THE first time I gazed on the storied coast of Alaska I was standing lens-to-lens with dozens of my fellow passengers on the deck of a cruise ship. To say we were bowled over would be a serious understatement. Mountain after mountain, each streaked with a different pattern of snow, exploded from a silver-gray sea into a gray-silver sky  and it all seemed to go on forever. The engines churned, the ship sailed on and the spectacular beauty kept rolling by.  Chris Ramirez for The New York Times  Heading out to Homer Spit, at the end of the Sterling Highway.  Chris Ramirez for The New York Times  But after a while, I wanted more than scenery. I wanted, well, Alaska: Wildlife sightings without a score of whirring shutters. Hikes without a sign-up sheet. Random, unscripted encounters with people and places. Silence. Solitude.  I wanted to see some of Alaska's 33,904 miles of coast without having to strain against a ship's safety rail. I wanted to get out on the road and drive, to see the beauty of the Last Frontier up close and at my own pace.  Though most visitors see Alaska from the deck of a cruise ship, the reality is that this state, despite its lack of highways and abundance of challenging terrain, can be the setting for a perfect road trip  one that takes the driver through canyons carved by jade-green rivers, along deserted beaches teeming with shellfish and shorebirds and past century-old miners' cabins and dark bars serving up cool mugs of amber brews.  So, earlier this summer, my wife, Kate, and I set out on a six-day journey in a rented Chevy Cobalt, on a route that formed a rough arc through the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. Just 20 minutes after leaving the Anchorage airport, heading south on Seward Highway, we got our first payoff at Turnagain Arm, the dark, tapered fjord that separates the Chugach Range from the mountains and lakes of the Kenai (pronounced KEY-nigh).  I'd never seen mountains so big rising so close to salt water; I'd never seen so many peaks so close to a city; I'd never felt so dwarfed by highway scenery. Fifteen miles into the trip, I'd already exhausted my supply of superlatives.  The plan for that afternoon was to head toward a little town called Hope, an 18-mile detour off the Seward Highway on the far side of Turnagain Arm, and stop on the way there for a whitewater raft trip down Sixmile Creek. Kate was game, but my resolve got a little wobbly when the temperature refused to budge out of the low 50s  and it collapsed altogether once we scrambled down a rough path to the river bank and I got a look at the rapids slamming against the canyon walls.  You know they lose three or four every year from those rafts, Jim Tudor told me later as we stood by the stove in the Hope-Sunrise Historical Society and Mining Museum, where he is a docent, and talked about the gold rush days that got the town going in the 1890s. Who needs class V rapids when you can while away an afternoon peering at old photos, stuffed owls and gold nuggets?  Downtown Hope  a bar, a store, magpies singing from big clumps of Alaska elderberry and a collection of quaint log cabins set back from an immense tidal flat on Turnagain Arm  was pretty much deserted. But someone must love the place dearly because these cabins have withstood more than a century of Alaska weather in pristine condition.  NOT counting spurs and side roads, there are only two highways that serve the Kenai: the Seward Highway, which runs more or less north-south for 127 miles between Anchorage and Seward, and the Sterling Highway, which cuts west off the Seward Highway 90 miles south of Anchorage then turns south along the peninsula's west coast to Homer, covering 158 miles.  Cooper Landing, 11 miles west of the junction of the Sterling and Seward Highways in the middle of the peninsula, seemed like a good place to stop for the first night. Anyway, I liked the sound of the name.  Aside from its stunning location where the long snaking Kenai Lake flows into the milky green Kenai River, the town isn't much to look at. A series of cabins equipped with fish freezers and billboards boasting of fishing and rafting trips, Cooper Landing is all about bagging big salmon  and since the fish hadn't appeared yet, there wasn't much going on. What to do on a gray, drizzly morning?  Drive out to Skilak Lake Road, suggested a woman who worked at the Kenai Princess Wilderness Lodge, where we spent the night, describing how to pick up the rutted dirt road that cuts through a corner of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge west of town. This is where the locals take their guests to see bears.  No bears were spotted in the course of the drive, though there was a striking change in scenery. No sooner had the billboards of Cooper Landing disappeared than the jagged peaks that had encircled us since Anchorage relaxed into smooth ridges and rounded humps rising from wide glassy waters. Trail signs beckoned every few miles, and so, despite the dreary weather and elevated threat level for bears, we decided to take a hike.  A helpful sign at the start of the 2.6-mile Skilak Lookout Trail explained in graphic detail how to resolve all manner of ursine encounters. Singing loudly to alert lurking bears to the presence of a couple of out-of-tune idiots, we set off into the dripping underbrush.  Charred stumps left by a 1996 fire made for a rather somber walk. But the burn did open up glorious views to Skilak Lake (as well as good sight lines to approaching bears) and cleared the way for meadows starred with lupine, bunch berry, Jacob's ladder and purple mountain saxifrage, all in full bloom. We saw but a single raft drifting on the lake below  a dot of blue in a brooding immensity of black, green and gray.  (Had we been there later that month, we would have seen the smoke from a 72,000-acre fire that burned for days southwest of there and destroyed scores of homes).  By the end of the hike we became rather lax about bear patrol and even regretted that we'd encountered no wildlife more thrilling than the celestial-voiced Swainson's thrush and some seagulls, which fly inland to feed on young salmon in the gravelly shallows of Hidden Creek.  DAVID LASKIN, a regular contributor, wrote about bird-watching on St. Paul Island, Alaska, for the Travel section in 2005.
Though most people see the awe-inspiring Kenai Peninsula from behind the railing of a cruise ship, this rugged land has the making of an ideal road trip.