Alaska's Seldovia offers a glimpse of the past

SELDOVIA, Alaska — The man with the white beard stopped his bike on the bridge where I was watching two boys wrestle a salmon onto the beach.

Reaching into the pocket of his blue jumpsuit, he pulled out a plastic bag filled with strips of smoked fish.

"How'd you do this season?" I asked. "Nothing to brag about, but nothing to throw back," he replied, handing me a sample. "Just finished smoking it this morning."

He rolled a cigarette and introduced himself as Larry Story, ex-Missourian and fisherman extraordinaire.

As it turned out, he had plenty to brag about. The king salmon run was especially good this year, and Story, 58, caught several big ones just by parking himself on a lawn chair and casting his line over the bridge above the slough that the fishermen share with kayakers and bird-watchers.

Everyone in Alaska, it seems, has a fish (or some other) story to tell, and in Seldovia, population 300, a stranger is the perfect audience.

Perched at the mouth of Kachemak Bay at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, its closest neighbor is Homer, a town of 4,000 at the westernmost point of North America's highway system, literally the end of the road.

Seldovia lies 16 miles beyond, surrounded mostly but not quite entirely by water, and reachable only by air or sea — weather permitting.

"You look to the west and you see water. You look north, south and east and you see wilderness," says City Manager Kurt Reynertson. "We are truly a community surrounded by wilderness."

A fishing village with a Russian heritage, this is a town that attracts a different kind of Alaska tourist — someone in search of what this part of the state was like before highways and big-box stores, $400-a day bear-viewing excursions and $600-a-night luxury lodges.

With almost everything of interest within about an 8-square-mile area, Seldovia is more about soaking up nature in peaceful surroundings — bird-watching, kayaking through secluded lagoons, hiking, beachcombing — and getting to know something about the kinds of people who make Alaska their home.

Plenty of fishing

"How much fish are you bringing back?" is a common question the pilots ask when they ferry passengers back to Homer after a weekend in Seldovia.

With salmon running from late May through August and halibut year-round, fishing is the major pastime. A handful of charter boats operate out of a pocket harbor in a sheltered cove on Seldovia Bay. Tides swing from a minus 5 to a plus 22 and the water is so clear it seems as if you could grab a salmon with your hands.

There's plenty for nonfishers to do, too. Kirby and Lynn Corwin, 22-year Seldovians who own Kayak 'Atak, run guided sea-kayak tours of the area, offering the chance to explore isolated beaches with eagle nests, fossils and sea otters.

A few blocks from town is the start of the 1.5-mile Otterbahn hiking trail leading through spruce forests filled with wild blueberries and salmonberries and over boardwalks built across lagoons to the beaches of Kachemak Bay.

The main commercial strip is Main Street, which runs for about a mile along the waterfront. There's a museum run by the Seldovia Native Association, a few gift shops and the Tide Pool restaurant, where I sampled reindeer sausage and "drunken" mussels, caught locally and steamed in beer.

Perhaps the town's most unusual shop is the Alaska Tribal Cache berry kitchen and store, where members of the Seldovia Village Tribe (people of Aleut, Indian and Eskimo descent make up about 30 percent of the population) use family recipes to make jelly from sea kelp and syrups and jams from wild berries.

Mostly though, Seldovia seems to pride itself in what it doesn't have: no traffic lights, no lawyers, only one bar, one cement truck.

Wildlife? Black bears are around, but tourists rarely encounter them. Bald eagles (the Chamber or Commerce says there are 50) and sea birds are more common.

Aerial views

Most tourists arrive on wildlife-watching trips by boat across Kachemak Bay from Homer, but the view is more impressive at 2,000 feet, and it's yours for $30 a hop and the answers to a few personal questions.

"How much do you weigh?" the clerk at Smokey Bay Air asked when I called for a reservation.

The airline's six-seater Cessnas have a 1,000-pound limit, including cargo — which, in addition to luggage on the day I flew, included boxes of soy milk and bottles of detergent being flown over from Homer.

Owned and run mainly by women, Smokey Bay operates the equivalent of yellow cabs with wings, ferrying passengers back and forth on 15-minute runs across the bay.

You could pay for an official sightseeing flight, but as I buckled in next to pilot Tina Sawtelle, I had a hard time seeing how the views could get much better.

Laced between mountain peaks were ice fields and glaciers. Below was the Homer spit, a 4.5-mile long sandbar that juts into the bay like a twisting finger. Almost as fast as we climbed, we descended, over a lagoon a few hundred feet from Seldovia's gravel runway.

After the earthquake

Seldovia's name comes from the Russian word for "herring," and was given to the town by explorers in the late 1700s who discovered coal in the area — and a bay teeming with herring, writes Mary Glover, chamber president, in the Seldovia Summer Gazette, a newspaper that's distributed free to tourists.

The Russians left when the United States purchased Alaska, and the herring eventually disappeared, but Seldovia became a busy seaport.

Fish canneries and businesses set on pilings flourished along a picturesque wooden boardwalk, and it was Seldovia, one of the largest cities in Alaska with a population of 2,000, not Homer, that became the Kenai's major commercial hub.

Things began to change with the building of a road from Anchorage to Homer. The two towns reversed roles for good when high tides washed out most of Seldovia's boardwalk after a 1964 earthquake sunk the land mass by 4 feet.

When I booked a room at Susan Mumma's Seldovia Rowing Club, I won the privilege of spending the night in one of the few remaining structures that survived the earthquake.

The three-story gray bungalow decorated with fishing nets and perched on stilts above the slough at the south end of town was the Kenai Peninsula's first B&B when Mumma, 56, opened it in 1980.

A painter and retired art teacher, she moved to Seldovia 30 years ago after visiting the island on a class trip.

After the earthquake, the Army Corps of Engineers shored up a small section of the boardwalk, and Mumma's house was saved along with a handful of cabins and boat sheds.

"A woman at age 26 getting a loan was hard enough," she recalls, "but a woman of 26 getting a loan on a house on stilts in Seldovia, Alaska — that was quite a feat. But I did it."

Half English cottage, half beach cabin, her B&B "isn't the fanciest in town," she says, "but it's the most historic."

These days, she has plenty of competition. There's a hotel and a half-dozen more B&Bs, including one "tent and breakfast," as more travelers discover Seldovia's simple pleasures.

That's a good thing as far as most are concerned. Without tourists, who would the locals have to listen to their stories?

"Going to the airport?" the man in the car asked after I checked out of Mumma's B&B the next morning and was walking with my overnight bag to catch my plane back to Homer.

He introduced himself as Gerry Willard. He grew up in Tacoma and moved here in 1972 to work for the electric company.

"What's time's your flight?" he asked. "A half an hour? Plenty of time for a little tour around Seldovia."

Willard drove me past a spot near the runway with a tide pool swarming with salmon. Then he pulled up in front of his personal pride and joy, the airport outhouse.

As people do in a small town, he made a volunteer project out of sprucing it up. He painted it robin's-egg blue with a bucket of donated paint and decorated the outside with a wooden anchor and two American flags.

It looked so nice, some didn't recognize it as an outhouse, so he added block letters spelling out the words for "bathroom" in English, Spanish and Alaskan native.

"Someone wanted me to add it in French," he said, "but that's where I drew the line."

Carol Pucci: 206-454-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com