Salmon, and more salmon! Soldotna

We love eating fish, favorites are halibut and salmon! (Unfortunately they are not any less expensive here than at home!) So today was all about the salmon...we drove north from Seward and west across the peninsula, loosely following the Kenai river. At the junction of the Sterling and Seward hwys is Tern Lake. We got our first swan sighting of the trip. They are common to this area, but like the moose, we don't see them much. They were pretty close and we watched them rolling their ends (butts) into the air to get food from the bottom. These are good size birds!

So as we followed the river we got a peak at lots of fishing activities; boating, floating, and shore fishing. At the confluence of the Kenai and Russian rivers we stopped to hike to a salmon viewing areas. Just a nice, almost level path that was a little over 2 miles in. Had a break in the rain, just gray, and when it was raining, it was pretty light.

The platform did not disappoint. I have always wanted to see salmon (live, not pictures) trying to get up stream. You end up at a point on the river that had some challenging falls, so the forest service had installed a fish ladder. But many of the salmon are still trying to "leap" up the falls. At the base you can see a pool of red salmon at the foot of the ladder. We got to spend a lot of time just watching them try to leap the falls, and to get a photo of it! Then the long walk back, with a little more rain. But not to bad.

Got in the RV and headed to the highway only to find it at a standstill! It turned about to be a 3 hour standstill! When in Alaska there are not a lot of alternative routes, unless you are in an ATV. So we sat for awhile, snacked for awhile, read for awhile, cleaned up our email inboxes for awhile, chatted for awhile, and some if us even managed to snooze for awhile! The standstill was due to a 4 vehicle crash that looked pretty bad. Helicopter came and went, several emergency vehicles.

After getting by the wreck, alternating one way traffic only being let through, we drove by a line of vehicles headed the opposite direction that was over 6 miles long at least. Got to the RV park a little after 7 p.m. We drove through our hardest rain storm yet, which actually was good for the area. A lot of the smoke we had experienced in Anchorage and north was due to a huge fire here that burned just north of the highway. You could see the burn right up to the highway. I think this rain was the final blow to the fire that started in early July due to multiple lightning strikes.

Good news, the Saturday night salmon bake was still out when we pulled into the park. So without even getting parked in our site, we had a great salmon dinner. It was delicious, fresh caught, smoked and baked! Excellent! Drove over to our site, so rainy, we just plugged in the power and stayed inside!Read more