Gore Point is a major headland with a summit elevation of 1411 feet (430 m) on the outer coast of the Kenai Peninsula that extends 2.5 miles (4 km) into the Gulf of Alaska, about 83 miles (134 km) south-southwest of Seward and 37 miles (60 km) south-southeast of Homer, Alaska. The point was named to honor Lieutenant John Gore by Captain Nathaniel Portlock of King George’s Sound Company on the King George during an exploratory trading voyage from 1785 to 1787. In 1776, Gore joined HMS Resolution as first lieutenant for Captain James Cook‘s third voyage. Following Cook’s death in Hawaii, Gore was assigned to command the expedition’s HMS Discovery. Gore eventually took responsibility for the entire expedition and brought the ships home to England in 1780. Gore Point is connected to the mainland by a low-lying isthmus of depositional sediments. The headland represents rocks of the Valdez Group that developed during the Late Cretaceous and is part of the Southern Margin Composite terrane. The rocks consist of complexly deformed metasedimentary greywacke, siltstone, and shale generally considered to be deposits of turbidity currents in an oceanic trench.
The isthmus connecting Gore Point to the mainland may have been an important area for the Unegkurmiut, an Alutiiq people that prehistorically inhabited the outer coast. Numerous house pits indicate the presence of large numbers of people that likely used the flat terrain, that had easy access to both the Gulf of Alaska and the relatively protected waters of Port Dick, as a seasonal village for hunting and fishing. At the time of first European contact, the outer coast of the Kenai Peninsula had an estimated population of about 600 people, inhabiting several villages and dozens of seasonal camps. A number of historic settlements and place-names are recorded in Russian records and Alutiiq oral history, including a village called Kangiliq in Port Dick. Russian forts were built at Aleksandrovskii or Nanwalek in Kachemak Bay in 1786, and Voskresenskii or Seward in Resurrection Bay in 1793. Alutiiq residents of the outer coast were employed or conscripted to work at Voskresenskii, and joined Russian-organized kayak fleets that were dispatched each year during the 1790s and early 1800s to hunt for sea otters along the Kenai Peninsula, Prince William Sound, and the mainland coast to the east.
Gore Point forms an immense catchment for the flotsam and jetsam transported by the prevailing westerly Alaska Coastal Current. Much of this drifting debris is kelp and logs, and there is also a large volume of plastic. When this debris washes up and strands on beaches, the organic material decomposes, but the plastics slowly degrade into smaller pieces and eventually disperses into the environment. Plastics in the marine environment have become a major concern because of their persistence, and adverse consequences for marine life and potentially human health. In 2008, 900 large bags collectively weighing over 40 tons were removed from the Gore Point area, with about 80 percent of the debris by weight and volume being commercial gear such as nets, lines, floats, buoys and fish totes. Plastic gets into the ocean when humans discard it from ships, abandon fishing gear, or leave it in the path of an incoming tide, but by far the largest volume enters the ocean from rivers. An estimated 1.15 to 2.41 million tons of plastic waste currently enters the ocean every year from rivers, with over 74 percent of emissions occurring during the summer months. The top 20 polluting rivers, mostly located in Asia, account for 67 percent of the global total volume of plastic marine debris. Read more here and here. Explore more of Gore Point and the Kenai Peninsula here:
