Interior orders $15,510 in on-call flights for Unuk River salmon research through May

The Interior Department has ordered on-call flights from Misty Fjords Air and Outfitting of Ketchikan for a U.S. Geological Survey salmon project on the Unuk River, under a $15,510 delivery order first obligated Oct. 20.

The order covers fixed-wing flights on call from Oct. 23 through May 1, 2027, federal spending records show. The amount is what has been obligated to date, not what has been spent.

It follows an earlier $15,510 order to the same company for Unuk salmon flights, first obligated Aug. 11. Alaska News reported Aug. 17 that the earlier charter would keep USGS crews sampling the river this fall and that three large British Columbia mine projects sit in development upstream. Interior also ordered helicopter flights this month to service a USGS gage on the river.

The Unuk flows from Canada into Southeast Alaska. It is one of five cross-border rivers where USGS runs monitoring stations, along with the Alsek, Taku, Stikine and Salmon. USGS began collecting water-quality data on the Unuk in 2018, the year Congress directed the agency to develop a water-quality strategy for these rivers.

USGS runs a super gage on the Unuk: a conventional streamflow gage fitted with continuous monitors for water temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, specific conductance and turbidity. The agency says its river sampling, done every six to eight weeks, depends on weather and aircraft availability.

USGS says salmon fisheries in these cross-border watersheds contribute an estimated $1 billion a year to the regional economy.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reports Unuk Chinook escapement since 1977 has ranged from 956 to 10,541 large fish, averaging 4,301.