Nuka River starts from Bradley Pass in the Kenai Mountains at an elevation of roughly 1400 feet (427 m) and flows generally south for 10 miles (16 km), draining a watershed of 34,503 acres (13,963 ha), to Beauty Bay between Storm Mountain to the north and Mount Diablo to the south in West Arm Nuka Bay, about 57 miles (92 km) southwest of Seward and 32 miles (52 km) east-southeast of Homer, Alaska. The river name was first published in 1826 by Lieutenant Gavril Sarychev and is derived from the Alutiiq language word ‘nukaq’ which refers to a young bull caribou. Bradley Pass divides the Harding Icefield to the north from the Grewingk-Yalik Glacier Complex to the south. Bradley Pass was reputedly named for John A. Bradley, a local prospector. Nuka River is fed by at least seven ice streams descending from the Grewingk-Yalik Glacier Complex. Beauty Bay is almost entirely formed by metasedimentary rocks representing the Valdez Group of the Southern Margin Composite terrane, mostly consisting of greywacke, siltstone, and shale generally considered to be deposits of turbidity currents in an oceanic trench. Igneous intrusions during the Eocene and Paleogene created localized mineralization with limited amounts of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc.

The outer coast of the Kenai Peninsula was inhabited by Aluttiq Sugpiaq people known as the Unegkurmiut. In the 1830s, a trading post and Russian Orthodox chapel were established at Yalik village and by 1880, the settlement had a population of 32. Following the Alaska Purchase in 1867, the Russian Orthodox Church had difficulty in providing services to remote villages and Yalik residents were requested to move to Alexandrovsk, present-day Nanwalek. In 1896, a group of miners were heading up the coast to the Hope-Sunrise diggings when a storm forced them to retreat to Nuka Bay, and George Stinson reputedly found some placer gold on the beach. In 1917 or 1918, a quartz lode carrying free gold was discovered two miles up the Nuka River from Beauty Bay by Frank Case and Otis Harrington. In 1922, Charles Emsweiler, a Seward-based game guide and policeman, located a vein of free milling gold at the head of Beauty Bay, and he brought out a thousand pounds of ore that netted $80 of gold. In 1924, Emsweiler’s prospect was operated by Frank Skeen as the Alaska Hills Mine, and in 1928, the Sonny Fox Mine was operating at the head of Surprise Bay. Between 1924 and 1940, a total of five mines produced and shipped gold ore valued at $10,000 per year.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report in 1950 noted that the Bradley Lake area was one of the most favorable sites for hydroelectric development in Southcentral Alaska. Project construction began in 1986, and the dam’s power plant began generating electricity during the summer of 1991. Most of the water for the project comes from Kachemak Creek that connects the outflow from Kachemak Glacier, which is attached to the Harding Icefield, to Bradley Lake. A lesser volume of water comes from the Bradley River that connects the outflow from Nuka Glacier, which is attached to the Grewingk-Yalik Glacier Complex, to Bradley Lake. The terminus of Nuka Glacier is situated at Bradley Pass and straddles the divide between the Nuka and Bradley rivers so that some of the discharged water flows into Kenai Fjords National Park and Beauty Bay, and some into Kachemak Bay via Bradley lake. To increase the capacity of the hydroelectric project, engineers diverted a portion of the Nuka River’s flow into the Bradley River drainage by building a dike at Bradley Pass. Read more here and here. Explore more of Nuka River and Beauty Bay here: