All around the boat they were leaping into the air, making their way slowly back to their birthplace. From hundreds of miles away, the Alaskan salmon were returning to the streams in the Tongass National Forest to find the very creek and spot where they were born, to lay or fertilize their eggs and expire after the next generation was created.  The salmon spawning in the millions meant that the grizzly bear and cubs could stand in the streams and scoop up the fish as they thrashed by, guaranteeing that they would have enough body fat to get through the coming winter. The eagles, waiting high in the Sitka spruce would also have a great feast before the onset of winter.

But this was not happening last summer. In August, John and I hosted an NRDC-sponsored trip to Southeast Alaska and I observed something as painful as anything I have seen in nature. I watched as the salmon worked their way back to their home stream only to be halted - not by dams or fish nets but by dry creeks. After an unusually cold winter and a late spring, the temperature in this vast archipelago rose and almost no rain fell. By August there was not enough water in many of the mountain streams for the salmon to complete their life cycle.  Watching hundreds of flailing fish, desperate to go upstream but caught in the shallow water by the shore was agonizing.

Now it made sense that we had been warned in the town of Sitka that we should be careful walking even on Main Street because there were regular grizzly bear sightings. The mothers with their cubs were coming down from the mountains, along the dry streams, looking for the salmon to bulk them up for winter hibernation.

One day, we took a hike through an enchanted forest; the enchantment being the deep moss covered floor with a multitude of fungi and the tall Sitka Spruce dripping with droplets of water. But on our walk, the moss was dry and crunchy underneath our feet and the air had no moisture.

One summer when we were in the Tongass, we had seventeen inches of rain in two days. This summer, we had no rain the entire week we were there. I found myself hoping for rain, even though I had spent much of the summer in New York hoping the rain would stop. It was one of the coldest and wettest summers on record in New York and one of the driest in the Tongass.

As powerful as the pictures of polar bears on floating ice and diagrams of the shrinking ice cap are- the site of the salmon desperate to get back home, the bears thin and hungry without their primary source of food and the dryness of the rainforest, made climate change real in a personal way.