Cruising in Alaska, This Time on Land

North America > United States > Alaska > Homer

By DAVID LASKIN

The New York Times
Published: July 22, 2007

Heading out to Homer Spit, at the end of the Sterling Highway.

THE first time I gazed on the storied coast of Alaska I was standing lens-to-lens with dozens of my fellow passengers on the deck of a cruise ship. To say we were bowled over would be a serious understatement. Mountain after mountain, each streaked with a different pattern of snow, exploded from a silver-gray sea into a gray-silver sky — and it all seemed to go on forever. The engines churned, the ship sailed on and the spectacular beauty kept rolling by.

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But after a while, I wanted more than scenery. I wanted, well, Alaska: Wildlife sightings without a score of whirring shutters. Hikes without a sign-up sheet. Random, unscripted encounters with people and places. Silence. Solitude.

I wanted to see some of Alaska's 33,904 miles of coast without having to strain against a ship's safety rail. I wanted to get out on the road and drive, to see the beauty of the Last Frontier up close and at my own pace.

Though most visitors see Alaska from the deck of a cruise ship, the reality is that this state, despite its lack of highways and abundance of challenging terrain, can be the setting for a perfect road trip — one that takes the driver through canyons carved by jade-green rivers, along deserted beaches teeming with shellfish and shorebirds and past century-old miners' cabins and dark bars serving up cool mugs of amber brews.

So, earlier this summer, my wife, Kate, and I set out on a six-day journey in a rented Chevy Cobalt, on a route that formed a rough arc through the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. Just 20 minutes after leaving the Anchorage airport, heading south on Seward Highway, we got our first payoff at Turnagain Arm, the dark, tapered fjord that separates the Chugach Range from the mountains and lakes of the Kenai (pronounced KEY-nigh).

I'd never seen mountains so big rising so close to salt water; I'd never seen so many peaks so close to a city; I'd never felt so dwarfed by highway scenery. Fifteen miles into the trip, I'd already exhausted my supply of superlatives.

The plan for that afternoon was to head toward a little town called Hope, an 18-mile detour off the Seward Highway on the far side of Turnagain Arm, and stop on the way there for a whitewater raft trip down Sixmile Creek. Kate was game, but my resolve got a little wobbly when the temperature refused to budge out of the low 50s — and it collapsed altogether once we scrambled down a rough path to the river bank and I got a look at the rapids slamming against the canyon walls.

“You know they lose three or four every year from those rafts,” Jim Tudor told me later as we stood by the stove in the Hope-Sunrise Historical Society and Mining Museum, where he is a docent, and talked about the gold rush days that got the town going in the 1890s. Who needs class V rapids when you can while away an afternoon peering at old photos, stuffed owls and gold nuggets?

Downtown Hope — a bar, a store, magpies singing from big clumps of Alaska elderberry and a collection of quaint log cabins set back from an immense tidal flat on Turnagain Arm — was pretty much deserted. But someone must love the place dearly because these cabins have withstood more than a century of Alaska weather in pristine condition.

NOT counting spurs and side roads, there are only two highways that serve the Kenai: the Seward Highway, which runs more or less north-south for 127 miles between Anchorage and Seward, and the Sterling Highway, which cuts west off the Seward Highway 90 miles south of Anchorage then turns south along the peninsula's west coast to Homer, covering 158 miles.
Cooper Landing, 11 miles west of the junction of the Sterling and Seward Highways in the middle of the peninsula, seemed like a good place to stop for the first night. Anyway, I liked the sound of the name.

Aside from its stunning location where the long snaking Kenai Lake flows into the milky green Kenai River, the town isn't much to look at. A series of cabins equipped with fish freezers and billboards boasting of fishing and rafting trips, Cooper Landing is all about bagging big salmon — and since the fish hadn't appeared yet, there wasn't much going on. What to do on a gray, drizzly morning?

