Kenai Peninsula Borough is a borough of the U.S. state of Alaska. As of the 2020 census, the population was 58,799, up from 55,400 in 2010. The borough seat is Soldotna, the largest city is Kenai, and the most populated community is the census-designated place of Kalifornsky.
Soldotna is a city in the Kenai Peninsula Borough in the U.S. state of Alaska. At the 2020 census, the population was 4,342, up from 4,163 in 2010. It is the seat of the Kenai Peninsula Borough.
Katmai National Park and Preserve is an American national park and preserve in southwest Alaska, notable for the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and for its brown bears. The park and preserve encompass 4,093,077 acres, which is between the sizes of Connecticut and New Jersey. Most of the national park is a designated wilderness area. The park is named after Mount Katmai, its centerpiece stratovolcano. The park is located on the Alaska Peninsula, across from Kodiak Island, with headquarters in nearby King Salmon, about 290 miles (470 km) southwest of Anchorage. The area was first designated a national monument in 1918 to protect the area around the major 1912 volcanic eruption of Novarupta, which formed the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a 40-square-mile (100 km2), 100-to-700-foot-deep pyroclastic flow. The park includes as many as 18 individual volcanoes, seven of which have been active since 1900.
Cook Inlet stretches 180 miles (290 km) from the Gulf of Alaska to Anchorage in south-central Alaska. Cook Inlet branches into the Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm at its northern end, almost surrounding Anchorage. On its southern end, it merges with Shelikof Strait, Stevenson Entrance, Kennedy Entrance and Chugach Passage.
Lake Clark National Park and Preserve is an American national park in southwest Alaska, about 100 miles (160 km) southwest of Anchorage. The park was first proclaimed a national monument in 1978, then established as a national park and preserve in 1980 by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The park includes many streams and lakes vital to the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, including its namesake Lake Clark. A wide variety of recreational activities may be pursued in the park and preserve year-round. The park protects rainforests along the coastline of Cook Inlet, alpine tundra, glaciers, glacial lakes, major salmon-bearing rivers, and two volcanoes, Mount Redoubt and Mount Iliamna. Mount Redoubt is active, erupting in 1989 and 2009. The wide variety of ecosystems in the park mean that virtually all major Alaskan animals, terrestrial and marine, may be seen in and around the park. Salmon, particularly sockeye salmon, play a major role in the ecosystem and the local economy. Large populations of brown bears are attracted to feed on the spawning salmon in the Kijik River and at Silver Salmon Creek. Bear watching is a common activity in the park.
Cape Krusenstern National Monument and the colocated Cape Krusenstern Archeological District is a U.S. National Monument and a National Historic Landmark centered on Cape Krusenstern in northwestern Alaska. The national monument was one of fifteen new National Park Service units designated by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980. It was initially declared a national monument under the authority of the Antiquities Act by President Jimmy Carter on December 1, 1978.
Chugach State Park covers 495,204 acres covering a hilly region immediately east of Anchorage, in south-central Alaska.
The Denaʼina, or formerly Tanaina, are an Alaska Native Athabaskan people. They are the original inhabitants of the south central Alaska region ranging from Seldovia in the south to Chickaloon in the northeast, Talkeetna in the north, Lime Village in the northwest and Pedro Bay in the southwest. The Denaʼina homeland is more than 41,000 sq mi (110,000 km2) in area. They arrived in the south-central Alaska sometime between 1,000 and 1,500 years ago. They were the only Alaskan Athabaskan group to live on the coast. The Denaʼina have a hunter-gatherer culture and a matrilineal system. The Iditarod Trail's antecedents were the native trails of the Denaʼina and Deg Hitʼan Athabaskan Native Alaskans and the Inupiaq Inuit.
Anchorage, officially the Municipality of Anchorage, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Alaska. With a population of 291,247 at the 2020 census, it contains nearly 40 percent of the state's population, and has more people than all of Northern Canada and Greenland combined. The Anchorage metropolitan area, which includes Anchorage and the neighboring Matanuska-Susitna Borough, had a population of 398,328 in 2020, accounting for more than half the state's population. At 1,706 sq mi (4,420 km2) of land area, the city is the fourth-largest by area in the U.S.
