Just a Little Hope

This land once belonged to Russia.

 

The mountains in the background are part of the Kenai peninsula.  The Russians knew there was gold here as early as 1850.  As much as the Americans wanted to own this land and technically not have Russia own a little chunk of North America, it's also possible the Russians had an equal desire to get rid of this little piece of North America that it had such little presence in and tenuous hold of in the first place.  Strangely, no one wanted Alaska just for being Alaska back then.  And so Russia sold Alaska off to the Americans in 1867...who weren't expecting British Columbia to join Canada and isolate their new land from the main body of America.  Regardless, it didn't take long for the gold rush to expand north.  First to Juneau, and then miners slowly migrated north, until they got to just this spot, right on the Kenai peninsula.

A mining camp formed at the base of Resurrection Creek in 1889.  The prospectors struggled to come up with a good name for their fledgling town, and the story goes that they vowed to simply name it after the next soul to hop off one of the boats that periodically delivered supplies and newcomers.  That soul was a young man named Percy Hope.  And so Hope, Alaska was born...a suitable name for a settlement of prospectors driven by exactly that.  A sign says that you can see the white roofs of houses at the base of the mountains...I took this picture not quite believing that.

 

There was a little telescope mounted to support this claim, and sure enough with a little scanning, I did indeed find tiny rooftops of Hope, which still exists today, mostly as a summer village.  If you look very carefully in the photo below, you can see those little white roofs just below the base of the clouds in the center of the photo.

 

 

 

Wikipedia had some interesting little facts about Hope.  It said there were 192 residents in the 2010 census.  That 1/4 of the houses had indoor plumbing (summer village, outhouses are simpler to maintain when you are not around to monitor your pluming in freezing temperatures).  The average household income was $21,786, and the average household income was $24,432.  There is a wage disparity between females and males...it states that the males had a median income of $0 and the females had a median of $37,000.  Only 11% of people were below the poverty line, and 100% of those were over 64.  My first thought is that some of that math doesn't make sense to me, and my second is that the men are either really lucky or they were too snowbound to submit tax information that year.  I want to go see this town someday soon.  I suspect it's a simpler life...no Starbucks or movie theatres to waste earning on...nor to apply for jobs at.  I suspect it's beautiful.  And that just maybe the people there have everything they want under those scant few white roofs of the town.

 

Hope.  What a great name.  And what a great force embodied in the legend of this little town.  Even today, 2/3 of Alaskans come from somewhere else...hoping they will find what they are looking for here too.