Eldred Rock Lighthouse, Lynn Canal

Eldred Rock Lighthouse, Lynn Canal

by | Apr 10, 2021

Eldred Rock is an island located in Lynn Canal, about 55 miles (89 km) northwest of Juneau and 20 miles (32 km) south-southeast of Haines, Alaska. The rock was named in 1880 by Marcus Baker for his wife, Sarah “Sadie” Eldred. According to Dr. Arthur Krause, the Tlingit name for the rock is “Nechraje”.

On February 5, 1898, near the peak of the Klondike Gold Rush, the three-masted passenger ship Clara Nevada was loaded with over 800 pounds (362 kg) of gold, an illegal shipment of dynamite, and about 100 passengers. The ship had just embarked on a multi-day journey from Skagway to Seattle and encountered hurricane-force winds in Lynn Canal. Just over 30 miles (48 km) into the southward voyage, the ship ran aground at Eldred Rock, exploded in flames, and sank. Whether the loss of the Clara Nevada was an accident or an act of sabotage may never be known, but no trace of the gold has ever been found.

Eldred Rock Light was activated on June 1, 1906, making it the last of the 12 lighthouses constructed in Alaska between 1902 and 1906. This is now a popular dive site on the wreckage of the Clara Nevada, formerly the U.S. Coast and Geodetic survey ship Hassler. Read more here and here. Explore more of Eldred Island and Lynn Canal here:

About the background graphic

This ‘warming stripe’ graphic is a visual representation of the change in global temperature from 1850 (top) to 2022 (bottom). Each stripe represents the average global temperature for one year. The average temperature from 1971-2000 is set as the boundary between blue and red. The color scale goes from -0.7°C to +0.7°C. The data are from the UK Met Office HadCRUT4.6 dataset. 

Credit: Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading). Click here for more information about the #warmingstripes.

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