“Drive out to Skilak Lake Road,” suggested a woman who worked at the Kenai Princess Wilderness Lodge, where we spent the night, describing how to pick up the rutted dirt road that cuts through a corner of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge west of town. “This is where the locals take their guests to see bears.”

No bears were spotted in the course of the drive, though there was a striking change in scenery. No sooner had the billboards of Cooper Landing disappeared than the jagged peaks that had encircled us since Anchorage relaxed into smooth ridges and rounded humps rising from wide glassy waters. Trail signs beckoned every few miles, and so, despite the dreary weather and elevated threat level for bears, we decided to take a hike.

A helpful sign at the start of the 2.6-mile Skilak Lookout Trail explained in graphic detail how to “resolve” all manner of ursine encounters. Singing loudly to alert lurking bears to the presence of a couple of out-of-tune idiots, we set off into the dripping underbrush.

Charred stumps left by a 1996 fire made for a rather somber walk. But the burn did open up glorious views to Skilak Lake (as well as good sight lines to approaching bears) and cleared the way for meadows starred with lupine, bunch berry, Jacob's ladder and purple mountain saxifrage, all in full bloom. We saw but a single raft drifting on the lake below — a dot of blue in a brooding immensity of black, green and gray.

(Had we been there later that month, we would have seen the smoke from a 72,000-acre fire that burned for days southwest of there and destroyed scores of homes).

By the end of the hike we became rather lax about bear patrol and even regretted that we'd encountered no wildlife more thrilling than the celestial-voiced Swainson's thrush and some seagulls, which fly inland to feed on young salmon in the gravelly shallows of Hidden Creek.

Back in the car, though, luck was with us. A mile or two down the road, two black shapes — from a distance they looked like very fat round Labrador retrievers — resolved themselves into adolescent bears. They paused to scope out our car and then beat it back into the underbrush.
Luck, as it turned out, really was with us. A week later, a bear mauled a family's dog right in this area and then turned on the dog's owner, who shot the bear with a .44 Magnum. According to John Morton, supervisory biologist at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, about 25 bears are killed each year on the Kenai Peninsula by people protecting life or property.

Backtracking east on the Sterling Highway, we stopped for coffee and pie at a sprawling 1950s log compound of roadhouse, espresso stand, cabins, grocery store and gift shop called Gwin's Lodge. I half expected a chorus of kids in coonskin caps to break into the “Davy Crockett” theme as we settled in beside the gumball machine.

Every guy in the room was trying to make time with a pretty pig-tailed waitress from Arkansas. She kept talking about how crazy things were going get in a few days with the start of combat fishing — a peculiar Alaska ritual in which fisher folk stand cooler-to-cooler at the confluence of the Russian and Kenai Rivers to prey on the incredible runs of sockeye. “That's when we stay open 24 hours a day,” she said.

Forty minutes later, after a stunning drive down from Cooper Landing, we hit the outskirts of Seward: strip malls, fish-processing plants, a reamed out river bed. “This place seems to have every conceivable horror,” Kate remarked as she spotted our hotel across from a gas station.
I'm usually the upbeat one, but even I had to admit that Seward looked depressing.

What we didn't see is that on the other side of the commercial crud, the Small Boat Harbor was humming with fishing boats and pleasure craft, and beyond that a panorama of glacier-splotched mountains rose from Resurrection Bay. Happily, I had sprung for a room facing the harbor.

The next morning, with the view shrouded in low clouds, we drove a half-mile south to Seward's other hub — an older, slightly less touristy downtown of gift shops, bars, restaurants and hotels. We stopped for coffee at an old church that has been born again as the Resurrect Art Coffee House Gallery. Amid the bulletin board postings for American tribal-style belly dancing, carrot cake and shawls, I stumbled on a volume entitled “Wilderness” by the artist Rockwell Kent about a 1918 sojourn with his 9-year-old son on Fox Island across the bay.

