Travers Creek flows generally west-southwest to the north shore of Kachemak Bay, approximately 3.5 miles (5.5 km) south of Anchor Point and 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Homer, Alaska. The creek starts from an unnamed lake on the Kenai Peninsula and flows for about 1.5 miles (2.4 km)  to the confluence with Troublesome Creek and then continues for another 0.5 miles (0.8 km) through Mutnaia Gulch and exits on a broad gravel beach on lower Cook Inlet. The names for both creeks were first reported by Ralph W. Stone in 1906 and appeared on maps by the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1950s. Mutnaia Gulch is a steep-sided ravine, originally named ‘Mutnaya’—Russian for ‘muddy’—and named in 1840 by Ilya G. Voznesensky. This area is part of the Kenai Lowlands, a physiographic division of the Cook Inlet trough containing up to 23,000 feet (7,000 m) of sediments from the past 30 million years. Most of the lowland is covered by unconsolidated sediments from the Late Pleistocene glaciers. However, the Beluga Formation, a 5,000-foot (1,525 m) thick sequence of nonmarine sedimentary rocks from the Miocene (23 to 5.3 million years ago), is exposed along the north shore of Kachemak Bay from Travers Creek to Fritz Creek. The rocks in the area are predominantly weakly lithified sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, shale, coal, and minor amounts of volcanic ash. A coal seam, about 5 feet (1.5 m) thick, is exposed a few feet above high tide at the mouth of Travers Creek. Anchor Point was glaciated twice in the past 120,000 years. The first major ice advance covered the Cook Inlet basin and extended southward into the North Pacific Ocean. The second advance, during the Naptowne glaciation about 25,000 to 18,000 years ago, saw a glacial lobe flow northwest from Kachemak Bay. At that time, a large glacier blocked the mouth of Cook Inlet, impounded meltwaters and raising waterlevels to about 260 feet (80 m) above present-day sea level, until the ice retreated around 13,500 years ago.

The origins of the first humans to settle the Cook Inlet basin remain unknown, but archaeological sites suggest habitation between 10,000 and 7,500 years ago. Evidence indicates that interior Alaska was likely the origin of these early settlers after the last Ice Age glaciers melted. These sites contain stone tools left behind by highly mobile hunter-gatherers who traveled in small groups and relied on large land mammals for food. They produced thin, razor-sharp micro­blades from high-quality stone. Around 4,200 years ago, people in Cook Inlet began using ground slate spear points similar to those of the Ocean Bay Culture from Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula. This suggests the arrival of new settlers who were marine mammal hunters. Over time, these groups traded, intermarried, and occasionally conflicted. From 3,000 to 1,000 years ago, the Kachemak Culture spread across Cook Inlet. The Marine Kachemak along the lower Cook Inlet shores were closely associated with people from the outer Kenai coast and Kodiak Island, while the Riverine Kachemak were influenced by Bristol Bay and more northern coastal peoples. The Dena’ina arrived in Southcentral Alaska between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago from the interior. They are the only Alaskan Athabaskan group to live on the coast. Evidence of early settlements in the area includes fish camps and villages with large, multi-room houses. In 1778, Captain James Cook became the first European to explore and document the shores of the inlet, naming many of its key geographical features. By 1787 or 1788, Russian fur traders from the Shelikhov-Golikov Company had established a trading post, Aleksandrovskaia, at present-day Nanwalek. Around the same time, the Lebedev-Lastochkin Company set up a trading post, Pavlovskaia, at the Kenai River‘s mouth. In 1789, English ships commanded by Nathaniel Portlock and George Dixon visited the inlet, trading for furs and discovering coal beds at Port Graham. In 1794, Captain George Vancouver conducted surveys, correcting the latitude on Cook’s charts. He determined the inlet was not a great river as Cook described, leading to the name change from Cook River to Cook Inlet.

Mutnaia Gulch is the site of a series of paleobotanical studies examining plant material found in the exposed Beluga Formation. Paleobotany, a branch of biology, focuses on recovering and identifying plant remains from geological contexts. It aids in reconstructing past environments and understanding the evolutionary history of plants, contributing to the broader study of life’s evolution. This field includes the study of terrestrial plant fossils and prehistoric marine photoautotrophs, such as photosynthetic algae and seaweeds. Plant fossils are preserved parts of long-deceased plants, such as pollen. These fossils can range from prehistoric impressions millions of years old to charcoal fragments just a few hundred years old. The non-marine sedimentary rocks at Mutnaia Gulch are rich in fossilized plant material, including tree stumps, wood fragments, wood grain, and amber, likely originating from a forested swamp. Pollen and spore assemblages indicate that the warm-temperate forests of that era were primarily composed of tropical hardwoods. This suggests tectonic movement of crustal terranes from warmer equatorial latitudes. While some plants have remained almost unchanged throughout the Earth’s geological timescale, others have evolved significantly or become extinct. The megafossil plants associated with the Beluga Formation include willows such as Salix alaskana, S. chuitensis, S. kachemakensis, and S. tyonekana; alders like Alnus corylina and A. adumbrata; hornbeam Carpinsis cobbi; hazel Corylus chuitensis; shrub Spiraea hopkinsi; Rhododendron weaveri; and heath Vaccinium homerensis. Read more here and here. Explore more of Travers Creek and Kachemak Bay here: