Steep Creek Self-Guided Audio Tour

About this tour

It looks like nothing — a shallow, narrow stream you'd walk past in a rainstorm without a second glance. From July through October, it becomes one of the most fiercely contested stretches of waterway in Southeast Alaska, and one of the best wildlife shows on the continent. You'll learn how the salmon arriving here pulled off a navigation feat that would humble most GPS systems — thousands of miles of open Pacific, finished by literally sniffing their way home — and why "home" turns out to be less of a welcome and more of a trial they aren't going to survive. Spoiler: dying is the point. You'll watch the entire food web in motion. Black bears working the creek a few yards from where you're standing, treating each fish like a calorie spreadsheet — maximum return, minimum chewing. (Worth watching long enough to see the routine. They are absurdly good at it.) Bald eagles overhead, in the densest concentration found anywhere on Earth, running their own delivery service from the canopy down. You'll find out what the trees that line this creek are quietly made of — the answer is one of the strangest sentences in ecology, and once you've heard it, you can't un-hear it. By the end of the loop, you'll watch tiny, almost translucent salmon fry hovering at the water's edge, and you'll know exactly how much had to die to put them there.

Stops on this tour

1. 1The Gauntlet Begins
2. 2The Next Generation
3. 3Marine Nitrogen
4. 4The Winged Scavengers
5. 5The Closed Trail
6. 6The Bear Strategy