Kent's descriptions and paintings of mountains and glaciers soaring out of the sea in intoxicating fauvist colors persuaded me that I had to get out on the water. The easiest (and, short of kayaking, cheapest) way to do this was to take one of the cruises to Kenai Fjords National Park that embark from the Small Boat Harbor. Six hours was more time than I wanted to spend breathing engine fumes with a hundred-plus tourists, but the shorter cruises did not get to the glaciers or the best of the wildlife. So I took a deep breath and climbed aboard.

About 10 minutes out of port, the clouds broke up and a humpback whale surfaced into the suddenly sparkling air. Seeing and hearing a plume of whale spray rise and dissipate against the snowy mountains was goose-bump-raising magic, and the rest of the cruise followed suit. Sea lions dived off rocks like obese mermaids; tufted puffins buzzed nesting sites on sheer cliffs; orcas flipped their glistening black tails; porpoises, kittiwakes and common murres circled the exquisite granite formations of the Chiswell Islands.

About three hours in, we approached the blue crenellated wall of Holgate Glacier through a bay of icebergs. The captain cut the engines and the passengers stood in silence as Holgate cracked, gasped and released chunks of its face into the ocean. It was as if we were worshipping at a vanishing frozen shrine.

The next morning, it was raining, so instead of a hike we opted for the Alaska SeaLife Center. I had read that this marine-animal research and rehabilitation facility was partly financed by the settlement of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, so I came braced for a long, pious immersion in marine ecology. But I was practically elbowing tots out of the way to get a better view of puffins and guillemots torpedoing to the bottom of a bird habitat dive tank. Who knew that seabirds flew underwater?

As we drove out of town, Kate wondered why I hadn't allotted more time for the wonders of Seward.

Our next stop was Homer, the end of the road in the southwest corner of the Kenai Peninsula. But first we made a wet backtrack through Cooper Landing and then a long trek south through a series of cheerless lowland outposts hawking antler carvings, knives, “show girls” and soft ice cream. The first picturesque thing we came to was the old Transfiguration of Our Lord Russian Orthodox Church on a rise above the village of Ninilchik — white clapboard, green trim, gold-painted onion domes and heart-stopping views to the volcanoes across Cook Inlet.

HOMER, 40 miles farther south, has something of the same stark beauty, but the sharp, clean maritime atmosphere has a funky espresso overlay. The town has artists and galleries galore, terrific restaurants, stupendous views of wide water and high mountains, but it's not exactly postcard pretty. The four-and-a-half-mile spit that pokes into Kachemak Bay swarms with fish joints, halibut charters, rowdy bars and souvenir shops, but it's too rough and too weird to be a tourist trap.

Too hilly for easy biking, often too windy to kayak and with annoying traffic downtown, Homer nonetheless casts a powerful spell. It's like a stripped down, maritime, far-north cousin to Santa Fe.

Since the day was dry with patches of blue sky we decided to grab a water taxi and head across the bay to Kachemak Bay State Park — 400,000 acres of mountains, glaciers, pebble beaches, trails and lagoons. The plan was to hike from the Glacier Spit Trailhead to the Grewingk Glacier Lake, admire the glacier, and return via the Saddle Trail, making a nearly five-mile loop ending at Halibut Cove. The water taxi driver promised to collect us four hours later.

We were five minutes into the woods when thrashing in the brush froze us in our tracks; a moose glared through the tree trunks, shambled a few feet, glared again. Ten minutes later, the same thing — only this time it was a bear. I summoned what I could remember of the advice on that sign near Skilak Lake: look big, back away slowly, don't run.

The bear, black and smallish but still formidable, did not charge but neither did it flee. At some point, we regained the equanimity to turn our backs and continue the hike, which passed uneventfully — if you can call four hours in the company of bald eagles, wildflowers, flickering cottonwoods and a lake flowing from the mouth of a glacier and floating an armada of crystalline icebergs uneventful.

