“You can ask your feet what’s happening. It’s real slippery right here,” Ralph Hulbert says as we step carefully across slime-covered rocks in an unnamed clear stream on the Palmer side of the Matanuska River’s riverbed.

“This is not rocket science,” he tells me. “These are third-grade observations.” As we walk across the stream the rocks get progressively less slick, progressively cleaner. They’ve got just enough algae to color them. The rocks on the opposite side are covered with a coat of green algae, about an eighth of an inch thick.

Hulbert is leading a field trip on the unnamed stream he calls “Sewer Creek.” It’s officially unnamed, and known to government geographers who map the Matanuska as one of several “clear-water side channels” on the riverbed. Ten years from now—or five, or maybe only 18 months from now; no one can predict, exactly—you may not be able to find Sewer Creek, let alone walk its slimy bottom. If one of the Matanuska’s braids reclaims the Palmer side of the riverbed, the creek will be erased, covered by a silty river too swift and dangerous to wade in rubber boots. This year, at least in late June, Sewer Creek runs from headwater springs in the riverbed just south of the Old Glenn Highway’s bridge, past the town of Palmer and its sewer plant, and continues roughly southwest about four miles across a mostly dry stretch of riverbed where young trees are gaining a foothold. It ends at a confluence with the Matanuska’s largest channel, at a spot known to sport fishermen as “Poachers Hole”—which Hulbert tells me is at the uppermost reach of Cook Inlet’s tides.

We are hunting for salmon fry at the outfall of Palmer’s sewer plant. Those fry have a lot to do with why anglers have a name for the fishing hole, even if no map recognizes a name for Sewer Creek. The fry also have a lot to do with the miles of four-wheeler tracks leading across the sand-and-gravel riverbed to Poacher’s Hole. They’re the reason Hulbert likes to take people here, to a slimy-bottomed salmon stream that’s fed by riverbed springs and picks up some treated sewer plant water as it passes below the bluffs south of Palmer.

That Ralph Hulbert would have a personal attachment to the Matanuska River and its salmon would be no surprise to people who know him. His parents met in Palmer and raised him here. After finishing high school, he earned a chemistry degree at Oregon State University. He volunteered for the Peace Corps and went to Africa as a teacher, then returned to Alaska. Ralph’s wife, Helen, also grew up in Palmer. They’ve raised two children, Ruth and Garth, in Palmer.

Almost every summer, unless weather or another commitment prevents it, the Hulberts join Helen’s family at a fish camp on Cook Inlet. “Mostly it’s from my mom’s side,” 17-year-old Garth says of the fishing. “My dad likes some good smoked salmon every now and then, so we all tag along and just make a good time of it.” A typical stay is two or three weeks, Garth says.

In August of 2005, the City of Palmer’s wastewater plant was up for permit renewals and a review. New standards were applied to the sewer plant. Some of the standards were new because state and federal regulators noticed that Sewer Creek, the unnamed Matanuska side channel, was a distinct stream. It had salmon spawning in the waste water mixing zone.

This would send the city on a hunt for state and federal cash for sewer plant upgrades. It would also propel the Hulberts into a family science project that takes them outside Ralph’s chemistry and water quality arena and into salmon biology at the habitat level. In summer 2008, frustrated that regulations were being enforced at Sewer Creek with little or no research available on the health of the stream, Ralph Hulbert engaged in experiments that might be described as homegrown science.

He also roped his wife and two teenage children into helping. Together they would map the mixing zone as it spreads downstream and dilutes the wastewater in the clear stream. They’d test for temperature, acidity and the presence of ammonia; they’d also map salmon distribution on the stream—cohos, chum and sockeye, live and dead—and use caged salmon fry to compare the growth between fish reared in various locations of the mixing zone with the fished reared solely upstream from the treatment plant.

It’s a lot of fieldwork, and some lab work, and more time spent compiling data into charts and tables. This wasn’t family game night or even a softball league Ralph had signed his brood on for.

When he talks about the project, Garth sounds like an easygoing but characteristically bored teenager. Garth’s a cross-country runner at Colony High School—“I hate pavement,” he says—but two years ago he was 15 and had already stopped playing Little League baseball and put his Legos away. His interests lean toward physics and engineering, but he couldn’t come up with a good reason not to join his dad in a biology project.

“Most of it was just getting strong-armed, but I needed something to do anyway and it was something to do,” Garth says. “You know, doing a science project, I guess it felt good to act like I was doing something.” Garth had been on other adventures led by his father, and while the mosquitoes bothered the boy, wading a shallow stream isn’t the worst thing Alaska has to dish out. “Any time he takes us for a hike it turns into a brutal six-mile trek through ice and snow,” Garth says. “His adventures always turn out kind of crazy— so this one was relatively easy, I’d say.”

