Cooper's Landing

Heading south again on Alaska Hwy 1 (the prettiest drive I've ever seen), we travelled through incredible mountain and ocean vistas below the glacier topped mountains. Rhonda had joined us again and we were off to Cooper's Landing, located in the center of the Kenai Penninsula.

We stopped on the way to checkout a river vista and took a little walk along the way.

And stopped to see how far we can throw a rock....It's a pretty long ways! (gravity helps)

And it's a beautiful river, perfect for rafting, or throwing rocks. "It's ok Mom, the rafters have on helmets."

Back in the car, we headed to the Russian River Falls Trail. It is about 2.3 miles of manicured trails to the Russian River Falls where millions of salmon are swimming upstream spawning. This is a kittywake. It is sitting on a rock in the falls hoping for a salmon lunch. (These are the same birds we saw in Whittier.)


The pools on the edges of the falls are full of salmon who are trying to work their way up the falls.

And swimming up this stream is quite a challenge!

We climbed down to this little ledge with a cave just over the falls where we ate our picnic lunch.

We ate and took some pictures and took off down another trail that followed the river.

This trail was much rougher and non-existant in some areas close to the river but it was a lot of fun.

Here we are right on the edge of the river with the fishermen. Check out the trail here.

Time to leave and head back to Anchorage.