Mountaintop views at Icy Strait Point

I’ve already written one story about Icy Strait Point – the images I took of the shapes and shadows around the pier by the Canning Factory. And here is the rest of the story! Icy Strait Point seems almost built for tourism with the canning factory turned into a museum and store and the modern fast cable gondolas connecting the cruise ship port with that factory and now to the top of the mountain and the fast multi-passenger zip lines that swoop down to the sea level. As we arrived early in the morning, we were the first passengers in town and so we made the most of that by looking around the canning factory and making our way via the paid shuttle bus into the town of Hoonah. I thought this was going to be something more than it was – it had a nice harbor full of local fishing boats, but very little else that seemed worthy of a visit. In fact, the coach driver mentioned that someone was carving a totem pole, but if we wanted to stay on the bus, we could do so for the return visit!

We got off to see the harbor and before we knew it, the coach was gone, and we had to wait for it to return. So, I can confirm that we didn’t find much to do. Back at the point, we decided to use the gondola to the mountain top which I think had only been opened a month or so back. Definitely a fantastic piece of engineering as it swooped through the forests to the top of the mountain overlooking the bay:

For the photographers among you, the windows on the gondola open a little and so you can get uninterrupted views of the ocean as you ascend.

As you can see, by this point in the late morning, the Viking Orion had been moved into the bay as the much larger Celebrity Eclipse took its place at the mooring. With almost 3000 passengers on that ship, I guess it was decided that returning to the Orion via the tenders was much easier to organize!

There was apparently an active bear sighting on the mountain and so guests headed for the zip line were being escorted by an armed guard, so we decided that exploring on our own up there was not a great idea. There were some spectacular views over the water and the distant mountains though:

This image also shows just how steep the final bit of the gondola ride is:

As you can see, we now have two Celebrity boats at the docks – pretty crowded down on the ground, but not that many people were paying for the ride in the Gondola as far as I could tell.

I also decided to walk through the forest by the shore back to the Canning Factory on a pleasant little path that shows just how dense the forest floor is in Alaska. These are known as temperate rain forests and you can see just how much plant life grows here:

And then, with another ride back on the gondola, I was ready to catch the tender boat back to the ship and try to capture some images of people shooting across the sky on the zip lines.

That evening we had another lovely display of dramatic sunlight as the sun set in the west. I was impressed by this one of a sunlit cruise ship against the dark mountains:

And then a very wide panorama of the sunlit clouds over the distant Alaskan coast:

I could imagine this covering a wall in my home! And finally, the sun set below the horizon as we steamed off to Sitka and the day to come!

You can read the next section of this story about the town of Sitka here.