Advice · On the ground in Alaska

What a zipline in Alaska taught me about who really owns these ports

I first noticed Icy Strait Point because of an oddly enormous zipline and cable car strung above an Alaskan village. Chasing down why led somewhere I wasn't expecting, and the next stop on the same trip turned out to be a completely different story.

A zipline that didn't add up

I first came across Icy Strait Point the way a lot of people probably do, a photo of an enormous zipline and a cable car strung across what's clearly a small Alaskan village. It struck me as slightly odd. Alaska isn't where I'd have guessed you'd find that kind of purpose-built attraction, and that oddness was enough to make me look closer rather than scroll past it.

The obvious question, why does a village this size have infrastructure like that, turned out to have a real answer. Unearthing it took me somewhere I wasn't expecting: not a marketing story, but a genuinely layered piece of Alaskan cruise history, one of discovery and intrigue in roughly equal measure.

The rabbit hole: whose port is this, really?

What I found first was Huna Totem Corporation, an Alaska Native corporation with around 1,500 shareholders, most of them Tlingit residents of Hoonah, the small town the port sits beside. They built Icy Strait Point on an old salmon cannery site, welcomed their first cruise ship in 2004, and have since brought in over four million travellers. It's the largest employer in Hoonah, by a distance.

The current headline is a Disney deal, a 15 year agreement signed in July 2026 securing one Disney ship a week and priority docking through at least 2041. It's been widely reported as exclusive, and that's where the story got more interesting than the headline. It isn't the first deal of its kind. Back in December 2018, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, NCL's parent company, quietly struck almost the identical arrangement: funding a second pier in exchange for preferential berthing for NCL, Oceania and Regent Seven Seas. That 2018 deal is what actually brought in the huge ships, Norwegian Joy and Norwegian Bliss, each carrying close to 5,000 passengers and crew, and it's what made a gondola system necessary in the first place.

Disney's arrangement is the same idea, run a second time, not a change of ownership. Both lines, and others, still call there today.

A shopkeeper's tip, and the correction it needed

Walking the path from the pier into Hoonah itself, on the same trip, aboard Crystal Symphony, we spoke to a shopkeeper in town. Her account: housing has become expensive to rent, for residents and seasonal workers alike, and she put it down to the port's workers all being employed by NCL.

That part doesn't hold up. Huna Totem owns and operates Icy Strait Point directly. It gives hiring preference to its own shareholders and to Alaska Natives, and over 80% of the port's staff come from Hoonah itself. NCL calls there like any other line. It doesn't employ anyone at the port. It's an easy mix-up to make from the ground, the cruise line whose ship happens to be tied up that day isn't the same thing as the corporation that actually owns the port and pays the wages.

The housing pressure itself is real, Huna Totem has had to bring in temporary worker housing, a repurposed facility originally used at a Fairbanks-area military base, specifically to house its own staff. What I couldn't confirm is her explanation for it, that outside buyers are behind the squeeze.

I also noticed fewer visitors made the walk into town than I expected, even with the ship tied up close by. That fits the port's own layout: the pier sits roughly 1.5 miles from downtown Hoonah, and the complex itself, with its zip line, cannery museum and shops, gives most passengers a full day without ever making that walk.

Klawock: a completely different Alaska

Our next stop told a different story entirely. Port Klawock, on Prince of Wales Island, has almost none of Icy Strait Point's infrastructure, no gondola, no zipline, no purpose-built complex, just a floating tender dock in a genuinely small, quiet place. It only opened for its first cruise call in May 2024, and it still shows. Klawock normally takes one ship a day, by design, it's meant to feel like the one Southeast Alaska port where you won't see another ship on the horizon. On 7 July 2026, that changed for a day: HX Expeditions' MS Roald Amundsen was in port alongside our own ship, Crystal Symphony, and we were told it was the first time Klawock had ever had two ships in at once. Whether or not that stays true for long, it captured exactly how new and small-scale this still is.

Klawock is run by Na-Dena', a joint venture between Huna Totem, Doyon Limited, the Interior Alaska Native corporation, and Klawock Heenya, the village's own corporation, a genuinely different ownership structure from Icy Strait Point's own, even though Huna Totem has a hand in both. It's still boutique scale, served mainly by Oceania, Seabourn and Regent Seven Seas, the last of which sometimes calls there instead of Ketchikan.

The lack of infrastructure wasn't just a curiosity, it cost us part of the day. We waited 40 minutes for a shuttle that never showed, gave up and walked into the nearest town instead, and never did manage to catch the connecting shuttle on to Craig. Getting back to the ship was no smoother: the map the ship itself had given us marked the wrong pickup point for the return shuttle, so we walked the 40 minutes back to the pier as well.

What this actually means for the guest experience

None of this changes whether either port is worth a stop, but it does change what kind of day to expect. Icy Strait Point is a curated day out, built and run for exactly that purpose, and its scale, the size of ship it can now handle, the gondola, the queue management, exists because two major cruise-line deals paid for it. Port Klawock hasn't had that investment yet, and it showed on the day we were there: a shuttle that never turned up, a missed connection, a return pickup point that didn't match the ship's own map. That's not charming smallness, it's an early-stage port that hasn't finished building out the basics, and a guest booking there should go in expecting that rather than a quieter version of Icy Strait Point.

It also changed how freely I spent ashore, and not in a good way at the time. Hearing the shopkeeper's version, that NCL owned the port, made me less inclined to spend money there, especially at Icy Strait Point itself, on the assumption it was going to a cruise line that didn't need it rather than the town in front of me. Knowing it actually goes back to Huna Totem's own shareholders in Hoonah changes that calculation. Getting the ownership wrong is exactly the kind of mistake that talks a guest out of spending in the one place it would do the most good.

Where this is heading

If Icy Strait Point and Klawock show two different stages of the same idea, Goldbelt Aani, a proposed 500 million dollar cruise port on Juneau's Douglas Island, shows where it might be heading next. Goldbelt Incorporated, Juneau's own Native village corporation, is developing it with Royal Caribbean Group as its main customer, first announced in 2024. Two floating docks are planned, spaced to take the largest ships currently calling at Juneau, alongside a childcare centre, employee housing and a replica Tlingit village. Nothing has broken ground yet.

Juneau capped itself at five large ships a day, an agreement the major cruise lines, including Royal Caribbean, signed onto. Goldbelt's dock would sit outside that cap entirely, as a sixth berth. Goldbelt's own leadership has criticised the cap directly, saying, "We don't think that's good public policy." Whether that's a Native corporation building around a policy that unfairly limits it, or the cap doing exactly what it was designed to do by pushing new growth outside downtown Juneau, depends on who's telling the story, and both readings are defensible.

Three corporations, three completely different stages of the same idea: an established destination that's just signed its biggest deal yet, a brand new port still finding its feet, and a half-billion dollar bet that hasn't broken ground. I didn't expect a zipline to lead here, but it's the kind of thing that only shows up once you stop asking which line to sail with, and start asking whose land you're actually standing on.

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