Perryville, Alaska

Perryville is a small community on the North Pacific side of the Alaska Peninsula. They were another community receiving fiber optic services, and I was part of the crew doing the archaeological monitoring to make sure that cultural sites weren’t impacted during construction. The community was built relatively recently, originally most of the families who live there were from farther northeast on the Alaska Peninsula, near Katmai National Park. In 1912 there was a major eruption of Novarupta that blanketed the region in ash. Captian Kirtland Perry of the US Revenue Cutter Manning picked people up and transported them down the Peninsula, eventually settling in the current location of Perryville, named after Captian Perry. I had never been to Perryville before this project and was excited to see a new place. I visited Perryville twice during 2025, once in the late Spring and once in mid-summer. The first time I was there, Hooligan (also called eulachon or candlefish) were running, they’re small fish like smelt that run in huge numbers. Because the Hooligan were running there were tons of seals and sea lions swimming at the mouth of a river munching on them as they swam by. There were also tons of Bald Eagles flying around, and when I hiked up one of the hills around town I even saw a nesting eagle with chicks in its nest. Perryville was a beautiful village with amazing natural rock formations and sat under the shadow of Mt. Veniaminof, and active volcano that has erupted multiple times in the last decade, we had an earthquake that measured 7.2, but the volcano never smoked while I was there.