It's Cook Inlet primeval: black bears, salmon, glacial erratics and towering devils club. Find them all in a birch and spruce forest on the remote northwest Kenai coast.

Wood frog

Gray jay

NOTABLE SPECIES

Coho salmon
Rainbow trout
Wood frog
Black bear
Moose
Bald eagle
Gray jay
Black-billed magpie
Varied thrush
Amphipods

State Recreation Area

FIELD NOTES With its jungled understory and big trees, this 3,460-acre park north of Nikiski along Cook Inlet offers a hint of the lush lowland forest that greeted explorer Capt. James Cook in 1778. The seldom visited woods hosts a range of Kenai Peninsula mammals: moose, black bear, coyote, beaver, muskrat, red squirrel. Thrushes, warblers and jays fly through the trees, and mergansers and goldeneyes swim in the streams. The slow-moving Swanson River meanders to the sea, rainbow trout in its pools, its shorelines chirping with wood frogs. Coho salmon arrive in July and August. Along the beach, watch for bald eagles, gulls and shorebirds. Immense boulders dropped by melting glaciers dot the beach and mud flats offshore. Amphipods and other tiny invertebrates can be found beneath rocks after the tide has ebbed.

HABITAT Paper birch and white spruce forest, with an open understory of willow, alder, devil’s club, cow parsnip (see page 30), and other low-growing plants, spread across the flat uplands. The Swanson River glides through a riparian wetland with floating bogs, through a marsh and into a shallow, silty estuary.

CULTURAL CONNECTION Dena’ina Natives harvested fish and other foods in this area.

ECONOMIC CONNECTION Today fishermen operate beach nets to the north and maybe half of Cook Inlet’s 15 oil and gas production platforms can be seen from the beach.

VIEWING TIP Turn over rocks on the beach and watch translucent amphipods before they scurry away. Sit by the Swanson River estuary with binoculars and scan for birds, muskrats and beavers. Listen for common loons on Stormy Lake.

GETTING THERE Take the Kenai Spur Highway north; milepost 35.5 you enter the park; milepost 38.6 Swanson River; milepost 39 (the end of the road) turn left to Discovery Campground and the beach.