![]() When she isn’t busy watching, writing, and snapping photos, I see her take readings from a handheld device that gauges the temperature, speed and direction of the wind. Sitting a few feet from me is the bear monitor, a woman whose job is to observe and collect data on the brown bears that congregate here during the salmon run. Unless an eagle or an osprey or a bear gets them first. He also believes that most of the fish that want to get upriver eventually do get there. A colleague of mine who has counted a lot of fish over a number of years at exactly this spot estimates that only 6% to 7% of all jumps are successful. When they reach the falls, they jump - and jump - and jump - until they make it. Until I leave at 7 am tomorrow morning, the platform will be closed to visitors.īrooks Falls acts as a natural barrier, or at least a hurdle, to salmon that swim upriver towards Lake Brooks and beyond in search of the gravel beds where they were spawned. I’m sitting on a wooden platform some 20 feet above the south bank of the Brooks River, at a point just downstream from a waterfall. It’s 10:30 pm in southwest Alaska, and the sun has yet to sink below the horizon.
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