A Siberian Adventure

Kayakers to raise awareness of overfishing

Next summer, seven whitewater kayakers will embark on an expedition to explore the Siberian mountain landscapes of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in an effort to raise awareness of the complex relationships between the place, its people, and its fisheries.

The team plans to focus on making the first descents of at least three rivers on the peninsula. The aim of the expedition is to explore the impact of caviar-poaching on the salmon population in the region and how that effects the indigenous people. The team will use kayaks to gain access to never-before explored regions, allowing them to get up close to the species they feel are most threatened.

The Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Siberia is one of the last truly wild places on Earth. It's a place with some of the densest brown bear populations in the world, a place with no dams, no massive extractive resource operations, less than one person per square kilometre, and only one major highway on the 600-mile long peninsula. This remote land has some of the richest salmon runs in the Pacific, sustaining animals and communities.

Ludmila Sakharovskaya, who has worked in a local fishing hatchery there since the early 1980s told National Geographic that twenty years ago a lot of fish came to the river. "A variety of species," Sakharovskaya said. "Now I don't see them."

To read more about the Kamchatka Expedition, visit: http://schoolhouse.kamchatkaproject.org/?page_id=582