Hope AK and Porcupine USFS Campground

What a wonderful blue sky day. The forecast was for rain but we wouldn't believe it. We headed out on our 10 mile hike, 5 miles down Gull Rock Trail which begins at our campground. It is rated "easy" and "relatively flat" but warns of lots of rocks and tree roots along the trail.

There were some hills at the far end of the trail and after scaling across 2 woody and 2 stoney avalanche fields cut into the steep mountainside our legs were crying for mercy by the end of the day!

The trail reached the Gull Rock point overlooking the Northern end of Turnagain Arm. We could see the snowy mountains in the far distance beyond Anchorage and the windmills on one of the islands.

We enjoyed a quick lunch of granola and an apple and headed back. There were large moose tracks along a good section of trail and we met one hiker on his way back that said he followed the moose along! As we were heading back we noticed that the tide was coming in.

You can see in this picture the huge mudflats left behind at low tide slowly fill in. And on the other side of the water is the highway from Anchorage South on Seward Highway. The tiny white dots are mostly campers and cars along the base of the mountains. The Alaska railroad also parallels the highway. That is the route we took yesterday to come around the "arm". We also took it last week to go to Whittier. It is very scenic. We continued on the hike and about 2 miles from the end spotted 2 women hiking. They were waiting for friends who were slower. We spotted them at least another mile down the trail. After we passed them we could really feel our legs tiring out! We slowly walked into our campsite and got our chairs and beverages. As we were cooling down a suburban and a big Class A camper pulled up and said she had reserved this site for the night online! Neither of us could barely move! I explained that we had just returned from a 10 mile hike and would do my best! There were 3 upcoming "reservations" on the site post and they were for future dates. Her reservation was not posted. It is first come first served for vacant sites and we gracefully let them have this one as it was a pull through. We only had to go to the other side of this loop and back in to the site we had had just the night before. Thankfully we didn't have to take any tents down! It was easy enough to make the switch. (Only our legs were groaning!) We didn't have to go anywhere and had easy grilled tuna and cheese sandwiches to fix up for supper. A few cold ones to replenish lost "nutrients" and liquids helped too! The Campground is quite high on the slopes above the waters. Becca and Aaron both called to check on us regarding yesterday's Earthquake, 7.9 on the Richter scale. And subsequent tsunami warnings. But Alaska is a very large state and the quake was near one of the Aleutian Islands. The tsunami warnings wouldn't effect us. We will sleep soundly tonight! I can already hear Bob's soft breathing.