There are moments or places on rivers that feel like portals, like openings to other realms. And then there are communities, human hamlets that are, themselves, gateways to rivers. We get excited about doing our pre-trip rounds through town, and we come to associate particular grocery or liquor stores, gas stations or city parks with the river trip itself. We find our favorite campgrounds or motels to stay at the night before launch and our favorite splurgy dinners out before days of eating from coolers.
In this short series, we highlight four river gateway towns. These are places I’ve come to know over repeated visits, before or after private trips, commercial trips, or the occasional field course. Surely you have— or will have— your own experiences, your own anecdotes, memories, and impressions of these spaces between spaces, these sentinel communities that buzz at the brinks of beloved rivers.
The liminal quality of a portal, a gateway, is quite precious, as it demarcates the space between experiences, between realities. It’s good to pay attention to these in-between spaces, to notice ourselves within them, to spend a little time there before moving in one direction or another. With that, let’s spend a little time in Hope, Alaska.
Hope, a history
Imagine traveling to Alaska by ship from the south. The wide-open and blue Pacific turns steely grey as you round your last corner, cutting inland from the Gulf of Alaska as you pass by Kodiak Island to the north. The water of the Cook Inlet separates the Kenai Peninsula from Katmai, Anchorage from the Susitna. And as it extends further inland, the Cook Inlet eventually branches into two arms, Knik to the north, and Turnagain to the south. Big glacial rivers empty into the Arms and the Inlet, and the water here is brackish, metallic. Silty river water swirling with the sea.
I grew up on the north side of the Knik Arm, but Turnagain Arm might be my favorite place in all of Alaska. From Anchorage, you can drive east and vaguely south along the Seward Highway, paralleling for almost 50 miles the mudflats or water or ice of the Arm, all of it shimmering in various shades of gunmetal. (The Inlet’s tidal mudflats are alluring if not dangerous to hapless humans. They also host an important intertidal, interstitial ecosystem.)
Depending on the season, you might see Dall sheep, moose, black bear, or belugas. The peaks of the Chugach Range rise all around you; in winter, when conditions are right, the skiing here is superlative.
As you wrap around Turnagain Arm from the Anchorage side, you’ll pass Girdwood, then Portage and eventually, you’ll see a sign welcoming you to the Kenai Peninsula. You’ll go up and over Turnagain Pass, coming down the other side into the Sixmile Valley. If you turn back north to follow the Sixmile Creek to its mouth, you’ll arrive at the southern shore of Turnagain Arm. And here you’ll find the wind-worn remnants of two twin mining settlements with the dreamiest of names: Sunrise and Hope.
In 1896, on the front end of the Klondike frenzy, ships brought 3,000 rabid gold prospectors to Cook Inlet. The camps they built at the mouths of Resurrection Creek and Sixmile Creek were called Hope and Sunrise, respectively. The next year, as the Klondike stampede raged toward the Yukon, a few thousand more prospectors arrived at Cook Inlet. In the summer of 1898, there were 8,000 gold seekers on Cook Inlet. For a few weeks that season, Sunrise (then population 800) was the largest city in Alaska.
By 1905, Hope and Sunrise began to lose residents and government offices to the new population center of Seward, 70 miles to the south. After a deadly avalanche, numerous structure fires, and the death of the last permanent resident in a 1939 boating accident, Sunrise essentially faded away. Perhaps 14 people live there now.
Hope, just a few miles west, managed to diversify their revenue streams beyond mining to grow root crops and apples in the fertile soil of the Resurrection Creek valley. For about 70 years, the year-round population of Hope hovered around 50 people. Today, there may be between 130 and 250 residents, depending on who you ask. You can still buy a mining claim along Sixmile or Resurrection Creek. (Going rate is $12,000…OBO.) But, more importantly, you can go to Hope to experience water.
Hope is far enough removed from the arterial Alaskan highway system that it doesn’t see hordes of cruise ship or tour bus passengers. It’s dark and still in the winter. As teenagers and later as young 20-somethings, my friends and I would go to Hope to dance to Alaskan bluegrass on the porch of the Seaview, overlooking the water of the Arm. We would slosh around the soggy tidal flats in our muck boots and skirts.
The first time I ran Sixmile Creek, I was a third-year raft guide, learning to row heavy boats 300 miles north on the Nenana. I’d come to Hope from Denali with two friends on our days off, and we hopped on a trip with a now-defunct company called Class V.
This was before drysuits were standard. Our guide told us our neoprene wetsuits were actually better than Gore-Tex for Sixmile: they padded a swimmer’s body against the sharp rocks. I’d never been on whitewater like Sixmile’s before, and I was terrified, mesmerized. The water in Sixmile Creek is an ethereal aquamarine, not the heavy-metal grey of the rivers I grew up with, like the Matanuska or the Sustina. I desperately wanted to learn more, to be closer to this river.
When I started guiding for NOVA in 2007, I spent even more time at the Seaview as I trained to someday work on Sixmile Creek. On raucous midsummer evenings at the bar, my enigmatic colleague Luke would redirect me outdoors to “look at the seals,” which meant, I think, to breathe salt air in quiet and away from the boozy crowds inside.
