Port Protection is a community on Wooden Wheel Cove, at the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island in the Tongass National Forest, about 140 miles (225 km) south-southeast of Juneau and 48 miles (77 km) west-southwest of Wrangell, Alaska. The community takes its name from Port Protection, an embayment that extends about four miles (6.4 km) south from Sumner Strait in the Alexander Archipelago of Southeast Alaska. The bay is formed by rocks of the Descon Formation, part of the Alexander terrane. The Descon is a marine sequence of volcanic debris, greywacke and sandstone and turbidites. Overlying it, the Heceta Limestone holds fossils from the Silurian period, which ran from about 443 million to 420 million years ago. The island’s Tlingit name is Taan, meaning “sea lion.” The Henya, a Tlingit group, were among its traditional inhabitants and a fish camp at the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island was used for trade and subsistence fishing. In 1793, Captain George Vancouver named the islands of the southern Alexander Archipelago the Prince of Wales Archipelago, after the future King George IV.

The community’s Lingít name is Kél. In the early 1900s, a fish buyer known as “Wooden Wheel” Johnson became the first resident, mooring a scow in the cove with a store and fuel dock that let salmon trollers stop on their trips north and south. In 1946, Laurel “Buckshot” Woolery opened the B.S. Trading Post to replace Johnson’s scow. In 1955, Point Baker, about 2.3 miles (3.7 km) north-northwest, was withdrawn from the Tongass National Forest. Woolery closed his post in 1973, and the Wooden Wheel Trading Post took over the general store and fuel dock. State land-disposal programs later opened the area to permanent settlement. In 1975, a large logging camp was established at Labouchere Bay, adjacent to and immediately south of Port Protection, by Tuxecan Logging Company and hundreds of miles of logging roads were built to extract the timber until the camp was closed in the late 1990s. In 1989, the Stein v. Barton suit pressed for buffer strips along salmon spawning streams, and the 1990 Tongass Timber Reform Act required 100-foot (30-m) buffers on National Forest salmon streams.

The shallow head of the bay, known locally as the “Back Bay”, supports clam and cockle harvests and waterfowl hunting, particularly for ducks and geese. Dungeness crab are also taken there. Crabs are generally caught in individually owned pots, but residents without pots share the catch by pulling the pots when they visit the bay. Most residents fish for salmon, halibut, shrimp and clams, and hunt deer for personal use. Most of the individuals who fish the pots distribute any excess crab to neighbors and friends, and historically there were annual crab feeds held in the communities. The community is reachable only by boat or float plane, and a boardwalk through the forest serves homes without beach frontage. Most services operate seasonally. The 2020 census counted 36 residents, down from 48 in 2010, and the community has been featured in National Geographic’s Life Below Zero: Port Protection. Read more here and here. Explore more of Port Protection and Wooden Wheel Cove here: