The Kenai Peninsula Bundle: Seward & Sterling Highways

About this bundle

Two of the great drives in North America, back to back — and the road they share. Together these guides cover the entire peninsula: 127 miles from Anchorage down to Seward on a road so good the federal government named it an All-American Road, and 143 miles from Tern Lake out to the end of the pavement at Homer. Two tours, 350+ story stops, playing automatically by GPS as you drive, in both directions, fully offline. Southeast, on the Seward Highway, you'll run the shoulder of Turnagain Arm — thirty-eight feet of tide, a wave you can schedule to the minute and surf up a river, and a mudflat that has taken people who mistook it for a beach. You'll pass a stand of bare gray trees still standing in the silt sixty years after saltwater killed them in four and a half minutes, and a town that picked itself up and moved because of it. You'll learn why the finest navigator of his age sailed up this arm and had to turn around, and why the name still says so. Then over a mountain pass, down through lake country, into a harbor town where — on one afternoon in 1964 — the sea came ashore burning. Northwest, on the Sterling Highway, you'll follow the Kenai River from glacier-blue headwaters to the ocean, cross six thousand years of unbroken human history at a single bend in the water, pass the improbable patch of moose refuge where the modern state of Alaska was born, and reach a coast where boats are launched into the open Pacific by farm tractors. Four live volcanoes line up across Cook Inlet — one of them famous for switching off a jumbo jet in mid-air. And the road finishes by cresting Baycrest Hill, where Kachemak Bay opens up all at once and every first-time driver pulls over without deciding to. Buy them together and you have the whole peninsula narrated end to end — Anchorage to Seward, Seward to Homer, and every mile home again. Most visitors drive both of these roads anyway. This is the difference between driving them and understanding them.