Whale Passage is a waterway about 10 miles (16 km) long situated between Thorne Island to the east and Prince of Wales Island to the west, roughly 40 miles (65 km) southwest of Wrangell and 11 miles (18 km) west-northwest of Coffman Cove, Alaska. The passage was named in 1886 by Lieutenant-Commander Albert S. Snow of the US Navy, who commanded the US Coast and Geodetic Survey steamer Carlile P. Patterson during surveys that charted much of Southeast Alaska. The site of a historic logging camp, the waterway lies at the eastern edge of the Alexander terrane, roughly aligned with a shear zone of minor faults running north-west to south-east through rocks of the Descon Formation. These sedimentary rocks developed during the Ordovician to Silurian periods (about 480 million to 430 million years ago) and consist of mudstone and graywacke turbidites, with some limestone, chert, basalt flows and breccia. The rock underlying the community of Whale Pass is mostly limestone. Pleistocene glaciation (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) buried all but the highest peaks of Prince of Wales Island under up to 3,000 feet (900 m) of ice, creating the present-day topography of steep-sided mountains and fjords.

Before the Alaska Purchase in 1867, logging was limited to the needs of the Tlingit and Haida peoples for building canoes and cedar-plank houses. Russian settlements at present-day Sitka and Wrangell also demanded lumber, but extraction remained relatively localized. After America acquired Alaska, the timber industry began with hand-logging operations targeting specific high-value trees or stands of large trees extracted from easily accessible low-lying and beach-fringe areas. In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt established the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve; in 1907 another presidential proclamation created the Tongass National Forest. The two forests were merged in 1908, and the combined area encompassed most of Southeast Alaska. In 1947 Congress passed the Tongass Timber Act, authorizing 50-year timber contracts mostly to support the Ketchikan Pulp Company and the Alaska Pulp Company. The 1970s through the 1990s brought conflict and change to the Tongass National Forest and the timber industry, alongside very active logging and timber exports from lands transferred to private Alaska Native corporations established by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. During the 1990s the region’s two pulp mills closed permanently. By the century’s end most private timberlands had been harvested and logging activity declined rapidly.

The Whale Passage waterway was used extensively by tugboats, oil barges and freight boats servicing a logging camp at the northern end of the channel on Prince of Wales Island. The area saw intensive use from 1964 until the early 1980s by floating and shore-based logging camps. Murray E. Gildersleeve came to Alaska from British Columbia in 1953 and, with his brother Roger, founded Gildersleeve Logging Company. They secured one of the first contracts with Ketchikan Pulp Company and operated several logging camps in south-east Alaska, including a floating camp at Whale Pass. The floating community could be moved from cove to cove depending on contract locations. The camp consisted of 20 trailer homes bolted to a large floating deck and fastened to huge spruce logs with steel cables. The structure included a school, mess hall and residences. Most groceries, small equipment, household goods, mail, medicine and other supplies arrived by seaplane. When the last camp moved out, the area was permanently settled following a State of Alaska land disposal sale and is now the community of Whale Pass. Read more here and here. Explore more of Whale Passage and Prince of Wales Island here: