Dillingham is a city of about 2,300 people located about 350 miles southwest of Anchorage. It sits at the head of Nushagak Bay, at the confluence of the Wood and Nushagak Rivers in Bristol Bay. It borders the largest remaining wild salmon fishery in the world.

The only way to reach Dillingham is by sea or air. There are no roads from the Alaska Highway System. A twenty-five mile paved road connects Dillingham to the neighboring community of Aleknagik which borders the largest state park in the nation, the Wood Tikchik State Park. Dillingham is also headquarters for nearby Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, home to walruses, seals, migratory birds, and fish, and includes one of the largest wild herring fisheries in the world. [Text adapted from the official Dillingham web site]

I visited Dillingham in late September 2011 to attend the Annual Meeting of the Arctic Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and serve as moderator for a town hall-type Forum on Mining in Southwest Alaska. The Forum was occasioned by the controversy over a huge proposed mine called the Pebble Prospect. For more on Pebble and the Bristol Bay region, see Edwin Dobb, "Alaska's Choice: Salmon or Gold," National Geographic, December 2010.