Cape Fanshaw is a low, wooded point at the junction of Stephens Passage and Frederick Sound, about 83 miles (134 km) south of Juneau and 68 miles (110 km) east-northeast of Sitka, Alaska. Captain George Vancouver of the Royal Navy named the cape in 1794, following its discovery by Lieutenant Joseph Whidbey. The shoreline along Frederick Sound is exposed and often hard to access. Tlingit people probably inhabited the area in prehistoric times; anecdotal evidence suggests Cape Fanshaw may have marked a boundary between the Kéex’ Kwáan (Kake Tlingit) to the south and the S’awdaan and T’aaku Kwáan (Sumdum and Taku Tlingit) to the north. Cape Fanshaw Light stands on a skeleton tower with daymarks 33 feet (10 m) above the water.

The area’s historic uses included fur farms, cabins, and a fishing village and cannery at Cape Fanshaw, already established by 1901. A post office operated there from 1902 until 1932, when it was renamed Fanshaw. A fox farm ran in Fanshaw Bay during the 1930s and 1940s. A 2003 Forest Service survey found no private cabins remaining, little subsistence activity, and scant use of the area beyond serving as an anchorage for vessels waiting out weather before rounding the cape. Nearby, a 540-acre Research Natural Area protects a stand of Alaska-cedar near Fanshaw Bay.

Cape Fanshaw also served as an astronomical triangulation station for mapping in the 18th and 19th centuries. Such stations had known coordinates and elevations, derived from precise measurements of navigational stars, and were grouped trigonometrically into networks that allowed land boundaries to be located accurately; the Global Positioning System has since largely supplanted this method. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order setting aside the Cape Fanshaw Astronomical Station as a military reservation. Today the cape hosts a US Coast Guard radio transmitter, a radio repeater, and a Federal Aviation Administration camera array. Across most of the United States and Canada, a network of very-high-frequency radio transmitters covers coastal areas, relaying signals to and from ships and monitoring emergency broadcasts; western and northern Alaska lack this coverage, but southeast Alaska‘s operational network includes the station at Cape Fanshaw. Read more here and here. Explore more of Cape Fanshaw and Frederick Sound here: