Gull Rock is a point on the south shore of Turnagain Arm on the Kenai Peninsula, about 18 miles (29 km) south-southeast of Anchorage and 6 miles (10 km) northwest of Hope, Alaska. The US Coast and Geodetic Survey first published the name in 1943. Johnson Creek drains a watershed in the Kenai Mountains and flows north to Turnagain Arm at Gull Rock. At low tide the creek flows across a wide mudflat through an incised channel. The rock represents an outcrop of the McHugh Complex consisting of weakly metamorphosed clastic and volcanic rocks that are well exposed in the Chugach and Kenai Mountains. The metaclastic rocks, which make up the bulk of the complex, are predominantly weakly metamorphosed siltstone, graywacke, arkose, and conglomeratic sandstone. The metavolcanic rocks include massive and pillow greenstones, basaltic in composition and texture, associated with radiolarian chert and argillite. The age of the McHugh Complex is thought to be Mississippian to Cretaceous, roughly 350 to 100 million years.

Turnagain Arm, which the Dena’ina Athabaskan people call Tutl’uh, is their traditional home. Glaciers began to recede from the upper Cook Inlet basin about 12,000 years ago, and people settled there between 10,000 and 7,500 years ago. The Dena’ina arrived from the interior roughly 1,500 to 1,000 years ago. In 1778 Captain James Cook explored the inlet for Britain, and his men met Dena’ina at West Foreland and Point Possession (the latter about 20 miles (32 km) west of Gull Rock). In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson appointed Frederick Mears, an army engineer for the Alaska Engineering Commission, which began building the Alaska Railroad in 1915. It bought the bankrupt Alaska Northern Railway, whose track ended at Kern Creek, and built the rest, along with camps, a hospital and sawmills. The hardest stretch, 30 miles (48 km) of rock cliffs on the arm’s north shore, was finished in 1918. Crews peaked at more than 4,500 workers in 1917.

Hope, founded in the 1896 gold rush, had shrunk to 35 to 40 winter residents by 1910. A sawmill and gold prospect stood along Johnson Creek at Gull Rock, served by a primitive road built in the 1920’s along the shore of Turnagain Arm from Hope that followed an old Dena’ina trail to a small community on Chickaloon Bay about 8 miles (13 km) southwest of Gull Rock. The mill cut ties that were boated across Turnagain Arm for the railroad and later sawed timbers and lumber for mines and construction. Dick Turpin reputedly owned and ran the sawmill in the 1940s, and it was abandoned in 1947. In 1972 the Hope Historic District, encompassing the Gull Rock area, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Today the old road is the Gull Rock Trail, a popular hike of more than 5 miles (8 km) from Porcupine Campground in Chugach National Forest. Gull Rock itself is on Kenai National Wildlife Refuge land, and remnants of the sawmill may still be found at the mouth of Johnson Creek. Read more here and here. Explore more of Gull Rock and Turnagain Arm here: