Hope, Alaska: 'The most romantic town in the universe'

HOPE, Alaska − Fifty miles from the nearest gas station, where the dirt road dead-ends at the old gold mining claims, bluegrass music drifted into the night.

Dressed in mosquito-net shirts customized with purple fringe, the four women of the band Annie Bartholomew and the Sitka Roses were singing, plucking banjos and dancing in front of the Seaview Cafe as a small crowd in lawn chairs sipped beers. The seemingly endless sunset gleamed off the snowcapped peaks behind.

"The first time I saw this place I thought it might be the most romantic town in the universe," said band member Kat Moore, 42, during a break in performances. "It’s just quaint and historic and there's beautiful mountains all around ... and amazing nature everywhere."

Long past 10 p.m. the sun still hung in the sky. A day after summer solstice, the daylight lasted almost 20 hours. As the twangs and strums from musicians lifted into the sky, visitors rolled into town with campers and pickups, rattling VW buses and Subarus equipped for camping. They swell the town's official population of 130 people into more than 1,000 on some weekends.

This is popular place for weddings because people want to start their marriages off from a place of Hope, as one local put it. There's no official town government - many decisions are instead made by the nonprofit Hope Inc. that any voting-age resident can join - and busiest coffee shop is a cabin reached by walking carefully around the momma moose lounging with her calf in a grassy yard. The gourmet hot dog stand opens at 10 p.m., and the ice cream shop will deliver to your tent or camper well past midnight.

This tiny community two hours' drive from Anchorage is one of 19 towns of the same name across the United States.

In interviews over the first half of the year, USA TODAY reporters repeatedly heard frustration and a deep longing for better times to come. So we visited six towns called Hope, from Michigan to Arkansas, Maine to Alaska, looking for signs of optimism and what was getting in people's way.

Here's what we found at the end of the road, about as far west as you can go on the North American continent.

It's important to get along with your (few) neighbors

In a town as small as Hope, everyone pretty much knows everything about everyone: The truck they drive, whether they've gotten a new snow machine, what they order for breakfast.

Though Alaskans love to embrace their "Last Frontier" status and the freedoms that come from living in a state with about as many residents as Denver, it's hard to escape the gaze of your neighbor or disappear into a crowd.

Instead, the harsh winter conditions ‒ 3 feet of snow overnight isn't unusual ‒ prompt a neighborliness rarely found in larger cities. After all, it's not a good idea to feud with the people who own the snowplows.

During long winter nights with only five hours of daylight, Hope residents use social media message boards to discuss pressing issues, from whether the summer's live music is too loud to how to handle the tourists' parking and trash. And while those online debates sometimes get heated, people usually realize they're attacking their neighbors and cool down, said Barb Bureau, 58, a retired adventure tourism guide who volunteers at the library.

"We’re forced to face each other," she said. “We get together and talk out our differences. When you’re in a room talking face-to-face, you can get a lot more done than just yelling on social media."

Still, disputes can quickly get personal, especially when it comes to things like parking, noise and the appropriate way to leave unwanted items at the "Hope Mall" ‒ the Dumpsters where residents toss their trash and set out no-longer-needed things like old bikes, washing machines or furniture.

"It’s way more painful, way more difficult" to deal with those small-town issues than the "future of the country" issues, said Hope resident and fourth-generation Alaskan Jeannine Jabaay, 47.

Scotty Smith, the town's de facto mayor, drifted into Hope as a river guide 20 years ago, eventually starting his own rafting business. Thousands of tourists arrive in Hope each summer to raft the Class IV and V rapids of Six Mile Creek, which flows into a narrow ocean bay called Turnagain Arm, where the inrushing tide is so fierce people regularly surf it.

Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, is about 15 miles from Hope as the bald eagle flies, but there's no bridge or boat across the sticky glacial silt covering the bottom of Turnagain Arm.

Smith, 44, said Hope's isolation was a big part of what drew him there. Growing up in the Atlanta area, he was frustrated by how political everything seemed. It's even worse today, he said, briefly tearing up as he recalled hateful social media posts from an otherwise loving family member.

With two kids he plans to homeschool, Smith said he wants to instill in them the same neighborliness he sees practiced every day. He said he rejects traditional "red versus blue" approaches in favor of community consensus, though he concedes that can be hard to find when longtime residents get irked by newcomers.

"When I showed up here 20 years ago it was pretty quiet," Smith said. "Tourism is great, but right now we have a town with little infrastructure and a lot of (tourist) impact."

Like Bureau, Smith said small fights over parking, trash and toilets often ripple through the town's message board but usually stop once people start talking to one another face-to-face. Because Hope has so little infrastructure, the volunteer-run library is a popular place for people to find a flush toilet instead of using the pit toilets and Porta Potties scattered around town.

“You can go to a room and people can talk it out," Smith said as he collected raffle tickets to benefit the library and volunteer fire department.

Grounds for hope

Long known as an off-the-beaten-path place for locals to escape from Anchorage, Hope is gaining popularity as a live music destination with three venues. On the solstice weekend the Creekbend Café, the Dirty Skillet and the Seaview were booked back-to-back with musical performances, campers and weddings. Riders staged up for a 250-mile-long mountain bike race that the fastest rider completed in under 30 hours, aided by near-continuous daylight.

At Grounds For Hope Espresso, owner Samantha Brown, 49, bustled from the coffeemaker to the panini press, serving up homemade burritos, oat milk lattes and lavender muffins. Most summer mornings, the tiny cabin serves as a de facto meeting place for Hope. Smith grabbed coffee and breakfast for his family, and a friend snuck in to pay his bill.

Jack the golden retriever wandered from group to group, investigating tourists and their dogs, sniffing at customers' flip-flops, sandals, running shoes and otherwise ubiquitous Xtratuf rubber boots, often worn with the tops folded down to show off a colorful lining of sea creatures.

Brown, a retired nurse, bought the coffee hut 12 years ago. At the time, her husband was working as a bartender but they were looking for a quieter lifestyle, which they found living in a cabin without running water. Now, she and her husband run the coffee hut five days a week, along with several seasonal vacation cabins for tourists.

"It's a pretty good gig, actually," she said. "The challenge is that we don't live near anything."

At least once a week, Brown drives her Toyota Prius to Anchorage for supplies for the cabins and the coffee hut. She has watched as food costs have steadily risen, especially eggs, and adjusted her burrito prices accordingly. Brown said she'd like to think she lives a low-impact lifestyle but adds that she also takes a lot of airplane trips during her six-month offseason

Like many Americans, she worries what the future holds for her daughter, especially the cost of housing and climate change. Like many Hope residents, Brown doesn't have a mortgage. Many of the homes here are modest, and some of the hand-hewn cabins built by the early gold rush prospectors are still standing.

Because Alaska has such extreme temperatures, especially in the winter, scientists say it is more vulnerable to a warming climate than other parts of the United States.

Some coastal Alaska Native villages are being washed away by rising waters, new plants and insects are moving in as large wildfires scorch the landscape, and experts fear large portions of the permanently frozen ground known as permafrost are melting, releasing heat-trapping methane. The warming coastal waters also are affecting the state's commercially important crab, cod and salmon fishing grounds.

Digging deeper: Climb aboard four fishing boats with us to see how America's warming waters are changing

At the same time, the oil and gas industry is the state's biggest economic driver, making up nearly 85% of tax revenue. High gas prices in the rest of the country mean boom times for Alaskans, and a transition to clean energy like solar and wind imperils the approximately 76,000 direct and indirect oil-industry jobs.

Hope isn't isolated from those concerns. It sits on the Turnagain Arm, which connects to the Gulf of Alaska. And people still talk about the effect of the 2019 Swan Lake Fire, which burned 265 square miles on the other side of the mountains bordering Hope, sending a choking pall of smoke across the area for days. Many residents count on catching salmon as a food source, and nearby receding glaciers can make rivers extra silty.

"We see it all around us, so many examples of how things are changing even in my time here," said Bureau, the retired tour guide. "We are going to hit some pretty low lows before we are forced to realize a lot of things aren’t sustainable. And maybe getting in our gas cars and driving two hours to the grocery store is not sustainable."

Isolation is a feature, not a bug

Hope's isolation is precisely what most visitors are seeking, though.

Just outside the core old town area, Jabaay and her husband own and manage the Dirty Skillet restaurant and Bear Creek Lodge Cabins. They ran a construction company in Anchorage, and although they bought a house in Hope in 2007, they didn't fully commit until 2018, when they purchased the lodge and restaurant. Anchorage, she said, was starting to feel kind of "icky" and unsafe.

