HOONAH, Alaska -- The encircling rain forest has been all but chopped down, and logging jobs are nearly gone. Income from salmon fishing has plummeted, a casualty of global salmon farming.
Yet this tiny native village on an island in southeastern Alaska is suddenly swimming in cash.
Don and Louise Albin of Michigan, on a cruise to celebrate Don's 80th birthday, have their picture taken in Hoonah, Alaska, a new port of call.
(Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post)
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If Marge Peterson, a village trinket-maker, does not make $400 after six hours of selling earrings made of fish-head bones, she thinks something is amiss. Sealskin moccasins, at $360 a pair, are disappearing as fast as village women can stitch them together. Bear tours ($90) are packed. So are humpback whale cruises ($79) and charter fishing excursions for salmon and halibut ($179).
Hoonah is feeling the financial rapture -- and fretting the cultural dislocation -- of being discovered by one of Alaska's fastest-growing industries: cruise-ship tourism.
Pale interlopers from the lower 48, smelling of sunscreen , wearing khakis with complicated pockets and videotaping everything in sight, are disembarking here this summer for the first time. With wonder in their eyes and cash in their wallets, they come off big white ships in herds of 2,400 to 4,000. They seem to find this village of rusted tin roofs, potholed roads and 860 Alaskans, most of them members of the Tlingit tribe, to be the Far North experience they had been dreaming about.
"This is more remote, more wild, more like you are out in the elements," said Don Albin, owner of Don's Furniture City in Three Rivers, Mich. His cruise was a gift from his wife, Louise, in honor of his 80th birthday.
"It couldn't be better," said Louise Albin, enumerating the joys of Hoonah and its surroundings on Chichagof Island, where people are outnumbered by brown bears (the big, often surly beasts that are called grizzlies in the lower 48). In a two-hour tram tour, she said they saw a brown bear, a bald eagle, several sea lions and a whole lot of spawning salmon.
Large cruise ships are not new in Alaska. For decades, the number of ships and passengers has been swelling along the state's southeast panhandle -- as the logging industry shrinks.
It is an eco-driven phenomenon that cuts against the resource-extraction grain of Alaska's political leaders, who continue to grumble about a 24-year-old congressional decision to create 104 million acres of parks and refuges across the nation's largest state. As former governor Walter J. Hickel once complained, "We can't just let nature run wild."
Yet wildness -- at least, wildness as perceived from the deck of a luxury cruise costing several thousand dollars -- will lure about 800,000 people to the Alaskan coast this year, injecting more than $700 million into the state's economy.
When the big boats are thick in the ports, the invasion transforms such smallish ports as Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka into crowded, kitschy tourist traps, where T-shirt hawkers and fast-food odors imbue the 49th state with the ticky-tacky feel of the Jersey shore. That ambiance has become a word-of-mouth downer for cruise-ship marketing.
Ergo, Hoonah -- the newest, rawest and, by far, smallest port of call for cruise ships plying the Inside Passage of southeast Alaska. It is a collaborative invention of a Juneau guide company and the local native corporation, Huna Totem.
Part of the reason this town needs tourism is that Huna Totem, in a rush to cash in on logging, hired contractors to make massive, environmentally damaging clear-cuts of forests on native-owned land on Chichagof Island.
Timber companies have since chopped down nearly all the marketable trees -- and laid off nearly all the Tlingits who had been working in the woods. Cruise ships drop anchor in Hoonah's harbor beside a steep and eroding clear-cut hill.
