Icy Strait Point is a cannery before it is a cruise port. The 1912 salmon plant at 108 Cannery Rd was rebuilt as a visitor landing in 2004, and it remains owned by Huna Totem Corporation, the Alaska Native corporation representing the Huna Tlingit — the only cruise destination in Alaska under Native ownership.
The grounds cost nothing to enter; the water is where the money and the meaning both go.
That water is the reason anyone comes. Icy Strait and Port Frederick sit at the mouth of Glacier Bay, where cold, nutrient-heavy currents push upward against the sills and shallows around Chichagof Island. Krill and herring collect. Humpback whales follow them from Hawaii each spring and stay through September, and a share of them stay put, feeding in the same bays year after year. Icy Strait Point whale watching private charters exist because the water is narrow enough that a boat of six sees what a boat of a hundred cannot: the coordinated bubble-net feeding for which these whales are famous, a technique passed between individuals rather than inherited.
Hoonah itself is the largest Tlingit village in Alaska, population near 900. The town burned in 1944 and much of its clan regalia went with it. What survives is on the water and in the names — Xunaa, the village sheltered from the north wind. Orca, Steller sea lions, sea otters and bald eagles share the strait; brown bears fish the salmon streams inland, which is why several operators pair marine and terrestrial wildlife on the same day.
The cannery buildings are worth reading as architecture. Weathered cedar sheds on pilings, a working dock, the retained machinery of the fish line, and above them a gondola strung to Hoonah Mountain at 1,600 feet. Little was demolished. The restoration kept the sagging rooflines and the shapes of the old net lofts, so the port reads as an industrial artifact rather than a themed street.
What a private boat buys, practically, is time and quiet — a smaller hull, a captain who can idle at 100 yards and wait, and no fixed circuit to complete. Some sailings add aerial drone filming; others extend into Chichagof Island's bear country. Icy Strait Point whale watching private tickets are booked separately from the port itself, and the vessels sail from the same dock the salmon once left on. The strait has not changed. Only the cargo has.
3 hr
