Hope, Alaska

The turnoff to Hope is about 70 miles south of Anchorage on the Kenai Peninsula. You drive another 16 miles through forest after the turn and find yourself in a place on Cook's Inlet where the only liquor store looks like this and has one bottle of white wine for sale.

Wiki says that "more than 2,000 miners spawned what is now the Hope area, and recreational gold mining is still a major attraction in Hope -- now a town of about 150 year-round residents. The ongoing quest for Resurrection Creek gold in the late 1800s created the community of Hope, named after Percy Hope, the youngest new miner to step off a boat when all present decided that the town would be named after the next exiting passenger."

 With my polarized glasses I can see the "pink" salmon under the bridge in Resurection Creek. I cast my fly before them hundreds of times but only get one hit....

Fortunately I have "sockeye" fillets in the freezer for dinner and "sockeye" burgers to make into salmon salad for lunch tomorrow.

 There's a lot to do here. The cafe is full of books and the bar has live music three days a week.

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I pick up five good paperbacks in the community bookstore. They say that the town library is a good place to research the town history.....

 Volunteers run the used book store and the coffee shop. They have bears here and white water rafting and many hiking trails.Some of them take four days to complete....

About 150 people now live here in the summer...some of them are seasonal residents....

 In the morning we'll push on to Coopers Landing or Soldatna....there is bad news about the "king" salmon run this year...the run is light so if you catch one it must be carefully released to spawn and die....