I went to Alaska to fish but couldn’t resist stopping now and then to smell (and photograph) some of the state’s 1500+ species of flowers.

Alaska is awesome.

Alaska is an gigantic natural jewel where each footstep and boat swing reveals dazzling displays of scenic beauty and wildlife.

Our group of six spent a week fishing and exploring Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. It was my first trip to our country’s 49th state; it won’t be my last.

Alaska is a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts. While our primary goal was to fish for halibut and salmon, we felt like kids in a candy store as each day revealed remarkable diversity in flora, wildlife, weather and other natural resources.

Road ditches and meadows showed off blankets of bright-pink flowers that I quickly learned are fireweed (Epilobium agustifolium), a tall perennial that blooms from the bottom up on stiff 4 ft. stems. Locals say that when fireweed blossoms reach the top of the plant winter is just four weeks away.

The plant’s common name is derived from its ability to revegitate quickly after fire, thanks to a deep root system that escapes damage from the heat.

Fireweed plays another crucial role in Alaska’s ecology. We toured the Kenai Peninsula’s glaciers by boat and on foot. Several of Alaska’s blue-ice glaciers sprawl down through mountain valleys for more than 10 miles and are more than two miles wide at the terminus.

All of the peninsula’s 32 glaciers originate in the 1,500-square-mile Harding Icefield that contains compacted snow and ice several thousand feet deep. The Harding Icefield is a relic from the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago when the icefield extended nearly to Chicago.

As glaciers recede they leave behind a barren, rocky surface that slowly begins to attract the earliest pioneer plants: mosses, lichens...and fireweed.

These plant colonizers start the 100-year progression from glacial till to the temperate rain forests of Sitka hemlock and spruce that cloak the edges of the Kenai Fjords.

Fireweed is critical to the progression because its roots fix nitrogen in the soil which helps establish a nutrient-rich seedbed for the plants that emerge 20 years later: cottonwoods, willows and alders.

Each successive stage of plant life sustains thousands of species of insects, birds and mammals that thrive in this diverse Alaskan ecosystem.

Thick stands of brown-needled Sitka spruce trees were evident throughout the peninsula. Our fishing guide explained that the dead spruce had been invaded by spruce-bark beetles and the growing number of tinder-dry trees poses a serious forest-fire threat.

One day we talked with a team of forest rangers counting plant species along a 100-ft. stretch of recently rebuilt road ditch. They said they were recording the number of non-native, invasive plants.

Although often quite attractive in ditches and meadows, invasive species are threatening Alaska’s ecology by out-competing native plants, displacing wildlife, harming fish habitat, altering soil and water quality and encouraging wild fires.

We fished for trout and salmon for two days on the Kenai River, described as “the world’s greatest sportfishing river.” The river has produced the world record king (chinook) salmon and also contains red (sockeye), silver (coho) and pink (humpy) salmon. By the way, the world-record king salmon, caught in 1985, weighed 97.4 lbs.

The Kenai River shoreline is deteriorating in many sections due to unsound shoreline vegetation management by property owners and from heavy foot traffic by shore fishermen during the July red-salmon run. Healthy, vigorous native grasses, perennials and woody plants growing right up to the water are vital for protecting and sustaining juvenile salmon which spend 90% of their rearing time within 6 ft. of the river bank.

Incentives have been put in place to encourage owners of riverbank property to install light-penetrating steel docks and to construct cabled spruce-trunk “cribs” that lay horizontally along the bank to collect silt and provide soil for grasses and other plant life.

As we fished with guides and toured by van, we picked up constant clues that Alaska’s heritage as a rough-and-tumble frontier where “anything goes” is rapidly giving way to a micro-managed ecosystem heavily weighted with constantly changing rules and regulations. Old-timers we talked with lament the shift in culture but, for the most part, agreed that strict regulations are necessary to preserve Alaska’s natural beauty and bounty.

The hardest part about visiting Alaska is deciding where to go and what to do. There are just so many tempting choices.

Following our four scheduled days of fishing, we signed up for a six-hour dinner cruise through Kenai Fjords National Park. It was a good decision. Halfway through the trip the captain spotted a pod of orca dolphins and positioned the vessel so the orcas passed by on either side. A half hour earlier we had floated up close to dozens of lazy sea lions lying side-by-side on flat rocks next to a rocky island. The nearby waters, shorelines, glaciers and mountains are home to countless fascinating species of wildlife.

I am grateful for my weeklong adventure to just one small section of this northern state that is twice the size of Texas.

Alaska became a state in 1958 while I was in grade school. I remember learning back then that the 1867 purchase, for $7.2 million, was widely scorned and was labeled “Seward’s Folly” in editorial cartoons. (William H. Seward, U.S. Secretary of State in 1867, negotiated the purchase with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S.)

From this vantage point, the two cents per acre price tag that the U.S. paid for Alaska seems like a pretty good deal.