“IT’S ALL BURNED UP,” Chad Hewitt shouts over the Beaver’s roar, briefly lifting one hand off the flight controls to wave across a blackened expanse. “Everything’s gone.”
I try yelling a question from the second-row seat, but my voice is lost in the drone of the single propeller. My hunting partner, Steven Kurian, doesn’t hear me either. As we approach the pond where we plan to start our 50-mile float hunt, the traveling dot on my phone screen grazes waypoints with names like “open pit” and “bulk tailings storage.” A platinum-blond grizzly observes our low passage over the tundra. Hewitt banks, sails over a few more ridges, and circles a verdant confluence of creeks before splashing down. As we glide to the bank, he leaps from the cockpit to the float, then lashes the plane to a scrub alder. Steve jumps out behind him.
I met Steve, veteran gill net captain and owner of Pride of Bristol Bay, a direct-from-the-fishery wild Alaska salmon business, just six months before this hunt. We bonded over shared backgrounds in commercial and fly fishing, and a fondness for traditional archery and nasty wilderness adventures. He was looking for a moose-hunting companion this fall, and I raised my hand.
“The mine camp was over there, or what’s left of it,” Hewitt says as we toss dry bags and raft parts onto the spongy lakeshore. “They tried to cut a fire line around the buildings and drilling gear, but it jumped.”
This summer, the Upper Talarik fire ripped through 9,000 acres of trees and tundra, demolishing the Pebble Partnership’s exploratory mining facilities. Nearly 300,000 more acres burned just to the west during one of the hottest, driest Alaskan summers on record. But compared to stiff political headwinds, a few torched Quonset huts are only minor setbacks for the Canadian mining corporation. Northern Dynasty Minerals, Pebble’s owner and parent company, is likely flying in a holding pattern until those winds shift in its favor again.
Hewitt has seen this cycle play out many times before. He first came to the Bristol Bay region in 1993, a few days after graduating high school and shortly after one of the world’s largest deposits of copper and gold was discovered here. Hewitt started as a fly-fishing guide but fell in love with flying. Now 47, he co-owns , a , an , and a remote fishing