in-season calls, run by the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association for nearly twenty years and, from 2024, also supported by the Act.

Fish wheels at Slana. The current pushes submerged paddles that turn the wheel, and its baskets scoop up salmon swimming upstream. NPS photo / Barbara Cellarius

What could come next

Barbara Cellarius, the park's cultural anthropologist and subsistence coordinator, has gathered ideas from Tribal councils and communities: more community fish wheels, elder-led lessons at youth camps, a shared cool building for butchering game when the weather is too warm. The rule she applies is that the money should help a whole community, not a few individuals, with Tribal governments and local groups leading and the Park Service as partner.

The Park Service is also using the funding to survey caribou, moose and Copper River sockeye in the park, updating its population estimates so it can judge what a changing climate is doing to them over the long run.

Sources

Written from "Community-led food security solutions in Alaska's Copper River Valley" by Laura Vachula (November 2024), a writing partner of the National Park Service's Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate, published by the National Park Service for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Caribou counts are from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (2019) and the Federal Subsistence Board (2023), as cited there.