Meet Wild Salmon Center Ambassador Kate Crump

The owner of Frigate Adventure Travel on salmon conservation, sharing meals, and using what moves you.

By this time of year, Kate Crump has usually had a month or two to decompress between guiding in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and winter steelhead season at her Oregon fishing lodge.

This year, no break. That’s because Crump—an intensely busy fishing guide, forest activist, brand ambassador, and owner of Frigate Adventure Travel—added one more responsibility, as the new owner of a lodge on Alaska’s Naknek River. She’ll be welcoming new guests here starting in June 2022. And that means she’s socked away in Bristol Bay all winter, navigating cabin retrofitting in subzero conditions.

“There are a lot of complications,” Crump laughs. “Like how do you get a cabin warm enough at negative nine to get the paint to dry?”

An aerial shot of the lodge on Naknek River now owned by Kate Crump and her partner. (PC: Cassie Bergman)

The payoff is what has driven Crump’s entire career in angling: sharing wild rivers with guests. These connections can change lives, Crump says, and they can also save these special places.

“One of the best ways to get people to take action, obviously, is by taking them into the wild, onto these rivers,” she says. “Then we come home and literally break bread: share a meal, take it all in together, and solidify those connections through reflection.”

Check out the rest of the interview at Wild Salmon Center’s Ambassador Council