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.
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 54,563km 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. Twenty-four kilometers 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, a 29km 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 from 10°C - 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 203km between Anchorage and Seward, and the Sterling Highway, which cuts west off the Seward Highway 145km south of Anchorage then turns south along the peninsula's west coast to Homer, covering 254km.
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