Days 79-80 Homer to Captain Cook State Park

Homer to Captain Cook via Sterling

After three nights in a Homer parking lot, it was time to move on. Up in the northwest corner of the Kenai Peninsula is the Captain Cook State Park. This is where we ended up.

But frst it was back to Soldatna and a detour (for us) to Sterling. On the way to Soldatna, Ellen and I stopped at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge visitor center just outside of town. It was another impressive modern visitor center. We had nothing like this or the one in Homer on any of the refuges we'd volunteered at. Maybe the size and scope of the visitor center is inversely related to the accessibility of the refuge itself. Both of the Alaska refuges were mostly inaccessible, where Aransas had easy access and a big tour loop and Buenos Aires was virtually wide open with lots of unpaved roads through it.

It was then on to Solatna for a bit of serious provisioning at the Fred Myers store. After Fred Myers, we drove on to Sterling with Harry and Sally. They had booked a Kenai River fishing charter for the next day. The folks at Big Sky Fish Camp said they could just park there overnight. When we got there, they said we could stay as well, even though we weren't going fishing. It was quite crowded with a bunch of cabins and several trailers, so we decided to move on and left Harry and Sally to catch salmon.

We headed back to Soldatna and then north to the Capt. Cook State Park at the end of the road on the Cook Inlet above Nikiski and found a nice site in the half-full campground and relaxed. We finished up our halibut with a delicious halibut chowder for dinner.

It rained over night, but had stopped by the morning. We walked the beach in the morning. Not many birds out on Cook Inlet except a few gulls. The sea birds we found at Homer don't seem to come up this far. At this point, the water is very silty, not a good spot for diving sea birds. After our morning walk, we found another site with an empty one next to it. We moved to it for a bit better view and the possibility that it would remain open through the day.

After moving into the new site, we walked along the  cliff edge path above the beach, just behind the campsite. I wanted to find the mouth of the Swanson River. On the map, it looked like it ran just behind the end of the campground loop. We had seen people fishing as we crossed a bridge over it on our way in yesterday. By that time the tide had gone out and Cook Inlet had about a mile or two of mud flats between the beach and the water. When we found the river, we also found that it was  a 100 feet straight down and had at least a 20 foot high mud bank at low tide. Not exactly a good fishing hole.

Harry and Sally arrived mid-afternoon bearing fresh Sockeye salmon. They'd each caught two on their fishing trip and brought some to share. Grilled salmon was enjoyed by all (even Nina, who got the crispy skin).