At this fly-in lodge, everyone has salmon on the brain. Including some 900-pound guys who really need a shave.

In Katmai National Park on the Alaskan peninsula, spring begins in June. That’s when the icy landscape starts to break up and droves of Pacific salmon — sockeye, chum, pink, silver and Chinook — navigate the long distance from the ocean to the tundra’s thawing tributaries.

Ask any experienced fly fisherman, and he’ll tell you: There’s fishing, and there’s fishing in Alaska. And if the 900-pound grizzlies that can be seen tearing into that rosy salmon flesh all summer long could speak, they would certainly agree. But not all lodges set up to access this mating, fishing and feeding frenzy are created equal.

Standing a cut above the rest is Kulik Lodge, a riverbank enclave located squarely in the middle of nowhere. It’s one of three renowned Anglers’ Paradise Lodges that opened in 1950, when Ray Petersen, a pioneering bush pilot and avid fisherman, set up the first tent camps to drum up business for his burgeoning airline.

These days, accommodations at Kulik (now run by Ray’s son Sonny) are 12 comfortable, modern, two-person cabins spread out over 100 acres. Top-flight amenities include a native-spruce great lodge with a grand-stone fireplace, five floatplanes, 30 boats, an accomplished chef, sauna, full open bar and all the Sage rods, Ross reels and Simms waders you’ll ever need.

You’ll know you’re headed for something special the moment you abandon the last thing resembling a road for 60 miles and board the lodge’s eight-seat Piper Navajo at the King Salmon Airport.

A 30-minute flight takes you over a kaleidoscope of forests, lowland marshes, snow-capped mountains and mile after mile of gin-clear, gravel-bottomed rivers, then deposits you at the intersection of Nonvianuk Lake and the Kulik River, where the enormous rainbow trout are so spirited, their jumping actually makes the waters look as though they’re boiling.

Afterward, you’ll be paired with a guide who will wake you each morning at 5 a.m. to take you to your fly-out destinations — up to another 100 miles into the wilderness. But don’t be too proud to have him stop at least once, just 25 miles away, at Brooks Falls, otherwise known as the Greatest Feeding Grizzly Show on Earth. “It’s so clichéd,” Sonny says. “We were in a Geico commercial, for God’s sake.”  Kulik Lodge: 800-544-0551; katmailand.com

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