Chichagof Island carries one of the highest brown bear densities on Earth, roughly one bear for every square mile of forest. The island sits at the northern end of the Alexander Archipelago, and its shoreline meets Icy Strait, a channel where nutrient-rich water from the Gulf of Alaska funnels inland on the tide.
That current is the reason icy strait whale watching and wildlife sightseeing exists at all. Krill and herring collect in the upwelling. Humpback whales follow them. The pattern repeats each summer with unusual precision.
The shore installation at Icy Strait Point was built in 1912 as a salmon cannery serving the Huna Tlingit village of Hoonah. Production ceased in 1953. The red-roofed cannery buildings at 108 Cannery Road were later restored by Huna Totem Corporation and reopened as a visitor port, making this one of the few cruise destinations in Alaska owned by the Indigenous community whose ancestors named the water.
Little of the original structure was discarded. The cannery museum retains the retort line, the fish elevator and the boardwalk pilings that once carried sockeye from hold to can. Outside, the working docks now dispatch small vessels rather than seiners. An icy strait whale watching and wildlife sightseeing tour leaving this pier reaches Point Adolphus, the headland across the channel long regarded by biologists as one of the most reliable humpback feeding grounds in Southeast Alaska. Bubble-net feeding, a cooperative hunting behaviour recorded in only a few populations worldwide, is observed here most summers. Orcas, Steller sea lions, sea otters and bald eagles share the same water. The Tlingit name for the village, Xunaa, describes a place sheltered from the north wind.
The land side matters equally. The Spasski River valley, ten miles by road from the port, is coastal temperate rainforest of Sitka spruce and western hemlock, where brown bears fish the salmon runs below covered viewing platforms. A Hoonah wildlife cruise and a bear-viewing expedition are therefore two halves of one geography, not competing itineraries. Icy Strait Point excursions begin at a working waterfront rather than a terminal. Operators running icy strait whale watching and wildlife sightseeing tours from these docks work a marine corridor that remains a Tlingit subsistence ground, and the naturalists aboard are frequently Hoonah residents. Fewer than nine hundred people live in the village. The humpbacks outnumber them through August.
3 hr