At the Seaview, over the years, I fell in love a lot. I danced to my favorite bands. I curled up in the back of my pickup truck, parked out front, too nervous about running the river the next morning to sleep. On my training trips, I swam my childhood best friend regularly; she graciously advised me to wear sunglasses to spare my future clients from the fear in my eyes.
When I was working up north with NOVA on the Matanuska, I snuck away to Hope whenever I could. I had one colleague who complained that the Matanuska’s glacial silt was ruining his drysuit and that he needed, for the sake of his gear and his sanity, to be in Hope.
When I did eventually come to work in Hope, I was exhausted at the end of each day; my highly competent coworkers would go kayak the run after work. Sixmile guides pull salmon from the river and smoke fish in the evenings. They ride bikes from home to town for shows or dinner as moose amble alongside the road.
Hope is a gateway toward change, perhaps.
Last summer, ten years after my last season working for NOVA, I made it back to Sixmile. I met up with my old friend Scotty Smith, whose old dog Bertha romped with my old dog Arlo, and who used to manage NOVA and now co-owns Flow AK.
On that drizzly, foggy, hauntingly stunning July morning, Scotty lent me a raft, and I guided two pals down with the Flow AK commercial trip. At the put-in, I recognized only one old colleague, Reed. I didn’t see any lady guides. Merry Go Round, one of the most memorable Third Canyon rapids, had changed. The Seaview sold in 2023 and is now called Historic Hope Cafe and Campground; it was closed when I visited. Yet I left the river that day with my heart as uniquely full as a midnight sun.
Logistical Notes
To get to Hope, turn off the Seward Highway onto the 17-mile-long Hope Road.
Three raft companies (NOVA, Chugach Outdoor Center, and Flow AK) run Sixmile from May through September. The access is relatively simple and straightforward, but the character of the run changes significantly with fluctuations in water levels. Numbers (9.9’, 10.1’, 13’, for example) mean a lot on Sixmile, and the level changes the character of the run significantly. In Alaska, most of the time, high water spikes come after a combination of rain-on-glacier plus warming sunshine.
The first two canyons are usually considered Class III/IV. A long, meandering float through the valley separates the second canyon from the third. Then the boogie water gets splashier, the corridor more channelized, and the river charges into the third canyon, which is considered Class V by most people, at most water levels. Here is the American Whitewater description for the classic East Fork to Main Fork Sixmile run.
The water here, it should go without saying, is cold and fast, and the rocks are sharp. Please treat Alaskan rivers and mountains with the respect they deserve.
Advanced kayakers will find a lot more to do in the area, and they’d do well to connect with competent local paddlers before committing to any of the runs coming out of the Chugach. If you plan to spend any time exploring Alaska’s rivers, consider hunting down a copy of Andrew Embick’s mid-1990s guidebook, Fast and Cold.
Hope is also a gateway toward ocean energy, an auspicious place where rivers meet seawater:
Salmon run up Sixmile and Resurrection, their spawning bodies shimmering red against the glacial blues of the creeks. You can surf the bore tide in Turnagain Arm. You can, if you’re lucky, spot endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales. In late July, you might catch the annual Sixmile Creek Whitewater & Bluegrass Festival. Come September, you might participate in the Belugas Count event.
During summer, the Kenai Peninsula is crowded, saturated with humans and their oversized vehicles. Beware the Seward Highway and its tributary roads any weekend when the salmon are running.
Places to Sleep/Explode Your Gear
Hope has a few RV parks and campgrounds, and in recent years, cabins and yurts and Airbnbs have proliferated here. Still, I recommend you plan your visit well in advance or come during a shoulder season. Check out Creekbend and Coldwater Lodge or park up at established campgrounds like Porcupine, at the end of the Hope Road. There are also several pull-outs along Hope Road where you can explode gear and have a picnic.
Provisions
Coldwater Market has small-town groceries, but to save pennies and to enjoy variety, I recommend stocking up in one of the major cities before dropping into the Hope zone: Anchorage or Wasilla/Palmer if you’re coming from the north; Seward or Soldotna if you’re coming from the south. Any of these bigger communities will have solid grocery and gear options.
Vittles
For food: The Dirty Skillet, Creekbend, or (if it’s open) the old Seaview / new Historic Hope Café. For coffee: Grounds for Hope Espresso, at the library downtown, or Turnagain Kayak & Coffee House.
Where Rivers Meet an Inland Sea
I love Hope, Alaska, with my whole heart. I am grateful to Chuck Spaulding and NOVA for the opportunity to work intimately with the rivers that raised me – for the chance to sleep and dream where mountains, rivers, histories, and memories meet an inland sea.
I’m grateful to all the talented boaters who showed me lines, helped me cultivate confidence, and shared this surreal place with me. To the kindred spirits who danced on the deck of the Seaview and to the Alaskan musicians and the tolerant bartenders. To those invisible seals in the misty distance. And, maybe most of all, to the elusory, magical phantom belugas, swimming silently, I hope, beneath the surface.
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Photography courtesy of NOVA Rafting.