Clam Gulch

The Kenaitze and Athabaskan Indians were among the first to inhabit Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. Russian fur trappers arrived in the late eighteenth century. Captain James Cook explored Cook Inlet in 1778. Americans started coming to the area after the United States purchased the territory from Russia in 1876. Per Osmar and his family homesteaded in the Clam Gulch area in 1948.

Scott Ransom did not go to Alaska with the idea of writing a travel book. He hitchhiked there from upstate New York in 1972. His last ride left him off at Osmar's Ocean Specialties, a salmon processing plant. He spent the next ten years in Alaska, working as a commercial fisherman, an oil-field hand on the North Slope, and as a tax preparer on the Kenai Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands. He met his wife at the cannery and they were married at the Clam Shell Lodge.

Meet some memorable Alaskan characters: Seth Wright, the slightly eccentric, tougher-than-nails commercial fisherman, trapper, and hunter; Per Osmar's son Dean, a highline fisherman and champion sled-dog musher; the author's sometime fishing partner, Bob Toll; and Gidget, the world's ugliest dog.

Clam Gulch is a memoir written with humor and passion that will introduce you to a part of Alaska that tourists never see.