Icy Strait Point: Hoonah, Whale Watching, Bears and How Ships Arrive

A cruise ship drops anchor off a Tlingit village on Chichagof Island, and passengers step ashore beside an old salmon cannery with the forest rising right behind it. That is Icy Strait Point, a cruise destination built on the edge of Hoonah, and it mixes Tlingit heritage, whale country and a working Alaska waterfront.

What is Icy Strait Point?

Icy Strait Point is a cruise destination in Hoonah, Alaska, on Chichagof Island, near the Icy Strait. It sits beside a real community rather than a purpose-built port town, and that shapes the whole feel of a visit: a village waterfront, a cannery, forest and water all within sight of each other.

The place is owned by Huna Totem Corporation, a company of about 1,350 Alaskan Natives with ties to Hoonah and Glacier Bay. It opened for cruise ships in 2004. In other words, the people whose families come from this shore run the visitor business on it, which is not the case at every port in the Inside Passage.

The cannery at the water’s edge

The centerpiece is the 1930s Hoonah Packing Company facility. It has been converted into a museum, a restaurant and shops, so the old working buildings now hold exhibits about the salmon-packing days, a place to sit down for a meal and counters of local goods.

It makes a natural first stop after stepping ashore. You get a sense of how the shore earned its living before cruise ships arrived, and the buildings give the landing a weathered, industrial character that suits the setting better than anything newly built would.

Hoonah and the Tlingit homeland

Hoonah is a traditional Tlingit village near Glacier Bay, home of the Xúnaa Ḵáawu. The Tlingit, or Lingít, are an Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, recognized as Alaska Natives, and their historic territory took in almost all of the Alexander Archipelago, the island chain of Southeast Alaska.

Tlingits in Alaska have no reservations. Instead, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act set up regional corporations that hold land, and Sealaska is the one for Southeast Alaska, representing Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian shareholders. Huna Totem, which owns Icy Strait Point, is part of that same corporate landscape, which helps explain why a village company runs a cruise destination.

What can you do there?

You can go looking for whales and bears, browse the cannery buildings, and eat and shop in the restored Hoonah Packing Company complex. The wildlife outings are chances, never promises, and the water and forest around Hoonah decide what you actually see.

Whale watching at Point Adolphus

Whale watching excursions from Icy Strait Point go to the Point Adolphus feeding area for humpback whales. The idea is simple: boats head out onto Icy Strait to the spot where humpbacks gather to feed, and you spend the outing scanning the water for blows, backs and tail flukes.

As with any wildlife trip, the sighting is a chance and not a certainty. Bring binoculars if you have them, keep your camera ready, and enjoy the strait itself, with the forested shoreline of Chichagof Island and the open water of the channel, whatever the whales decide to do.

Searching for brown bears on the Spasski River

Visitors can search for coastal brown bears on the Spasski River near Icy Strait Point, but sightings are not guaranteed. The outing is about patience: you look along a river corridor in the forest, and you may see bears, or you may come back with only the scenery and the stories you heard along the way.

It suits travelers who like quiet and a slower pace more than a checklist of animals. If bears are your priority, pair it in your mind with the whale outing, since each gives you a different side of the same coast.

The cannery, the museum and the shops

Not every passenger wants a boat or a river. The restored cannery gives you a museum, a restaurant and shops in one cluster, so you can wander at your own pace, read about the place and have a meal in a building that once packed salmon.

It also works as a fallback when weather makes the water outings less appealing. The buildings are right at the landing, and the setting, with the village and the forest behind, keeps the stop interesting even without a tour.

How do ships reach it?

Cruise ships anchor off Icy Strait Point from May to September. Hoonah itself is accessible only by boat or plane, so the water is the way in, and the cruise season is what brings the village its weekly flow of visitors during the warm months.

Other ways into Hoonah

Not everyone arrives on a cruise ship. The Alaska Marine Highway serves Hoonah with the M/V LeConte, and the Alaska Department of Transportation built a new ferry facility in Hoonah that opened in early 2001. So the village has its own ferry landing, separate from the cruise operation.

By air, Hoonah Airport has a 3,000-foot runway, and the air carrier Alaska Seaplanes offers multiple flights a day between Hoonah and Juneau. Together, ferry and plane tie the village to the rest of Southeast Alaska without a single road in from outside.

Gustavus across the strait

Another community on Icy Strait, Gustavus, is the gateway to Glacier Bay National Park. It lies at the mouth of the Salmon River on the north shore of Icy Strait, 50 miles northwest of Juneau, and no road leads into it from outside Glacier Bay National Park.

Alaska Airlines flies daily in summer from Juneau to Gustavus Airport, and the Alaska Marine Highway began serving Gustavus at a new dock on November 23, 2010. Gustavus has one main road, which links it with Bartlett Cove in the national park. Wild Alaska Charters offers whale watching at Point Adolphus there too, along with rainforest hikes, kayaking, diving expeditions and fishing with equipment and bait provided.

Good to know before you go

Icy Strait Point is a working Tlingit community as well as a cruise stop, so treat the village and the cannery as someone’s home waters. The cruise season runs from May to September, and bear and whale outings depend on what the wildlife does that day, so go with an open mind and keep the cannery in reserve for the hours when the weather turns.