Southeast Alaska
This was an important travel corridor for Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Native peoples, as well as gold-rush era steamships.
This area is the traditional homeland of the Tlingit, and home of a historic settling of Haida as well as a modern settlement of Tsimshian.
Logging has been an important industry in the past, but has been steadily declining with competition from other areas and the closure of the region's major pulp mills; the Alaska Forest Association described the situation as "desperate" in 2011.
[4] Its members include Alcan Forest Products (owned by Canadian Transpac Group, one of the top 5 log exporters in North America[5]) and Viking Lumber, which is based in Craig, Alaska.
In 2014, the dam breach at the Mount Polley mine focused attention on the issue, and an agreement between Canada and Alaska was drafted in 2015.
[17] The northbound Inside Passage cruise commonly starts from either Seattle or Vancouver, Canada and stops in various ports including Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway.
[20] Prior to Princess cruises, Chuck West created a tourism agency in 1947 under the name Arctic Alaska Tours which was renamed Westours, which originally arranged trips for travelers on steamships.
[citation needed] Due to the extremely rugged, mountainous nature of Southeastern Alaska, almost all communities (with the exception of Hyder, Skagway, and Haines) have no road connections outside of their locale, so aircraft and boats are the major means of transport.
Alaska Airlines is by far the largest air carrier in the region, with Juneau's Juneau International Airport serving as the aerial hub for all of southeast, and Ketchikan's Ketchikan International Airport serving as a secondary hub for southern southeast Alaska.
Alaska's bush airlines and air taxis serve many of the smaller and more isolated communities and villages in the regions.
Many communities are accessible by air only by floatplane, as proper runways are often difficult to construct on the steep island slopes.
Southeast Alaska is primarily served by the state-run Alaska Marine Highway, which links Skagway, Haines, Hoonah, Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan and other outlying communities with Prince Rupert, BC and Bellingham, Washington; and secondarily by the Prince of Wales Island-based Inter-Island Ferry Authority, which provides the only scheduled passenger and auto ferry service to the island.
