Alaska's Southeast Coast

The view from Valdez, Alaska, the terminus of the Alaska Pipeline, with oil tankers waiting to be filled.

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When we were in Alaska this fall (2025), we dabbled with the coast, spending a few days in Valdez, Anchorage, and Seward early, and then Haines at the end of our trip before taking the Alaska Ferry south past Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan. The ferry stopped just long enough at Sitka and Ketchikan for us to stretch our legs (and wallets) for an hour or so. We barely touched Alaska’s 6,640 miles of coastline, and we didn’t stay anywhere long enough for more than a superficial glimpse of life in the small coastal towns. But from the perspective of someone coming from the arid Southwest, to live on Alaska’s southeast coast, you must be hardy, oblivious to rain, and tolerant of cruise ships disgorging so many passengers that they sometimes equal or outnumber the residents of the towns where they stop.

Maybe thanks to the weather, the southeast coast is gorgeous. Mountains march to the edge of the sea, and massive tidal glaciers flow into the ocean. Deep conifer forests crowd rocky shorelines where sea lions lounge. Braided rivers bring glacial silt to the fiords, and bears pluck salmon from the water, tearing off the choice meat before abandoning one and grabbing another. Fishing boats of all sizes, laden with the complicated tangle of nets and floats and ropes and booms needed to make a living catching salmon, cod, and halibut, are packed along piers in the harbors. In the evenings, fishermen lug twelve-packs of cheap beer to their boats to share with their mates. On shore, restaurants serve fish and chips, souvenir stores offer everything from t-shirts to Russian tchotskies, and groceries stock Dramamine in racks beside the check-out line. 

And it rains and rains. Seward, on the Kenai Peninsula, gets five to six feet of rain and eighty inches of snow in an average year. Farther south, Ketchikan, the “Rain Capital of Alaska,” gets thirteen feet of rain a year, the majority during the long dark winter. And if you live there, you can’t just drive to a sunnier place. Most of these towns are not accessible by road. Instead, residents must float or fly to escape. I don’t think I could manage, even with solace of the scenery. 

The day before we left Haines, I met a woman who had moved there two years before from Wilson, Wyoming, where I lived in the 1980s. In fact, she'd lived for decades just up the road from me there, though I don’t think we’d met. When I asked her why she’d moved to Haines, she lamented that, “It’s getting too hot in Jackson in the summer.” I don’t think of Wyoming as being a hot spot, but slow-motion climate migration is happening, and maybe cool and rainy beats hot and dry in the long run. 

Not surprisingly, it was stormy during our trip through the Inside Passage until we left Alaska and re-entered Canada, where the skies finally cleared. Until then, we mostly stayed inside, reading, eating, and scanning the shore through rain-streaked windows for bald eagles or the ocean for whales and orcas. On arrival in Bellingham, the Pacific Northwest, usually a rainy respite from the desert for us, was dry and sunny.

The Lowe River just before entering the Prince William Sound at Valdez on a typically cloudy day.

A fishing boat in the harbor at Valdez.

Complex (to me) piles of gear on fishing boats in Valdez Harbor.

Fireweed along the shore at Valdez.

The Columbia Glacier in retreat from Columbia Bay. We took a boat tour from Valdez to see the glacier.

Ice in Columbia Bay.

Thompson Lake, where we camped just outside of Valdez on our way to Anchorage.

Robin Moore and Ellen descending from Near Point in the Chugach Front Range back into Anchorage.

Seward, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula, where we spent a few rainy days.

The view of Resurrection Bay from the Lost Lake Trail above Seward. We enjoyed a rare clear day while on an overnight backpack to Lost Lake but hiked out as the next storm gathered.

Coastal mountains east of Seward viewed from the Lost Lake Trail on our hike out.

Ellen hiking towards Seward from Lost Lake.

The Bamboo Room in Haines. I imagine that bars are popular places during the long dark coastal winters. We had lunch in the adjoining restaurant, owned by the same family for generations. 

Raingear at the ready on a fishing boat in the Haines harbor.

The harbormaster's house above the Haines Harbor.

We missed the peak grizzly bear feed along the Chilcoot River at Haines, but this mother and her four cubs entertained us while we camped at a state park just upstream from here.

The view from inside the Alaska Ferry. I think the poor guy in the yellow jacket was faced with standing in the rain and wind to watch for floating logs as the boat traversed a relatively narrow passage.

A totem pole in Ketchikan.

Our friends, Terry and Bruce, and Ellen, on our last day on the ferry after it finally emerged from the clouds near Vancouver Island.

 

Photographing Tundra

 

Tundra plants, lichen, and blueberries along the Denali Highway in Alaska.

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My first trip to Alaska was for a short meeting in Fairbanks in September 2003, but I flew in a couple of days early, rented a car, and drove a big loop that included the Denali Highway, fascinated by my first glimpses of Alaska. It was autumn, and the tundra was spectacularly colorful, bugs were gone, and the weather was warm and sunny. Hunters gutted enormous moose beside the highway. I’ve wanted to return ever since, and this year’s seven-week autumn trip was the realization of that dream but without quite so much sunshine. 

We encountered tundra in Denali National Park, along the Denali Highway, in Tombstone Territorial Park in the Yukon, along the road to Haines, and on hikes into the alpine. I could have spent more time than I did wandering in tiny circles looking down at tundra, exquisite up close and grandly beautiful where it swept across northern landscapes. Even though we covered a lot of ground and were awed by the vast expanses, the close-up photos of tundra are my favorites from the trip, so I’ll share a few here starting with two from my first visit to Alaska in 2003.  

A wolverine skull embedded in tundra that I found during my short visit to Alaska in 2003. This photo was taken with an old film camera, and the contrast between dark moss and the bright white skull was a little too much for the film, but it was an amazing random find on a short walk from my rental car.

One more tundra photo from 2003. This is in Denali National Park.

Healy Ridge in Denali National Park on a rainy hike during our recent trip in 2025. 

Tundra along the Denali Highway.

Ellen identifying tundra plants along the Denali Highway. 

There are lots of mushrooms in the tundra. This is another detail near the Denali Highway.

Tundra detail.

Blueberries were everywhere in the tundra. We picked these on a hike up a peak called Near Point in the Chugach Front Range above Anchorage.

Scheuchzer's Cotton Grass along the Denali Highway.

Willow tundra on a bluff above the Denali Highway.

Lichen along the North Klondike Trail in Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon Territory, Canada.

Lichen and a woody shrub, North Klondike Trail, in the Yukon.

Lichen and fall leaves, North Klondike Trail, Tombstone Park.

Boulder with tundra vegetation. North Klondike Trail, Tombstone Park, in the Yukon.

Golden willows (probably) in Tombstone Territorial Park.

Our last view of tundra in the Yukon along the road to Haines, Alaska, where we boarded the Alaska Ferry.

The Yukon

Tombstone Territorial Park on the Dempster Highway.

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I’ve read stories of the Canadian far north for much of my life. Explorers, shrouded in ice fog or struggling through blinding snow, battled the elements and ate their shoes, still hungry after finishing their dogs and companions. Less extreme but nearly as harrowing were tales of fur trappers and prospectors scraping out a living (or not) in the face of unimaginable hardship, driven by greed and a thirst for the untamed frontier. I’ve flown over Northeastern Canada on my way to Europe, staring down at the Hudson Bay and vast wetlands south of it where trappers once navigated a maze of rivers in pursuit of beaver, but I’d never set foot there or traveled north of the Icefields Parkway in western Canada. 

The Yukon, Canada’s most northwestern territory, has its own mystique. In the 1960s, when I was a kid, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer aired every Christmas season. One of the characters, Yukon Cornelius, a goofy, crusty prospector, wandered around pecking at the ice with his pickaxe and licking its tip as if to taste for gold (or silver), declaring: “nothing!”, until he finally discovered a peppermint mine and realized that he’d been searching for it all his life. “Wahoooo!,” he shouted, before setting off to get supplies (cornmeal, hamhocks, gun powder, and guitar strings). Cartoons aside, it's easy to romanticize tales of gold miners and fur trappers living rough in horrible weather with meager supplies and little success, in a place so fierce and beautiful.

The confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers at Dawson City. The Yukon drains much of the Territory. This was the epicenter of mining activity during the Klondike Gold Rush.

So it was with considerable anticipation that I crossed into the Yukon from British Columbia on our way to Alaska, the highway having snaked back and forth between the province and the territory seven times before committing to turning north. Ellen had driven the highway one spring in the 1980s on her way to work in Alaska for a summer, stopping at the still-frozen Kluane Lake, which she remembered as gorgeous. When we camped there, it was early fall and aspens were bright yellow among evergreens and willows on the steep slopes of the spectacular mountains that border the lake. White Dall sheep grazed on cliffs high above willow-choked grizzly bear habitat where we hiked one day. 

One of our camps on the shore of Kluane Lake. Interestingly, the lake is low (exposing all of this gravel shore) because of the rapid retreat of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, which starved the Slims River that supplied water to the lake. Subsequently, the lake's outflow switched from a stream feeding the Yukon River and ultimately the Pacific Ocean to one that drains into to the Gulf of Alaska. More detailed discussion is at this link.

Dall sheep graze above Sheep Creek at Kluane Lake.

