The largest state in the U.S., Alaska is a land where
everything is more numerous, more intense, and larger than life.
Scenic vistas stretch well beyond the horizon, lit by the midnight
sun and the Northern Lights. Powerful grizzlies and stealthy wolves
walk the boreal forests and vast tundra. On an impossibly slow march
to the sea, massive glaciers feed swift blue-gray rivers and release
colossal icebergs into fjords and inlets, teeming with whales and
seabirds.
The Kenai Peninsula, a few hours south of Anchorage,
has been called a mini-Alaska. Nearly all of the ecosystems of the
State are represented here. Massive sheets of glacial ice, like
the 300,000+ acre Harding Ice Field, remain from the last ice age.
Lichen and moss cover exposed rock, and stiff tufts of grass cover
valley floors. Dense spruce and hemolck forests thrive in the cool,
moist nutrient-rich soils.
As the tectonic forces of our changing planet pull the Pacific
Plate below the North American Plate, the Kenai Mountains are pulled
slowly into the sea, enlarging the immense, steep-sided fjords created
by the recession of the glaciers. A land of change, both over eons
and sometimes minutes, it was here that the 1964 "Good Friday"
earthquake dropped the shoreline six feet in less than four minutes.
