There’s a stretch of the Sterling Highway, about two and a half hours south of Anchorage, where the Kenai River turns a shade of blue-green that doesn’t look real. Glacial silt does that. It catches the light and turns the whole river the color of a swimming pool somebody forgot to tell nature about. That’s Cooper Landing.
The town isn’t much on paper. It runs about eight miles along the highway at the west end of Kenai Lake, where the Kenai River begins, and only a few hundred people live there year-round. A prospector named Joseph Cooper found gold here in the late 1800s, and the place stayed an outpost until the road from Anchorage reached it in 1951. Today the gold is salmon. All four of the Kenai’s salmon species and some very large rainbow trout pull anglers here every summer, and the town fills up from June through August.
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