Sterling Highway: The Road to Homer

About this bundle

Most people drive this road and see a pretty highway to Homer. You're about to find out what it actually is. From the moment you turn west at Tern Lake, this GPS-triggered audio guide rides shotgun for all 143 miles — playing automatically, hands-free, exactly where each story lives. No cell service required. No stopping to read a sign. You'll follow the Kenai River from its glacier-blue headwaters to the sea, and learn why its water is that color and why the world's largest sport-caught king salmon — a fish that still hasn't been beaten in forty years — came out of it. You'll drive across six thousand years of continuous human history at a bend in the river where families have taken salmon since before the pyramids, and hear who still lives there today. You'll cross a refuge that burns on purpose, pass the unlikely patch of ground where the entire modern state of Alaska was born, and reach a coast where fishing boats are launched into the open ocean by farm tractors because the tides won't allow anything else. Then the volcanoes come out. Four of them, standing across Cook Inlet — including the beautiful one that once reached up and switched off all four engines of a fully loaded jumbo jet in the dark. And at the very end, the road tips over a ridge called Baycrest Hill and Kachemak Bay opens up underneath you all at once. Everybody pulls over. Nobody plans to. You already booked the drive. This is what turns it into the best day of the trip.