Fire Island is about 5.5 miles (8.9 km) long and lies near the head of Cook Inlet, within the Municipality of Anchorage, separated from Point Campbell by 3 miles (4.8 km) of tidal flats, and about 7 miles (11 km) from Point Possession and 7 miles (11 km) from the mouth of the Little Susitna River, roughly 24 miles (39 km) northwest of Hope and 9 miles (14 km) southwest of downtown Anchorage, Alaska. The island’s core is a glaciodeltaic formation, layers of sand, gravel and till laid down some 14,000 years ago near a glacier lobe in the Susitna valley, later capped by wind-blown dunes and rimmed by bluffs averaging 200 feet (60 m) high. Captain George Vancouver named it Turnagain Island on April 20th 1794, after nearby Turnagain Arm. The Dena’ina name, Nutuł’iy (“object that stands in the water”), appeared on an 1847 Russian chart as Ostrov Mushukhli, or Mushukhli Island. By 1895 the US Coast and Geodetic Survey had adopted the name Fire Island, which stuck.

Fire Island hosted Dena’ina fish camps from 1918 until the 1970s. According to a Dena’ina elder, a village once stood on the island until an epidemic, sometime before 1934, forced survivors south across Turnagain Arm to Point Possession, on the Kenai Peninsula. During the second world war the American army used the island as a lookout for Japanese submarines. In September 1951 the air force established Fire Island Air Force Station, staffed by about 200 people, as a radar-warning and Nike missile site for NORAD; the base also housed an FAA air-traffic-control radar and communications post. The station closed in 1969, though the FAA kept its own facility running until 1980; the remaining structures were razed in the 1990s. In 1982 the site passed to Cook Inlet Region Inc (CIRI), an Alaska Native corporation, as surplus federal property. CIRI now owns 90% of the island’s roughly 4,000 acres (1,619 ha); the FAA and the Coast Guard hold the rest.

Various uses have been proposed for Fire Island, including expanding the Port of Anchorage or building industrial facilities, but scant fresh water rules out large-scale development. In the early 1990s Chugach Electric, a local utility, identified the island as a promising wind-farm site, citing strong and steady winds, proximity to Anchorage and few conflicting land uses. CIRI, through its subsidiary Fire Island Wind, began preparatory work in 2009, and turbine construction proceeded through the summer of 2012. On September 24th 2012 all 11 turbines began feeding electricity into Anchorage’s grid, making it the first megawatt-scale wind project in south-central Alaska. The site was designed for 33 turbines in three strings of 11, and as of mid-2026 CIRI describes a second string as “shovel-ready,” since the necessary roads, transmission capacity and switchgear are already in place; construction has stalled for want of a utility willing to buy the added power. Read more here and here. Explore more of Fire Island and Cook Inlet here: