Rolph Slough is a tidal creek cutting through grass meadows and mud flats on the left bank of the Nushagak River, about 55 miles (89 km) west-northwest of Naknek and six miles (10 km) south of Dillingham, Alaska. The slough, now a side channel, was once the river’s main course. Nearby Nushagak Point is a prominent bluff of glacial deposits left by ice during the last glaciation, roughly 115,000 to 11,700 years ago. Mud flats have grown steadily since at least the late 1800s. The slough takes its name from Carl Rohlffs, whose historical cannery was established beside Kanulik, where the Moravian mission of Carmel once stood. Large ocean-going vessels could reach the site, but mud flats isolated it, and it was eventually abandoned. The point separates the river from Nushagak Bay and marks the approximate northern boundary of the Nushagak District, a fisheries regulatory area. All five Pacific salmon species pass through the bay to spawn. Chinook usually arrive first, in late May or early June, followed by sockeye, the bay’s most abundant species, which peaks in early July. Chum return from late June, and the Nushagak District produces more of them than any other. Pink salmon run in large numbers in even-numbered years, usually in late July. Coho arrive last, in early August. Nushagak Chinook are a stock of management concern, and since 2026, commercial fishers in the district must keep any Chinook they catch, so that all mortality is counted against the stock.

Yup’ik people, known locally as Kiatagmiut, wintered in permanent villages along the Nushagak River, moved to inland hunting and trapping camps in spring and fall, and returned to the river to fish each summer. Athabascan peoples lived on the upper Mulchatna River. The bluff at Nushagak Point was the site of the Yup’ik village of Tahlekuk, which offered a commanding view of the bay and its approaches, abundant fish and beluga whales, and drinking water from a stream that runs down the bluff. In 1818, the Russians built a trading post at the point called Aleksandrovski Redoubt, the first Russian post north of the Alaska Peninsula. A Russian Orthodox church was established there in 1841, and Anglo-Americans later called the post Nushagak. The trading post became a meeting place where Native groups from the Kuskokwim River, the Alaska Peninsula and Cook Inlet came to trade and live. The Alaska Purchase transferred the territory to the United States in 1867, and the U.S. Army Signal Corps later built a weather station at Nushagak. Commercial salmon fishing expanded across Bristol Bay in the 1880s, and a cannery opened at Kanulik in 1884, bringing new trade and wage work. In 1899, the Pacific Steam Whaling Company and the Alaska Fishermen’s Packing Company erected canneries directly in front of the settlement at Nushagak Point, and these facilities profoundly affected village life.

As more Native people joined the commercial fishery, families began to stay at summer camps along the bay, and river communities relied less on hunting and trapping. Father Vasili Kashevarov, who had been the Russian Orthodox priest at Nushagak since 1896 apart from six years, died in 1916 and was not replaced. The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 devastated the region and depopulated Nushagak. Dillingham became the commercial center in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Nushagak canneries closed in that decade. By 1964, only two families kept homes at Nushagak, but fish camps persisted, and today many set-net cabins and subsistence camps are occupied during the summer salmon runs. Mud flats limit vessel access except at extreme high tides, but the point still hosts some productive set-net sites, and cannery-era artifacts such as donkey engines survive. Set netters fish stationary gillnets from beach sites, mostly on Ekuk Beach, where more than 70 sites operate, and at the point. Under the district allocation plan, set netters receive 20 percent of the Nushagak Section sockeye harvest and six percent of the Igushik Section harvest. By mid-July 2026, set netters had taken about 26 percent of the district’s catch, while the drift fleet had taken 74 percent. The district’s season harvest reached about nine million sockeye by late July, against a forecast of 13.9 million. Read more here and here. Explore more of Rolph Slough and Nushagak Point here: