It's another Shakespearean construction - "the sweet of the year" - but spring is definitely the season of the angler. The dark of winter is gone, the snow and ice as well, and we residents of the 49th state can finally see water again.

The fish are on their way back, too. And maybe best of all, particularly for those of us who've just survived another winter in the Last Frontier, the season starts with our biggest bang: the kings.

The least abundant of the Pacific salmon, Chinook are also the largest, with mature fish routinely exceeding thirty pounds. That's plenty big for freshwater gamefish, near the top of the salmonid chain, but in Alaska they get much bigger than that. In fact, despite hopeful assertions from wily Canadians with sketchy mathematical skills and a marketer's interest in seeing the Skeena's name in lights, Alaska is home to the biggest kings. The only all-tackle world record came from the Kenai, where a fifty-pounder isn't even considered a trophy catch. Additionally, in 1949 a 126-pound king was captured in a commercial fish trap near Petersburg, and just like every longtime Kenai guide has stories of the triple-digit lunkers that got away, tales of kings going over 135 pounds drift in and out of the Cook Inlet commercial fleet like loose buoys. And apparently size does matter, as the Ninilchik campground figures to be plenty busy over the Memorial Day weekend, while the mouth of Willow Creek will again play host to the state's largest Independence Day parade. We won't even get into the traffic on the Kenai.

The streams of the Southcentral road system aren't the only Chinook destinations that draw attention from the angling public, of course. In Alaska, the state fish just so happens to also be the state's most popular fish, and streams with even moderate runs can draw a crowd. Lately the annual sport harvest has reached 100,000 or more fish per year. Add to that a commercial take of over half a million Chinook and subsistence catches nearing 90,000 fish annually and many might think we're headed for a meltdown, especially if they've read one of the several rather gloomy reports detailing the imminent collapse of the world's ocean fisheries. However, unlike the protected stocks of the Pacific Northwest (despite strong returns to the Columbia Basin in recent years, the wild salmon populations of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and California have continued on a downward trend that began over 150 years ago), the king salmon's status in Alaska has for the most part remained remarkably stable.

As one might imagine, there are a number of factors behind such success, but at least a little of our good fortune must be chalked up to simple geography. After all, while it may take some imagination to see a half-empty glass when two thousand fish just came in on the morning tide, we didn't get off to the greatest start. Even before statehood, and before the federal government began to take an interest in half-heartedly managing the region's fisheries, salteries could be built near a productive stream or river mouth and after a cycle of salmon runs, usually four or five years, the salter would be allowed to just move on, having nearly plundered an entire run of fish. Salmon returns appeared to be boundless, and that appearance was taken as fact.

We know better today - primarily because of what happened to the great salmon stocks that once flocked into the systems to our south. If one has spent much time at all with rod and reel in the Washington state area, it's fairly difficult to conceive of the native runs that used to regularly populate the rivers of the Columbia Basin, which, believe it or not, hosted the largest returns of wild salmon the world will ever see. Over-fishing played its part in their demise, as did dams, hatcheries, pollution and the destruction of habitat brought on by industrialization, urban sprawl, mining and logging. Still, historical horror stories aside, some Alaskans can remain a touch myopic when it comes to issues of conservation, as if speaking out for the preservation of the state's wild stocks puts one in either the irrational alarmist camp or on par with those fine folks tossing red paint at fur coats on Rodeo Drive.

All things considered - sometimes lucky, sometimes smart - we've taken pretty good care of our native fish stocks, and as the rest of the country struggles to preserve the last of their wild returns, we continue to count by the tens of thousands. We're not threatened by dams and the new corporate face of agriculture only affects the prices we pay for produce. "Los Anchorage" might make for a pretty swell joke in certain quarters, but far from mowing productive rivers asunder, Alaska's largest city actually hosts a few vibrant downtown salmon fisheries of its own. We've got it good, and sometimes, well, sometimes that's what scares me.

Having it so good is what led to salteries in river mouths and bounties for Dolly Varden tails and more recently, the general appearance of open warfare between commercial- and sport-allocation interests in the state. Though it hasn't moved an inch, Alaska is a lot closer to the rest of the world today, and now we've got to be careful not to go down the same road already traveled by anglers in places like the Pacific Northwest, Montana, Massachusetts or Maine. In fact, some of the questions that haunt the historical reports from those regions are currently being asked of us, and while our answers will certainly affect us, it's the future generations who'll have to pay for any mistakes. First among our concerns, then, should be the sweetness of their springs.