I think we can do both at the same time.

Since it is a rainy day, lets all of us take a virtual trip to Russian Kamchatka Peninsula. After departing our plane, we embark and finish our trip by helicopter when we hit a time warp of 250 years plus like Alaska and the PNW use to be.

Here is an account of what we will see.


The Kamchatka Peninsula was once a Cold War listening post, used by Russia to spy on Alaska.
Geographically remote and sealed off for 65 years, the landscape is without dams, logging or agriculture. Its 800-mile coastline has seen little economic development. Instead of industrial complexes, farms or blocks of housing, a helicopter fly-over reveals snow-rimmed volcanoes that give way to slopes of birch and tamarack and broad valleys partitioned by rivers that twist like ribbons.
The mountains were bisected by broad valleys where clear rivers wandered through marshes, grasslands, and thickets of willows and cottonwoods. This was a landscape as rich as my home, Oregon, must have been when Lewis and Clark arrived in the fall of 1805

I could see why these rivers were so productive, and what had been lost from the rivers of my home in the Pacific Northwest. From their headwaters in glaciers, lava fields, perched meadows and forested canyons, the rivers cascaded through a mountainous terrain untouched by human hands. Where the rivers found the smooth contours of the lower elevation valleys, the differences between these Kamchatkan rivers and our own rivers were even more pronounced. The rivers I saw from the helicopter divided into braids that wandered across the valley floors, connecting a glittering miasma of pools, riffles, old water-filled channels, oxbows and marshes. These floodplain habitats-long since lost in the United States to agricultural and urban development- provided not only the biological productivity of wetlands, but a wide gradient of micro-habitats for all of the varieties and life stages of juvenile salmon, trout and char. Indeed, when the helicopter landed, we saw thousands of fingerling salmon and char in these swampy off-channel meanders.
The peninsula produces nearly 25 percent of the world's wild Pacific salmon, and is home to Russia's only population of steelhead, an endangered species.


Anybody want to guess what made the russian steelhead endangered in one of the post pristine places on earth?

Where we can still see salmon like the accounts from Lewis and Clark exposition, so thick that you cross the river walking on their backs.