Broken Oar Cove is an embayment on the southeast shore of Yakutat Bay and the site of a logging operation, about 209 miles (336 km) northwest of Juneau and 3.1 miles (5 km) northeast of Yakutat, Alaska. Sawmill Cove, on the bay’s southeast shore is managed by the state as a log transfer facility, and it has road access and a boat-launch ramp. Yakutat Bay is about 18 miles (29 km) wide and runs southwest from Disenchantment Bay to the Gulf of Alaska. Glaciers carved its basin, and the Hubbard Glacier still calves into Disenchantment Bay at the bay’s head. The town itself is built on a moderately steep moraine left by a glacier that melted roughly 500 to 600 years ago, and a nearly flat outwash plain extends from the moraine to the Gulf. Surficial deposits there can exceed 700 feet (213 m) in thickness, overlying sedimentary bedrock. The land is also rising. A tide gauge at Yakutat recorded an average emergence of about half a centimeter a year between 1940 and 1972, and the great earthquakes of 1899 lifted land about 29 miles (47 km) north of the town by an average of 6 to 10 feet (2-3 m). The region sits on the Yakutat terrane, a fragment of the continental margin that is still colliding with and accreting to southern Alaska. The name is a Tlingit place name recorded as “Jacootat” and “Yacootat” by Russian naval captain Yuri Lisianski in 1805.

Yakutat, a community of about 600 people, has no road connection to the rest of Alaska, so fishing and logging anchor its economy. Its earliest known residents were probably Eyak speakers from the Copper River area, whom Tlingit migrants absorbed before Europeans arrived. In 1795 the Shelikhov-Golikov Company, a precursor of the Russian-American Company and managed by Alexander Baranov, founded a settlement called New Russia on the bay’s southeastern shore. Tlingit attackers burned it in 1805, killing most of its occupants, and the Tlingit kept Russians and other outsiders away from Yakutat Bay until the late nineteenth century. The site is now a National Historic Landmark with no surface remains. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, signed by President Richard Nixon on December 18, 1971, resolved Alaska Native land claims and created twelve regional corporations, a thirteenth for nonresident Alaska Natives, and more than 200 village corporations. Yak-Tat Kwáan, Incorporated, Yakutat’s village corporation, was entitled to 23,000 acres (9,300 ha), or 36 square miles, much of it forested.

Commercial timber harvesting in Southeast Alaska began in the early 1900s and surged in the 1950s after exclusive pulp contracts. Nearly all of the cut timber moved by water. Coves and bays offer the most shelter from wind and swell, which makes them preferred sites for log transfer and storage. Since the early 1970s, researchers have worried about the bark that builds up in these estuaries, which can blanket the seabed and smother habitat and the animals living in it. In 1982, bark covered 176 acres (71 ha) of estuarine habitat beneath 90 log transfer sites across the region. Near Yakutat, Yak-Tat Kwáan, Incorporated, harvested part of its land in the late 1950s, and about 3,000 acres (1,214 ha) have since regrown. In 2018 the corporation formed a timber subsidiary, Yak Timber, which by 2020 was loading logs at Broken Oar Cove. The state expects use of that facility to fall in future decades, because most state and private timber on the Yakutat forelands has already been harvested. The subsidiary later cut near Humpback Creek, a salmon stream that tribal governments and Sealaska consider culturally significant, even after announcing plans to dissolve in 2022. In 2023 the lender AgWest Farm Credit Services sued the corporation for $13.3m, and Yak Timber filed for bankruptcy that May. Read more here and here. Explore more of Broken Oar Cove and Yakutat Bay here: