Kenai Peninsula

Some years back, over 10 years ago, I made my one and only trip to Alaska. I was meeting with some FAA folks in Anchorage. One of them had a boat is Seward and offered one night after work to take me along to go check it.

I remember it was late winter and all the mountains were deep in snow. One of the things that struck me was snowmobilers. They would race up the sides of the mountains until they couldn't go any more, sometimes causing an avalanche and they try to outrace the wall of snow coming down at them. But mostly I remember the mountains.

Seward is basically on the southeast corner of the Kenai Peninsula, and Homer is on the southwest. In going to Homer, I was expecting it to be like going to Seward, with mountains the entire way. The eastern half of the peninsula is more like the Southwest Washington coast with Cook Inlet instead of the ocean.

And Homer is a sport fishing, tourist town. There is a several mile long spit south of town where all the charter boat shacks and tourist shops are. Halibut was the big thing while I was there.

I ended up staying on the Deep Creek Beach, about half way between Soldotna and Homer. It was a great spot and I stayed 5 days. Part of the entertainment there was watching the boat launching operation. They launch fishing boats, including large charter boats, right of the beach with these huge tractors.

But the real entertainment was watching them retrieve the boats. The boats come towards the beach at a rather high speed when their trailer is in the water.

And they don't really slow down much until they literally ram the boat onto the trailer. Look at the bow wave and wake of this boat. This boat is moving right along when it hits the trailer!

And then up the beach it goes to the parking area. Over the years I've seen hundreds of boats being gingerly put on trailers at boat ramps. This however is the brute force method. And they're quick. The whole process only took about 10 minutes. And they had 4 tractors available to do this. That's about 25 boats in an hour!

I have yet to have the weather be clear for an entire day since I've come to Alaska. The locals tell me that it actually does happen, but I”m beginning to doubt it. This is the view across Cook Inlet from my camping spot at Deep Creek Beach. Once in a while the clouds will lift high enough that I can see the mountains.

The eagles in the area love it here and there are lots of them. The reason being that all remains from the fish cleaning end up dumped on the beach. I was lucky enough to catch this eagle making off with one of the carcases.

After Deep Creek Beach I found this great little campsite on Peterson Lake about 20 miles east of Soldotna. You pass through Soldotna on the way to Homer. Soldotna is probable the third most populated area in the state with the Anchorage area first and Fairbanks second.

I love this picture as it brings back some really fond memories of our young kids trying to row us around in our dinghies. Just like us, they went around in circles most of the time. The parents were very patient, but the mom couldn't resist giggling.

There was a pair of loons residing on the lake.

And about once a day, a moose would appear at the lake not far from my camp. This one had her baby with her.

One night the sun started to set below the clouds which lead to this remarkable scene of the island on the lake.

And since it was the evening of the Fourth of July, Mother Nature decided later to light the sky with some fireworks. This was around 11pm.

I had such a great spot on Peterson Lake that I stayed for over a week. It was about 20 miles to Soldotna and maybe 10 the other direction to the mountains. I got several good hikes and motorcycle rides in. This hike was along the Kenai River at the edge of the mountains.

Another hike was up to the Russian River Falls. The Russian River is famous for it's salmon runs. When the salmon are running you can watch them jumping up the falls. I understand that many of the pictures of bears catching salmon are from these falls. As luck would have it, I was between the two main runs, about 10 days after the first and 10 days before the second. Oh Well! I did try my had at fishing the river a couple of days though. I wasn't lucky, but I did see a couple of fishermen catch a salmon. And I saw several bears along the river! They seem to be used to people also fishing the river, but that didn't make me feel any better.

My last day on the peninsula I road the motorcycle to Seward. On the way I road into the edge of the Kenai Fjords National Park where the Exit Glacier is. It is really the only part of the park that you can drive to. This seems to be the rule for national parks in Alaska. If you can drive into one, it is just to the edge and probably along a dirt road at that.

Like Homer, Valdez, Haines, and Skagway, Seward sits in a spectacular setting. When I was there many years ago, there was the downtown area, just two blocks, and that was about it. The marina had a harbor master's office with a few boat yards. The marina area now is like the Homer Spit, tourist shops (cruise ships come there now), restaurants and some charter fishing outfits. What a change. Although the downtown area hasn't changed much.

Well, this will go down as one of the longest blogs. Kenai was fun. Anchorage is fortunate, like Seattle, to have several playgrounds in it's back yard Except the Anchorage area is much smaller than the Seattle area, and it's playground much larger. I could have maybe stayed a couple of more days, but I'm also excited to get one with some more Alaska exploring. If I ever make it back to Alaska, I'll have to arrange it to be on the Russian River during one of the salmon runs.