The Palmer side of the Matanuska River’s braided plane didn’t always look the way it does today. Sewer Creek doesn’t even exist in aerial photos taken in 1990. Over the last two decades, while regulations for effluent on salmon streams were being tightened, the Matanuska River was migrating away from Palmer toward the opposite side of the riverbed. (It can get quite dramatic. Between 1989 and the spring of 1995 two houses on the Bodenburg Butte side fell into the river as acre after acre of riverbank bluffs eroded. During that time five other homes in the Butte area were moved, according to accounts in the Anchorage Daily News.)

Janet Curran, a hydrologist at U.S. Geologic Survey who studies the river, says it’s a mistake to describe the Matanuska as a “meandering stream;” it’s braided. Curran has studied historical photos. She says the river’s current state—having one major channel carrying most of the water far from Palmer—is an unusual one. “There are main channels on both sides,” Curran says. “It’s only been since 1990-ish that’s it’s been concentrated on the left bank—the Butte side. This is not a typical state for the river.”

Curran came to that conclusion by studying current river channels and photographs taken in the past. The river’s dominant characteristic, and more typical state, she says, is the multiple braids. They divide and reconnect along the river’s course and in many locations along the Matanuska a person can find a dozen channels full of water.

That’s why Sewer Creek may not be there in ten years. One example of what could happen can be found upstream at a place called Yellow Creek, which is near Sutton on the Glenn Highway. The creek once took a downstream path on the riverbed before connecting with a larger braid. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game counted salmon on Yellow Creek for years, but those spawning waters have all but disappeared. “It used to flow about two miles across the braid plane. It was the same scenario [as Sewer Creek],” Curran says. Then in 2004 water flooded empty channels, spreading braid-to-braid toward Yellow Creek. “It came over and hacked Yellow Creek into bits,” Curran says. “Then by 2006, Yellow Creek was all gone. It’s the river moving and re-occupying its braid plain.” Curran figures salmon have adapted. The Matanuska isn’t the only braided river with salmon. Resurrection Creek near Seward is similarly active on its gravel plain. “My biologists friends tell me [salmon] don’t really return to the exact same square meter they were spawned in,” Curran says.

Still, the salmon spawning and rearing in Sewer Creek spell a problem for the City of Palmer—even if the spawning ground’s existence is temporary. One of the people who stepped up was Ralph Hulbert. Of course, he has incentives. Hulbert’s one-person company AlaskaChem is where he markets his skills as a chemical engineer and consultant.

You might call him a water quality and engineering consultant. He also carries a general contracting license. Hulbert has a more casual description. He says he’s one of the people a small city like Palmer calls on “when they need someone to write-up a bunch of technical B.S.” He doesn’t build water treatment plants, exactly, but he tests water, understands regulations, and can design changes when a wastewater plant needs upgrades.

“I basically told them, ‘There isn’t really a problem. You don’t have a water problem, you have a regulatory problem,’” Hulbert says. That doesn’t mean he didn’t work on a solution.

The wastewater plant, in a town with a strong record of meeting state and federal standards, was out of compliance by two measures: the amount of ammonia in its effluent and the amount of total suspended solids. Both were related to the temperature in the sewer lagoons at different times of year. Bacteria that consume ammonia are not active during cold weather, so ammonia production begins a steep climb in October, and the plant’s outfall is out of compliance by early November. “Some of the bacteria are just too cold to work,” Hulbert says. Algae blooms in warmer weather and summer daylight, and it’s responsible for much of the suspended solids count at the treatment plant. By that standard the system is out of compliance between late May to early November, peaking in warmer months.

The city was given until 2011 to bring the sewer plant into compliance under the new regulation scheme. The city has plans to meet the deadline by covering the plant’s first two ponds with floating insulated covers. “Our job is to bring it into compliance,” Palmer Public Works Director Carter Cole says. “I know Ralph has different ideas about this, but the EPA has taken salmon into account in their regulations and we are going to comply with those regulations.”

Cole says the Palmer will be the farthest north location where the lagoon covers have been installed, and the project needs to take local windstorms and temperatures into account. He says Pond One is already cooler than it was last year at this time, a factor that was predicted during the design phase. “It’s already working and what we’re doing here is going to solve problems all over the state,” he says.

Hulbert was the contractor who drew up specs for the lagoon covers, but he’s not involved in construction. When we visited the water treatment plant, the first lagoon, Pond One, was nearly covered. Pieces of black insulation—basically rafts shaped like giant vacuum-sealed food bags—lay in stacks near the ponds. There were several truckloads of the stuff, stacked near the lagoons. One worker used a four-wheeler to tow a section of the cover raft from the unloading area toward Pond One. It will take about 315,000 square feet of floating insulated covers to cover Pond One and Pond Two. For comparison, the Fifth Avenue Mall has 446,000 square feet of floor space.

