Most fishermen who work the Alaska coast in winter have a tale or two about the dangers of ice accumulating from flying spray in cold weather. But the swiftness with which dangerous icing happened to us was sobering.

For a period in the 1970s I lived in a remote and roadless community of Point Baker, on the north end of Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska.

In the spring of 1972, my new bride, Susanna, and I finally headed up the Inside Passage to Alaska for the first time in our 32’ salmon boat, traveling with friends Bruce and Kathy Gore, in their boat, Kestrel. We ran into some challenging seas just at the Alaska border. From my journal: April 19, 1972.

These were Inupiats from King Island, a remote dot 40 northwest of Nome in the Bering Sea. In winter the 400 or so residents would hunt on the ice that surrounded the island for walrus, seal and fish and crab through the ice.

Alaska lost a true entrepreneur when Dennis died in 2021, but fortunately the ivory museum that he created in Skagway outlasts him.

The “Klondikers” - the tens of thousands of men that passed through Skagway in the winter of 1898-1899 - struggled over the mountain passes and created the largest tent city in the world on the shore of frozen Lake Bennett, headwaters of the Yukon River.

Volcanoes are nothing new to Alaskans; when Spurr or Redoubt, near Anchorage puffs, residents know to put extra nylon stocking air filters on their car engines.

In the summer of 1899, a group of Seattle businessmen on a “Goodwill Tour” of Southeast Alaska happened upon the Tsimshian village of Port Tongass, its inhabitants all away fishing. Thinking one of the gorgeous totem poles would look great in Seattle, they cut down the best one there, loaded it aboard and headed south.

Before 1958, Seymour Narrows, the narrowest part of the Inside Passage, about a hundred miles north of Vancouver, was a place all mariners feared and through which almost all traffic to Alaska had to pass.