In July 2010 Bryan Smith will lead an expedition of six whitewater kayakers as they explore the Siberian mountain landscapes of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

The Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Siberia is one of the last truly wild places on Earth. It is a place where between one sixth and one fourth of all salmon spawn, a place with some of the densest brown bear populations in the world, a place with no dams, no massive extractive resource operations, less than one person per square kilometer, and only one major highway on the 600-mile long peninsula. It is a place that is largely unexplored, a place that is worth protecting and a place that needs attention now.

The Kamchatka Project was born out of a passion for rivers and the wild salmon that depend upon them. The goal is to use whitewater kayaks to explore the mountain landscapes of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in an effort to raise public awareness of the complex relationships between the place, its people, and its fisheries. Kayaking will be the vehicle that takes the team directly to the salmon species in need of study; allows them to interact with and document indigenous people and caviar poachers; and ultimately experience wild and remote whitewater never before paddled.

The team of six kayakers will depart for Kamchatka from Seattle on June 30th, arriving in Moscow then onto Petropavlovsk (PK). The team will do a quick trip to the Kol biostation. The Kol River is one of Dr. Jack Stanford’s key study locations and also home to over 8 million spawning wild salmon each year. The goal will be to see and understand how some of Kamchatka’s anti-poaching efforts are working on the Kol, as well as pull in the significance of Dr. Stanford’s work over the past 10 years in Kamchatka. From here the team will focus on whitewater objectives on the Storzch and Semaliyach to the north near the Valley of the Geysers.

Conservation and science angles as part of the National Geographic Society's Expedition Council grant will resume as they transition to the Zhuphanova River to meet up with fly fisherman Ryan Peterson to explore this prime salmon and bull trout habitat. Here they will work as a team using several scientific methodologies to better understand why this river works so well for the fish. They will look at flow and discharge, temperatures, river bottom substrates and also nitrogen contents in the plant biomass to show how the sea nutrients from rotting salmon carcasses help create a lush food web that goes well beyond the river itself.