We were accompanied by Ailis Vann, a city administrative assistant familiar with construction upgrades at the sewer plan. The project warranted $2.5 million in federal stimulus funds because it was ready to go when the U.S. government was ready to loosen the purse strings. It includes the covers and some modifications of the aerator system. More investment could be made in the future.

We took a drive around Pond Three, which will remain uncovered and open to sunlight and ambient air temperatures. Hulbert left the truck to retrieve his binoculars—he’s a bit of a bird watcher, too, and ducklings were taking swimming lessons on the pond. “I just love Pond Three,” Vann says. “From the air, it looks like any other lake.”

Vann, who was raised in Soldotna, wasn’t familiar with the riverbed, but she he had no qualms about navigating a city-owned 4x4 pickup down a dirt path to reach it. Or about switching from open-toed pumps to a pair of borrowed boots—she turned down a pair of socks Hulbert brought—and wading through the mixing zone of a sewer plant.

“We don’t have a permit to harass the salmon,” Hulbert tells us. He says we’ll have to leave the fish in the water. “Did you ever see the bear that’s been spotted around here?” Vann asks. Hulbert says he’s seen one with cubs.

We can’t hear the Matanuska River from here. The loudest sound is a trickle from the sewer outfall, which is hemmed off from trespassing by two chain-link fences that run through a slough. Every few minutes the trickle gets louder, building to rushing sound as water tumbles through the rocks in response to pumps we can’t see or hear.

“We found a lot of silvers up here,” Hulbert says. A school of fingerling salmon swim away from his rubber boots. The fish swim from under a grassy dirt-clump hiding place while Hulbert’s steps stir a cloud of slime. He challenges me to find a similar school on the opposite side of the stream, just outside the funnel-shaped mixing zone. I can’t find any. Further downstream I spot loners on three separate occasions, but none of the easy-to-spot schools of fry that hold onto the right bank.

Last fall Ralph and his daughter Ruth gave presentations about the family research project at the Mat-Su Salmon Symposium. It’s a gathering mostly of researchers: geographers, biologists, hydrologists, habitat specialists and the like. A smattering of keenly interested sport fishermen and journalists show up to the event, held at a meeting room inside a fire hall in Wasilla. It’s hosted by the Nature Conservancy and a group called the Mat-Su Basin Salmon Habitat Partnership, which includes local, state and federal government agencies as well as non-governmental groups. The presentations ran a gamut from Curran’s methods for assessing bank erosion on the Matanuska, to a state biologist’s explanation of the pike infestation at Alexander Creek and what might be done about it, to a presentation about replacing culverts and restoring a stream by the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council.

“I’m not qualified. I am not a biologist,” is how Ralph Hulbert introduced himself to the room. He presented his family’s findings using charts and tables projected on a screen and a bit of humor about convincing his family to join the project. One slide is titled “$ Millions to comply, zero to ask why” and explained why the Hulberts embarked on biology survey together. (“Our fish, our town, nobody else volunteered,” the slide says.)

Surveys of salmon fry in the stream show they seem to prefer the mixing zone to other parts of the stream, the family found. (Fry distribution was observed April to November, using still photos blown up on a computer screen to count fish.) The cage study had a near disaster when a channel of the Matanuska joined Sewer Creek and raised its water level. The Hulberts were away at fish camp the week of the flood, and when they returned three cages still had fish in them that survived to the end of the experiment. The fry closest to the outfall had gained more weight than others, presumably from the nutrient-rich waters fertilized by the sewer plant. Both Ralph and his daughter included caveats during their presentation. Ruth’s final conclusion on fish counts: “This needs further study.” Her dad’s second-to-last slide includes these words: “Teach your children—we’ll be at this awhile.”

The slide presentations were just a thumbnail sketch of the work. Ralph is currently putting the finishing touches on two written reports that combine his knowledge of the water chemistry of the mixing zone with the salmon observations.

Any observer could see that government regulations sometimes chafe at Hulbert’s sense of what’s right. But after our field trip last week, Ralph tells me it’s not all about the EPA and state of Alaska regulators. “There are some really good technocrats, some good biologists, it’s just that they work in a system,” he says. He says the system prefers laboratory findings—ammonia can kill fish eggs in the lab—to field research: Ammonia can fertilize a stream. The system, he says, also wants to apply the same standards to every stream, from the Mississippi to the Matanuska, instead of looking at the individual streams to see with might harm or benefit can be done. “That type of feedback loop is what’s missing from the regulatory process. They don’t take a holistic look at the problem.”

I returned the rubber boots and polarized sunglasses to the back of Ralph’s 4x4 mini-van and asked if one summer on a creek can really pass as science.

“I try to make the point that this is just screening level observations,” he says. “When you have no budget, all you can do is look at the obvious.” Salmon like the nutrient-rich waters at the sewer outfall, he says. The implication is that changing the nutrient mix might change that. “They like it, they prefer it by magnitudes, and third: they grow larger,” he says.