When the water taxi arrived, there was another passenger on board, a youngish, somewhat nervous Englishman who was planning to camp and kayak alone in the park. Part of me was envious — we were heading home while he was looking forward to days by himself in all of this.
“We saw a moose not a hundred yards off the beach,” I told the fellow as he hauled his gear off the boat. “And a bear just beyond. Pretty bold.”

It pleased me no end to see his eyes widen and a muscle work in his jaw.

“You know, many more people get hurt and killed by moose than by bears,” the water taxi driver remarked as we were zipping back across the bay. “They get mad and stomp and kick you. Of course, if there are two of you and you split up, a moose just gets confused and leaves you both alone. They're that dumb.”

Something to ponder over a farewell beer on the Homer Spit.

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE.

A recent Web search found round-trip flights from New York-area airports to Anchorage (none direct) in early August around $600. Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport has the usual car rental agencies. We rented a Chevy Cobalt from National for $373 for six days (with an AAA discount).

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Tito's Discovery Cafe (at mile 16.5 on the Hope Highway, 907-782-3274) is just outside of Hope. A wrap (blackened salmon or vegetable) or a reindeer sausage sub will set you back about $10 to $12.

Gwin's Lodge (Milepost 52, Sterling Highway, Cooper Landing; 907-595-1266; http://www.gwinslodge.com/) serves meals round the clock during combat fishing season (mid June to mid August). The menu is old-fashioned roadhouse fare: burgers ($7.50 to $12.95), fish sandwiches, pie, coffee, beer. Dinner entrees from $16.95.

Ray's Waterfront (1316 Fourth Avenue, Seward; 907-224-5606), overlooking the Small Boat Harbor, is reputed to have the freshest seafood in Seward. Main courses feature halibut cheeks ($19.95), cedar planked salmon ($25.95) and seafood linguine ($25.95).

From the outside, Fat Olives, on the outskirts of Homer (276 Ohlson Lane, 907-235-8488), may look like an auto repair shop, but inside it's all earth tones, corrugated tin and cool light fixtures. The food is also quite cool: a shellfish sampler, pizzas from a wood-fired oven, rib-eye steaks. Expect to pay $60 to $70 for dinner for two without drinks.

The Salty Dawg Saloon (http://www.saltydawgsaloon.com/) on the Homer Spit is where tourists and locals drink, sing, and get silly. For a quiet beer and good pizza, try Finn's (Cannery Row Boardwalk, 907-235-2878) across the way on the Spit.

WHERE TO STAY

Kenai Princess Wilderness Lodge (800-426-0500; http://www.princesslodges.com/) sits on a hillside above the river in Cooper Landing. The rooms, spread out beneath the trees in low-slung buildings, have a somewhat corporate feel. Doubles are $239 in summer.

Holiday Inn Express Seward (1412 Fourth Avenue; 907-224-2550; http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/) has some of the best harbor views. A double with a harbor view costs $269.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Alaska Saltwater Lodge (907-224-5271, http://www.alaskasaltwaterlodge.com/), a family-run waterside hotel two miles south of Seward on Lowell Point Road. This is a great place to rent a kayak, stroll on the pebble beach, arrange for a water taxi out to the national park or start a hike. A water-view room in the lodge costs $169; the Lowell Point cottage, across the street, sleeps eight, a bargain at $189 a night.

n Homer, the Ocean Shores Motel (3500 Crittenden Drive; 800-770-7775; http://www.akoceanshores.com/) has great views, easy beach access and motel-style accommodations just outside of town. Spring for the more expensive lower unit closer to the beach ($189 for a double) — the view off the balcony is worth it.

Even more breathtaking views open up from the cabins at the Alaskan Suites (3255 Sterling Highway, Homer; 888-239-1972; http://www.alaskansuites.com/). Each unit has two queen beds, a wide-screen TV and a small kitchen; $225 in summer.

DAVID LASKIN, a regular contributor, wrote about bird-watching on St. Paul Island, Alaska, for the Travel section in 2005.