Where did the Huna Tlingit Indians forced by Climate Change to evacuate Glacier Bay circa 1800 end up? Just across Icy Strait in Hoonah. Right next to their town, after salmon canning became unprofitable, they set up a theme park for cruise ships called “Icy Strait Point”:
What did our AI cruise director suggest?
Icy Strait Point has a built-for-cruise feel, but it is also one of the better places for whale watching or kayaking because the tour boats don’t have to spend a lot of time just reaching wildlife areas. The port’s official site emphasizes the old salmon cannery setting and excursions tied to the natural setting and local history.
For a no-excursion plan, do the Icy Strait Point Nature Trail, beach, cannery area, and maybe walk/ride into Hoonah. The Nature Trail is short—about 1.1 miles, easy, roughly 0.5–1 hour—so it won’t satisfy your “couple of hours in forest” goal by itself. If you want a more substantial activity here, this is a good port for a guided wilderness hike, kayak, or whale-watch rather than improvising deep woods, partly because Chichagof Island is serious bear country.
Here’s the overview map:
We bought tickets from the ship for the Sky Peak gondola, which rises 1,600′, and arrived in the middle of a cloud for a bilingual talk by a tribal elder (not Elizabeth Warren):
Was waiting in line for the gondola worth it? 100 percent! Where better to practice outdoor masking than on top of a mountain in Alaska?
Remember to have your coffee before getting off the ship. The line for the shack at the top of the gondola wasn’t pretty:
The trail to a long boardwalk carried some warnings:
Who wouldn’t be happy to be out in the fresh air with a 12-gauge shotgun? One of these guys was from Indiana(!) and now makes his year-round home in Hoonah:
Were the guns necessary? The guides/guards said that the bears were all down closer to the water because there was an ample food supply down there during the late May time of our visit. The bear-free boardwalk:
The weather cleared when we got back to the top of the gondola:
There was a 30-minute line to get onto a free gondola that saves a 20-minute walk into Hoonah:
Hoonah with multiple ships in port is at least as crowded as Manhattan and with comparable restaurant waiting times.
Instead of waiting in the line, we hoofed it back to our ship and ate lunch on board.
I enjoyed seeing Serenade of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean ship that was home for me and mom on my very first ocean cruise (Baltic 2016). She’s also a product of Meyer Werft.
For fans of the costs of government regulation, a Jones Act Alaskan Marine Highway ferry, M/V Hubbard. She was built in Alaska and took 17 years from being “envisioned” to completion, i.e., enough time for the Chinese to build a few cities and associated shipyards for Neopanamax container carriers. The cost might have been as high as $100 million, including crew quarters that were added, for this Ketchikan-built 5,000-ton vessel that carries 53 cars. With her sister ship, in other words, the cost was higher than what our Chinese brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters charge to build a Neopanamax container ship of 15,000 TEU capacity and 135,000 gross tons. Do the Chinese need 17 years? ChatGPT says closer to 1 year, though this can stretch to 3-4 years depending on the shipyard’s backlog.
If we returned to Icy Strait Point we’d book a whale watch.
Your blog is so full of Misinformation that it is killing us! You should know that Climate Change is always and all the time man-made. Therefore, your post here, which celebrates some of the earliest known Climate Destroyers (the Huna Tlingit Indians), is morally repugnant to all the rest of us. These Climate Destroyers intentionally melted their own glacier and now run a despicable “amusement” park on Stolen Land.