After skirting the north end of Kenai Lake, you enter scenic Cooper Landing at Mile 48.4. The picturesque outpost, named for Joseph Cooper, a miner who worked the area in the 1880s, is best known for its rich and brutal combat salmon fishing along the Russian and Kenai Rivers. While rustic log-cabin lodges featuring giant fish freezers are still the lifeblood of this town, the trails and whitewater rafting opportunities attract a very different sort of tourist. Businesses plying fine dining, chakra alignment and other organic amusements are finding fertile ground among the towering mountains.
Category: Alaska Toursim
This fireweed-lined, forest-flanked corridor parallels the languid Chena River 56 miles east off the Steese Hwy to the Chena Hot Springs Resort, the closest to Fairbanks and also the most developed. The road is paved and in good condition. From Mile 26 to Mile 51 it passes through Chena River State Recreation Area, a 397-sq-mile preserve encompassing the river valley and nearby alpine areas and has some of the Fairbanks area’s best hiking, canoeing and fishing.
This small village serves as the major departure point to the Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve. Founded by Gordon C Bettles in 1900 as a trading post, Bettles was originally 6 miles down the middle fork of the Koyukuk River. Riverboats would work their way up the Koyukuk and unload their supplies in Bettles. The supplies were then transported to smaller scows and horsedrawn barges. The smaller boats would then take the cargo to the mining country further upriver.
Barrow is the northernmost settlement in the USA, the largest Inupiat community in Alaska, and one of the most distinctive places you’ll likely ever visit. Situated 330 miles above the Arctic Circle, it’s a flat, bleak, fogbound place, patrolled by polar bears and locked in almost perpetual winter. It’s also a town of surprising contradictions.
The lone settlement on Admiralty Island is Angoon, a predominantly Tlingit community. Tlingit tribes occupied the site for centuries, but the original village was wiped out in 1882 when the US Navy, sailing out of Sitka, bombarded the indigenous people after they staged an uprising against a local whaling company. In 1973 Angoon won a $90, 000 out-of-court settlement from the Federal government for the bombardment.
Anchorage offers the comforts of a large US city but is only a 30-minute drive from the Alaskan wilderness. Founded in 1914 as a work camp for the Alaska Railroad, the city was devastated by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake but quickly rebounded as the industry headquarters for the Prudhoe Bay oil boom. Today almost half the state’s residents live in or around the city, as Anchorage serves as the economic and political heart of Alaska. Sorry, Juneau.
Remote, rarely visited and extremely expensive to do so, the Aleutian Islands is a jagged arc where the Pacific plate of the earth’s crust is violently forcing its way under the North American plate.
Only 15 miles southeast of Juneau is Admiralty Island National Monument, a 1493-sq-mile preserve, of which 90% is designated wilderness. The Tlingit Indians, who know Admiralty Island as Kootznoowoo, ‘the Fortress of Bears, ‘ have lived on the 96-mile-long island for more than 1000 years.