A normally reserved Sen. Maria Cantwell was exchanging bear hugs with fishermen in Seattle on Friday, hours after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to stop a mammoth proposed mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, on grounds it would threaten the world’s greatest salmon fishery.

Cantwell took the fishing industry’s cause, framed the Pebble Mine debate in economic terms, and pressured the EPA to send its scientists into the field and scope out impacts of the mine. They did, and the impacts were many and frightening.

At a time when members of Congress are held in low esteem, exceptions deserve to be noted.

The two “Gentle Ladies from Washington,” Cantwell and Sen. Patty Murray, have recreated the one-two punch of two guys who together represented Washington in the U.S. Senate from 1953 to 1980, Sens. Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson.

Murray is the state’s provider, a senior power on the Senate Appropriations Committee, once chaired by Magnuson. She holds Maggie’s old Senate seat. Doing double duty, Murray is also chair of the Senate Budget Committee.

The federal purse strings were looser in Maggie’s time. The canny senator secured money for the great third powerhouse at Grand Coulee Dam, which heats and lights Northwest homes during cold, dark winter days. But Murray has secured bucks for such projects as Sound Transit’s light rail to Sea-Tac Airport.

Cantwell barely won Jackson’s old seat in 2000, but was recently reelected to a third term in 2012 by a landslide majority.

Jackson was a legislator, the architect of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act. He defied the Nixon administration’s “detente” policy with the Soviet Union with the Jackson-Vanik amendment that linked emigration of Soviet Jews to increased trade ties. Moscow hated him.

Jackson was a workaholic, once even taking time off from his Hawaiian honeymoon to visit headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and receive a briefing on the Soviet Union’s growing naval presence in the Pacific.

Likewise, Cantwell. She works and she works out. The senator’s vacations in recent years have been spent scaling Mt. Rainier, summiting the Grand Teton in Wyoming, and reaching the 19,360-foot summit of Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro.

She has inherited a lot of heavy lifting. Cantwell was an architect of the 2010 Wall Street reform bill, insisting on a strong consumer agency and making herself an expert in the eye-glazing field of derivatives.

She has taken up complicated stuff, from closing the gap in radar coverage of storms sweeping in off the Pacific, to ocean acidification that threatens Washington’s $300 million-a-year shellfish industry, to the threat to Northwest ports as they face emboldened competitors from Prince Rupert, B.C., to Charleston, South Carolina.

Cantwell has twice been an impact player on key Alaska decisions.

In 2005, then-Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, tried to use a defense spending bill to open the coastal plan of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and roads. Uncle Ted’s reasoning: No Senator would dare organize a filibuster to block defense bill.

Cantwell took his dare, and the Arctic Wildlife Refuge was spared. Stevens did a memorable nut out on the Senate floor, threatening to come into Washington and campaign against Cantwell. He did, and she won reelection in 2006 by the biggest margin of a Washington Senator since “Scoop” Jackson was on the ballot.

After Hurricane Katrina, House Republican leaders came up with legislation to encourage construction of more oil refineries. A hidden-away provision have lifted the prohibition of supertankers on Puget Sound (written, years ago, by Magnuson) and other protection against oil spills.

Cantwell helped squelch the legislation while it was still in the House, with help from Reps. Jay Inslee and Dave Reichert.

With the proposed Pebble Mine, Cantwell stood a frequent developers’ argument on its ear. The mine’s assault on a pristine environment would have damaged the economy. The commercial, sport and native fishery of Bristol Bay is a $500 million-a-year business and supports 14,000 full and part time jobs. About 1,100 Puget Sound-area fishers have licenses in Bristol Bay.

The senator helped stitch together a coalition that included sport and commercial fishing interests, the restaurant industry, even major jewelry outfits — Tiffany and Ben Bridge — which pledged they would never buy gold from the Pebble Mine.

The EPA is using its authority under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act, setting in motion a process to bar the Alaska mine project due to its detrimental impacts on river and wetland systems that support 46 percent of the world’s sockeye salmon fishery.

With Washington, D.C. burdened down with show horses — folks like Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and various crazy Texas congressmen — it’s sometimes hard to appreciate that the capital still has work horses. Magnuson once loved drawing the show horse-work horse distinction.

Our “Gentle ladies” are among the workers.

Murray had her victory when she ironed out a budget compromise with Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, chair of the House Budget Committee, that lifted painful sequestration and put an end to spending and debt crises at least until March of 2015.

Cantwell can celebrate giving the Pebble Mine a rocky future. She won’t have much time, sitting on three A-list Senate committees — Finance, Commerce and Natural Resources — and having just become chair of the Senate Small Business Committee.

She’s climbing.