The Modoc Rock Shelter is a rock shelter or overhang located beneath the sandstone bluffs that form the eastern border of the Mississippi River floodplain at which Native American peoples lived for thousands of years. This site is significant for its archaeological evidence of thousands of years of human habitation during the Archaic period in the Eastern United States. It is located on the northeastern side of County Road 7 southeast of Prairie du Rocher in Randolph County, Illinois, United States. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961.
The Amalik Bay Archeological District is a geographic area with a significant number of archaeological sites in Alaska. It is located on the Pacific coast of Katmai National Park and Preserve, in the mainland portion of Kodiak Island Borough, Alaska.
The Palugvik Site, also known as Palugvik Archeological District, is an archaeological site on Hawkins Island in Prince William Sound, near Cordova, Alaska, within Chugach National Forest. The site, first excavated in 1930, was the first to provide a view of prehistoric human habitation in Prince William Sound, the ancestral home of the Chugach people, and is one of the two primary sites for identifying the sequence of occupation in the area. The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1962, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.
The Walrus Islands are a group of craggy coastal islands in the Bering Sea, close to the northern shores of Bristol Bay, Alaska at the entrance to Togiak Bay. They are located 18 km to the east of Hagemeister Island, and are protected as the Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary by the state. A part of the island group is also of archaeological importance, with numerous deeply stratified sites covering 6,000 years of human use. For this reason, Crooked Island, Summit Island and Round Island were designated the Walrus Islands Archeological District, a National Historic Landmark District comprising 14 historical sites, in December 2016.
In 2006, Sarah Palin was elected governor of Alaska. Running on a clean-government platform, Palin defeated incumbent Governor Frank Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary election in August. She then went on to win the general election in November, defeating former Governor Tony Knowles 48.3% to 40.9%. Her running mate was State Senator Sean Parnell.
The Chuitna Coal Project was a proposed coal strip mine that, if granted state and federal permits, would have been built about 45 miles (72 km) southwest of Anchorage, Alaska, in an area known as the Beluga Coal Fields near the Chuitna River and the small communities of Tyonek and Beluga in upper Cook Inlet.
The Swan Point Archeological Site is located in eastern central Alaska, in the Tanana River watershed. It is one of a collection of sites in the area that have yielded the oldest evidence of human habitation in the state, in addition to megafauna no longer found in Alaska, such as wapiti (elk), bison, and woolly mammoth. Finds co-located with human artifacts at the site have given radiocarbon dates of 14,000 years, indicating the site was occupied around 12,000 BCE. Swan Point is the oldest archaeological site in the Americas whose age is not disputed.
The Knik Site, also known as the Old Knik Townsite, is the location in Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Alaska that was once home to the largest settlement on Cook Inlet. The only surviving remnants of the community are a former log roadhouse, now a museum operated by the Wasilla-Knik Historical Society, and a log cabin. The Knik area had long been a meeting point of Native Alaskans, and in 1898 it became the principal community on Cook Inlet from which goods were shipped into the interior. In 1916 the Alaska Railroad reached the site of present-day Anchorage, bypassing Knik and leading to Anchorage's growth. When the railroad reached Wasilla, Knik lost all importance as a transshipment point, and its buildings were either abandoned or moved to one of the other communities. Knik is located about 13 miles (21 km) southwest of Wasilla.
The Selenie Lagoon Archeological Site is a prehistoric archaeological site near Port Graham, Alaska. The site encompasses a fairly large and deeply-stratified shell midden on the north shore of the Port Graham inlet. The site is expected to yield a fairly complete sequence of artifacts relating to the history of human habitation of the inlet.
Magnetic Island is a small island on the north side of Tuxedni Bay, an inlet on the lower west side of Cook Inlet in south-central Alaska. The island is surrounded by mudflats that are under water during high tides. The island got its name from the presence of magnetism identified during a geological survey in 1951. Its shape and geology are heavily influenced by Mount Redoubt and Mount Iliamna, two active volcanoes located less than 20 miles (32 km) away.
Chester Creek is one of several streams that flow through the city of Anchorage, Alaska. It runs for 21 miles (34 km) from the Chugach Mountains to the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet.