Like many of America's urban areas, Alaska's biggest city has struggled with homelessness, drug overdoses and crime fueled by drug addiction. With nearly 300,000 residents, almost 40% of the state's entire population lives in Anchorage (though it's the 74th largest city in the country).

“I knew what we were letting go of ‒ that big-city feel. Moving to Hope was for the lifestyle, for the kids," said Jabaay, who, along with her husband homeschools their six children. "Maybe it should have been more scary. It was a lifestyle we were choosing and it was a totally different trade."

Today, she wouldn't trade it for anything. As the evening sun lingered in the sky on the summer solstice, staff at the Dirty Skillet bustled around busy tables, serving up Anchorage-brewed beers, burgers and chocolate-topped cherry cheesecake.

About 14 workers help Jabaay and her family run the lodge and restaurant ‒ 14 hires out of 700 applicants seeking a summer Alaskan adventure, which included free housing. Several workers said the offer of housing was a key factor in seeking their positions because such opportunities are rare in the Lower 48.

"On the surface, there's nothing to do here," Jabaay said. "It feels like 'Little House on the Prairie,' with Wi-Fi, but not good Wi-Fi."

That spotty internet connectivity, along with the long summer days, means residents and visitors alike have all the excuses in the world to disconnect and go hiking or mountain biking. Wildlife photographers search for bears and moose, and anglers head out for salmon and halibut from Whittier. Others make the 70-mile drive to Seward to clamber up an overlook showing how far the Exit Glacier has receded over the past 200 years.

Further afield, tourists admire the Russian Orthodox churches scattered around Homer, a reminder that Alaska belonged to Russia until William Seward, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of state, negotiated a deal for the United States to buy it in 1867 for $7.2 million ‒ about $120 million in today's dollars.

The gold rush that brought white settlers and prospectors to Alaska began almost immediately after the "Seward's Folly" purchase, and Hope was settled just before 1900. Local legend says Hope, named after a prospector, had a population of about 3,000 during its gold-rush heyday, when one man panned 385 ounces of gold in two months. That's worth more than $800,000 in 2024 dollars.

Gold mining in Hope has largely vanished, although a local artist makes earrings using gold flakes panned from the river.

Sitting at the bar at the Dirty Skillet as her staff poured drinks and accepted customer compliments, Jabaay laughed as she recalled how some tourists invariably arrive in Hope looking for a specific chain hotel. That hotel doesn't exist in this Hope, she said, and they've instead accidentally booked one in Hope, Arkansas. They usually take the mistake in stride, she said, and figure out a solution so they can stay.

"Hope has a weird way of drawing you in," Jabaay said. "Nobody ends up in Hope by accident. It has to be intentional."

All politics is local

Most Hope residents tread carefully around national politics, but Dru Sorenson doesn't bother with that. Though none of her neighbors fly Trump or MAGA flags or drive around with Biden-Harris bumper stickers, the front yard of her "world's greatest gift shop" is festooned with political signs, many of them criticizing Democrats and Republicans alike.

Sorenson, who goes by "Sourdough Dru," said she has been told to "cool it" at the Seaview Café for talking politics. Among the stickers on display, one says "Make America Happy Again," and another: "It's funny until someone files a lawsuit. Be Nice, Hope Alaska."

Sorenson moved to Hope in 1981 after cashing in some retirement savings to buy property. She had been coming camping in Hope since childhood and leapt at the chance to put down roots after living in several places around Alaska.

"When I came here, the thing I loved most about it was I could be myself and nobody gave a damn," she said, drinking a breakfast Guinness. "We're at the end of the road. That makes it special. People have to be intentionally coming here. Everyone who comes to Hope, I guarantee, you'll be back."

The tourists who flooded into town solstice weekend from Anchorage said they appreciated the opportunity to leave behind the politicized day-to-day life of modern America.

“This never gets old: opening up the camper door to see all of this, having the kids playing in the river while you’re opening up a cold Coors for breakfast," said tourist Ariane Aramburo, 42, an Anchorage television news anchor visiting with three friends and a handful of children. "When you come here, you don't have sides. It gives you hope that politics aside, that there is hope for our country."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Where there's Hope in Alaska: Solitude, nature, neighbors