Rained in the night (again!) Still overcast and rainy in the am. Heading down below Anchorage to the little town of Hope. It's quite aways away but since it's raining..why not! And the fishing?...we'll see!
I guess I should say here that this first part of our trip was planned to be very unstructured..no reservations so we could just go wherever we wanted to. And this week was mostly about fishing! And off grid bank fishing as well...no guides, no boat, just feeling our way around. We'll get to the other more touristy stuff when our good friends Kim and Terry fly in and we meet up with them. (Apologies to my brother Paul for posting more information on Salmon than he needed to know!) But....
"Alaska is the ninth biggest seafood-producing region in the world, with 80 percent of high-value wild salmon species originating from its waters. The state of Alaska's commercial fishery management harvest more than 29 million fish each year. Serious anglers will have their pick from pink, chum, sockeye, silver and king salmon, if they know which months to arrive." (and those months vary from year to year, depending on many things: snowfall and spring runoff etc...so if you are planning a trip a year in advance..it's just the luck of the draw!)
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| Turnagain Arm |
To get to Hope we needed to go through Anchorage and around the Turnagain Arm (a portion of the Cook Inlet) app. a 4 hour trip. The scenery was beautiful. The road and railroad follows the shore quite closely. There are many pull offs which are needed. This is the only road to get to the Kenai Peninsula and the traffic is heavy. We saw 2 beluga whales but were unable to get a picture because of the traffic! Hope has a population of app 190 year round residents although there are seasonal homes.
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| Commercial District in Hope! The SeaView Cafe |
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| Hope Community Library |
We met a woman and her husband who are year round residents and they told us a lot about the history of the area as well as what it's like living there. She is a cook at one of the few local restaurants as well as the librarian and makes and sells jewelry as a fund raiser for the Library. (Her husband is retired from the Highway Department and now works for FEMA on a contractual basis. He was in NY (Oneonta) a few years ago for FEMA. The school in Hope has app 50 students K-12. When her children were in school, an option was to send them to High School in Soldotna (about 90 miles away) She would drive them to Cooper Landing about a hour away where they would pick up a school bus to take them the rest of the way. They would stay for the week in dormitories provided by the local school district. (Reminded me of Uncle Willie, age 92, who spent some years as a child in Sabattis,NY when his father worked for the Railroad. He would take the train to Old Forge for school on a Sunday night , stay the week with his grandparents and then back to Sabattis on the train on Friday after school. That was 80 some years ago...)
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| Hope Airport |
Drove around the side roads and came across a moose just munching away on the side of the road. She was not fazed by us at all, looked at us once and just kept right on munching.
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| View from our campsite |
And it poured all night long.
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