Out past the river mouth is Cook Inlet — named for Captain James Cook, who probed it in 1778 hunting a Northwest Passage that wasn't there — with the white volcanoes Redoubt, Iliamna, and Spurr standing across the water. The inlet brought the next chapter: in 1957, drillers struck oil at the Swanson River north of town, the first commercial oil field in Alaska, and Kenai turned from a fishing village into an oil-and-gas town almost overnight. Canneries and rigs, salmon and crude — the inlet has paid the town's way both ways. And the wild stays close: belugas still surface off the river mouth, and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge runs back from the edge of town into moose-and-bear country.
What stayed longest was the church. The Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church, finished in 1896, is the oldest standing Russian Orthodox church in Alaska — a National Historic Landmark whose blue domes still rise over Old Town, with the small St. Nicholas Chapel of 1906 beside it on the old fort ground. Inside the church hangs a centuries-old icon of Our Lady of Kazan, among the oldest non-Native artworks in Alaska. More than a century on, the services are still held; Old Town Kenai is not a recreated village but a living one, a piece of Russian America that never quite left.
Why People Visit Kenai
Kenai pairs deep history with wide-open Alaska — a living Russian-era church, a salmon river that sets the summer's rhythm, and the long view across Cook Inlet to the mountains. It's accessible, working, and real: a Last-Frontier town that kept its old bones.