Later in our trip, we returned to the Yukon on our way to Haines, reaching Dawson City after crossing the Yukon River by ferry. We’d driven the Top of the World Highway from Tok, Alaska, through the tiny town of Chicken, to a remote U.S-Canadian border station. After showering and resupplying in Dawson City (and eating some pretty good bbq ribs), we continued to the Dempster Highway, following it north to Tombstone Territorial Park, where tundra vegetation in full fall color lay draped over craggy peaks visible during breaks in the rain. The Dempster Highway continues beyond Tombstone for another 400 gravel miles to the Beaufort Sea near the village of Inuvik. Though drawn by the lure of seeing the edge of the Arctic, we didn’t have time for another epic drive. 

The Dempster Highway leading north towards Tombstone Territorial Park. Beyond the park, it's 400 more miles of gravel road to the Beaufort Sea. 

The Yukon Territory occupies just over 186,000 square miles, making it larger than New Mexico but smaller than Texas. Unlike either of those, its population is only about 48,000, roughly 30,000 of whom live in the capital, Whitehorse, meaning that in most of the Yukon, the population density is vanishingly small. Once part of the Northwest Territories, it was split off in 1898 so that the huge influx of gold prospectors swarming into the Klondike could be more easily managed. The Yukon is geographically diverse, extending southward from the Beaufort Sea to the summit of Mt. Logan, at 19,551 feet the highest peak in Canada and the second highest in North America. Between those extremes are vast areas of tundra, boreal forest, obscure mountain ranges, and enormous rivers. We saw little wildlife, but herds of caribou are said to roam the tundra far from roads.

View up the Slims River (now almost dry) towards Kluane National Park and Reserve. Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada in one of many summits in this glaciated park. 

The Yukon was probably occupied by some of the earliest people to cross the land bridge from Asia to North America. Human-associated material in the Bluefish Caves was dated to 24,000 years before present, though not without controversy. People may have settled there before there was an ice-free corridor allowing migration southward. Today, First Nation people make up 22% of Yukon’s population. Tlingit, Tahltan, and seven Athabascan languages are spoken, though English and French are more common.

Ellen in Dawson City. The stop sign is in English and Han. Han is spoken by the Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation people.

The red-haired Yukon Cornelius aside, Europeans began exploiting resources in the Yukon during the 1800s, first collecting furs and then coming in droves starting in 1896 when gold was discovered in the Klondike. Prospectors disembarked from steamships in Skagway and struggled over White Pass with tons of gear to get to the Yukon gold fields east of the coastal mountains with enough supplies to survive a winter. By 1900, when the gold rush was essentially over, roughly 100,000 people had entered the Yukon, many of them finding their way to Dawson City. 

Dawson City.

We visited Dawson City twice during our time in the territory. It was established at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers by entrepreneurs eager to sell goods to miners. During the gold rush, prospectors floated the Yukon River to this frontier town after surmounting White Pass or other routes from the coast. Even today, placer mining is important in the Klondike region, and there are miles of gravel piles along rivers and streams, the detritus of hydraulic mining. Miners regularly unearth Pleistocene fossils buried in river sediment.  

Signs like this one supporting placer mining were all over in Dawson City.

After leaving Tombstone Park, we spent a couple of nights at a hoity-toity hot spring north of Whitehorse on our way to catch the Alaska Ferry at Haines. The Eclipse Nordic Hot Springs was  a little expensive but within our budget, and it seemed like a nice way to relax after a LOT of driving. The resort, once more rustic and inexpensive, has been transformed into a sort of Nordic-Japanese fusion experience, with warm pools, cold plunges, and heated relaxation chairs bathed in calming New Age music. We sat up late in a warm pool one night, chatting quietly with other guests and hoping to see the aurora (not that night). I wonder what Yukon Cornelius would have said had he stumbled upon a resort like this in the Yukon after one of his prospecting forays? "Wahooo!"? or "What the Hell?" In either case, washed, warm, and relaxed, he could have continued on his way to the hamhock and guitar string store, whistling a New Age tune. 

A lake west of Canyon Creek along the Alaska Highway in the Yukon.

The first building we saw after driving off of the Yukon River ferry into Dawson City.

The North Klondike Trail in Tombstone Territorial Park.

Tundra along the North Klondike Trail in Tombstone.

Fall color on a peak in northern Tombstone.

A drainage in Tombstone Park

Ellen hiking up the Grizzly Lake Trail in cold rain at Tombstone Park.

Ellen and our new friends, Terry and Bruce, who we met at Denali, hiking down from Goldensides Mountain in Tombstone.

Ellen looking south from Goldensides into the Ogilvie Mountains.

A stormy day along the road to Haines, which crosses from the Yukon back into Alaska.