Walk into spruce forests, discover a secret glacier. In Kachemak Bay, Alaska, witness the splendour of nature at every corner
Our 12-day road trip in Alaska was turning out to be a vacation of good clichés. The journey was as important as the destination and we went where the road took us. We ended up at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula in a town called Homer whose claim to fame is its famous spit—a narrow, hooked finger of land, nearly seven and a half kilometers long, jutting out into the waters of the Kachemak Bay.

The Homer spit is a lively place with shops, cafes, seafood restaurants and tour operators for fishing expeditions and chartered flights. But large crowds were something that we were trying to avoid. We found a spot to park our Recreational Vehicle or motor home (RV) inside town, away from the spit. It turned out to be a wise decision since it was empty and offered what we really wanted—a breath-taking, uninterrupted view of the Kachemak Bay state park across the water.

With such beauty outdoors, it was difficult to just go shopping or visit a museum. So we soon found ourselves huddled in warm clothing, racing in a boat across the cold water to the other side for a five-hour hike. We were headed to the state park, a vast 400,000 acre playground of mountains, valleys, glaciers and wildlife and the only way to get there is to hire a plane or a boat. Todd Scanlon, a guy from upstate New York who shows up in Alaska every summer to make some money running a water taxi service between Homer and the Kachemak Bay state park, helped us get there.

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