It's 3 times the charm as we come back to Alaska for our final week 9.

Alaska is both inspiring and intimidating. For first time visitors the land, water, wildlife, and fish often exceed even the dream of our last frontier. When I came here to fish for the first time, I was struck by the impossible abundance. Streams turned orange by billions of salmon roe, Dolly Varden and rainbows as long as your arm gorging themselves, salmon on a desperate quest to reproduce before they spread their corpses streamside like the ashes of an old angler who willed it as his final resting place.

Week 8 sees us again in South Dakota for some unfinished business with the pheasants.

It was a dark and stormy night in Oregon's Willamette Valley in 1888 when the time-space continuum would be forever altered. As the story goes, a man by the name of Owen Denny, the former consul general to Shainghai, had smuggled--er, I mean imported--several pairs of pheasants to his Oregon farm. When an ice storm knocked the pens down the pheasants escaped and ultimately descendents of those birds populated the entire West--including the Dakotas. In the immortal words of Paul Harvey, 'and now you know the rrrrest of the story.' I think the South Dakota legislature should enact an Owen Denny day...perhaps to not-so-coincidentally occur with the opening day of pheasant season.

It's hard to imagine the prairie landscape w/o pheasants...they're as much a part of the prairie now as jackrabbits and tumbleweed. What makes them so enticing for hunters? As game birds go, they're the complete package...fast running, strong flying and as beautiful on the wing as they are on the table. No matter how many you take, every bird has an enduring quality...you feel an undeniable sense of accomplishment in finally bringing one to hand.

We return to Alaska for Week 7. (Wouldn't You?)

In Alaska you can still pan for gold but I prefer to fish for silvers. Returning from the sea after years of surviving all manner of critters that want to eat them, silver salmon are one of the angling world's greatest gifts. They are finned torpedoes that, when hooked, turn into depth charges that will torture a rod and reel as if they were rentals.

There is the Alaska that you fly over in a bush plane and that renews a sense of wonderment that you haven't felt since childhood. Then there's the Alaska that you hike where every step through willows, boulders, and streams is a challenge and even moving short distances seems a miraculous feat. Raw...yes. Untamed...for sure. Wild...of course. Put them together and it is a piece of the planet that seems still in the Pleistocene.