Kenai National Wildlife Refuge

The National Wildlife Refuges of Alaska are indeed wild. The refuges see fewer visitors than Alaska’s national parks. You likely won’t see any other people deep in their backcountry areas and they may be your best bet for some of the most profound sort of wilderness experiences the state has to offer.

Many are remote, hard to access, and require a charter flight. A couple, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, can be accessed from the road system and afford excellent opportunities for adventure.

I first got turned on to the Twin Lakes area helping a friend harvest a big-racked bull caribou many years ago. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go all the way to Twin Lakes to harvest that bull. But, looking at the map of the hunt area, I couldn’t help but notice the Twin Lakes zone and how majestic it seemed just from the topo map.

Several years later, in early August 2021, the stars aligned with free time and an ideal weather window to access this zone without a charter flight.

While it’s a bit involved to access the Twin Lakes region from the road system, and doing so via human-power requires a very special window of conditions, it can be done. It requires at least a few days of good weather (to enjoy the alpine) and light wind (to paddle across the notoriously dangerous-when-windy nearly two miles of open water on Skilak Lake).

We had just that, and managed to do an amazing backpacking and peakbagging loop. My partner and I spent three days packrafting, backpacking, and peakbagging a nearly 50 mile and 20,000 vertical foot loop along which we climbed two 2,000’+ and one 1,000’+ prominence summits.

The hiking and camping in the Twin Lakes region is absolutely sublime. It has vast expanses of open alpine tundra, seemingly endless ridge walking, and many non-technical peaks to climb. It is also full of delightful alpine lakes, tarns, and streams.

We saw a caribou with huge antlers (as shown in the video below) as well as a beautiful grizzly sow with her two cubs.

CMI offers guided hiking, backpacking, and peakbagging trips into this area and many others in the Kenai Mountains. Fortunately, easy and reliable access is available via float-plane or motor boat and trips can be done base-camp, loop, or point-to-point style for all ability and experience levels.

A great thing about trips into the Kenai wilderness is convenient access direct from Anchorage. An hour flight in the float plane from Lake Hood Seaplane Base at Anchorage International Airport will put you in some of the most incredible wilderness this planet has to offer.