Creative wild food dishes overflowed on the tables of the Wild Food Feast at the Pioneer Igloo on April 21, as the Copper River Watershed Project celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Winning dishes in our four categories this year were:
- Best Walking: Moose Cocktail Meatballs, Kate McLaughlin and Moose Liverwurst, Ezekiel Brown
- Best Swimming: BBQ Beaver, Gannon Skorkowsky
- Best Growing: Fiddlehead Pesto Tarts, Kinsey Justa
- Best Flying: Corned Duck, Jeremy Norbryhn
- Best in Show: BBQ Beaver
Our board and staff team are so happy to have a chance to look back on what we’ve achieved with such strong membership support, and know that we can continue this work so that the Copper River watershed can have a vibrant, healthy future.
Two decades of work to bring partners together for watershed-scale planning and action have resulted in all kinds of measurable impacts including: Opening up access to 11 miles of upstream spawning habitat by replacing undersized culverts that were barriers to fish passage, adding data on 72.1 miles and 167.6 acres of salmon habitat to the state’s official salmon waters catalog, engaging over 800 volunteers in habitat restoration and data collection work from the headwaters near Mentasta to the river’s mouth at the Gulf of Alaska, restoring or building five trails in the watershed and a salmon viewing platform on the Gulkana River, and securing six million dollars in grant funding that has been spent in the watershed through partnerships.
Kristin Carpenter is the executive director of the Copper River Watershed Project.
