Why 70,000 People Live On Alaska's Weird Isolated Islands

Look closely at a map of Alaska. Like, really close. It has this jagged tail awkwardly hugging the Canadian coastline. In many ways, it looks like a map error. But this tiny strip of land is actually a massive rainforest that sparked a fierce border dispute, completely locking Canada out of the Pacific Ocean. So, why does the United States own it today? And more importantly, why do more than 70,000 people call this dreary, isolated region home? I'm Jeff, and this is the Unusual Story of Alaska's Archipelago. Home to over 70,000 Americans, there's a part of Alaska that looks like a simple cartographic mistake. Like, maybe it was a drawing error made in the 1800s. After all, this is a region surrounded by the roaring Pacific Ocean on one side, and basically what amounts to an impenetrable wall of ice and rock on the other. It would have been very easy to get this region wrong. But to understand why this slice of land is so weird, and why anyone would ever choose to live here, we have to understand just how hostile and bizarre the physical geography of this area is. And let's start by grounding ourselves in exactly where this archipelago is located on the globe. The Alaska Panhandle, which is largely made up of the Alexander Archipelago, sits roughly between the 54th and 60th parallels north. If you were to drag this exact latitude across the globe to Europe, you wouldn't be sitting in mild, sunny coastal regions. In fact, you'd be in places like the northernmost reaches of Scotland, the lower half of Norway, and the southern tip of Greenland. By all traditional geographic logic, a place sitting this close to the Arctic Circle should be a frozen, desolate wasteland for most of the year. And if you look at the vast majority of Alaska, that holds up perfectly. You see, mainland Alaska is a land of terrifying extremes. It's the largest state in the U.S. by a wide margin, encompassing over 663,000 square miles of territory. To put that into perspective, you could fit the entire state of Texas inside Alaska twice and still have enough room left over to squeeze in California. And most of this massive landmass is unforgiving and impenetrable. The northern third of the state sits entirely above the Arctic Circle, with a treeless tundra, permanent permafrost, and winter nights that last for literally months on end. Meanwhile, the interior of Alaska is more of a lesson in extremes, where summer temperatures can briefly soar into the 90s, only to plunge to negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the dead of winter. It's a harsh, brutal, and overwhelmingly frozen landscape dominated by the massive Alaska Range and the towering peak of Denali. But there is a massive section of the state that really does defy everything you think you know about the last frontier. Because if you travel down to that weird little tale of Alaska, the Alexander Archipelago, the tundra completely vanishes. The Alexander Archipelago is an immense collection of over 1,100 individual islands, stretching for roughly 300 miles along the Pacific coast of the North American continent. But instead of vast open plains of ice, this region is more like Norway. It's defined by incredibly awe-striking fjords, with towering mountains that rise directly out of the ocean, and of course, thick, incredibly dense vegetation. In fact, this region is home to the Tongass National Forest, which is the largest national forest in the United States, and amazingly, the largest intact temperate rainforest left on the entire planet. You heard that right. It's a rainforest in Alaska. While the rest of the state is mostly locked in a deep freeze, though Anchorage does thaw out occasionally, the Alexander Archipelago is more like it's bathed in perpetual moisture. And the reason for this drastic geographic split comes down to currents in the Pacific Ocean. The warm Kuroshio Current sweeps up from Japan, carrying its warm-ish water across the Pacific, where it then hits the North American coast. This warm water heats the air above it, which is then pushed inland. But as soon as that warm, moist ocean air hits the towering peaks of the coast mountains, it's forced rapidly upward into the freezing atmosphere. The air cools, condenses, and then dumps buckets of rain on the islands below. Because of this process, some parts of this archipelago receive over 150 inches of rain every single year. It's a dark, moody, intensely green landscape of ancient cedar trees, moss-draped branches, and roaring waterfalls. Geographically speaking, this region has very little in common with mainland Alaska. If anything, it's the exact same geographic profile as British Columbia, Canada. And that's because, physically, it is British Columbia. The Alexander Archipelago is simply the northern continuation of the Pacific temperate rainforest ecosystem that stretches all the way down through British Columbia and into the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The geology is the same. The climate is the same, if maybe a little bit more exaggerated. The dense, mountainous islands are the exact same as the ones sitting just a few miles south in Canadian waters, islands like Haida Gwaii and Vancouver Island. And of course, the imposing coast mountains that run along the mainland of the Panhandle are the very same mountains that form the spine of Western Canada. So, Mother Nature didn't draw a border here. The physical geography clearly dictates that this entire coastal stretch should be one unified region, smoothly transitioning from the Canadian mainland into the Pacific Ocean. But humanity, as we are wont to do, had a very different plan. Because while the physical geography of this region clearly screams that it belongs to Canada, the political reality was violently twisted by a completely different empire coming from the exact opposite direction. An empire that would set the stage for one of the most bizarre land grabs in history. Just like political borders completely reshaped who controlled this territory, a massive shift is happening in the online territory with how people discover your business. When someone asks AI tools for recommendations, who gets named and who remains completely invisible? To find out where your business actually stands, check out today's sponsor, Ahrefs Brand Radar, a tool to measure what used to be unmeasurable. Ahrefs Brand Radar shows whether AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity actually mention your brand when people ask for recommendations, so you can see if you're visible or invisible at the exact moment a potential customer is deciding. 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Now let's get back to the Alaska Panhandle. Well before it was a state of the United States, the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples navigated and settled this fractured, rain-drenched coastline. But unlike many indigenous groups across North America that relied on nomadic hunting or labor-intensive agriculture to survive, the peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast had something of a jackpot available to them, the ocean. The waters off the coast of this region were practically overflowing with salmon, halibut and marine mammals, while the dense cedar forest provided the perfect timber for building longhouses and seaworthy canoes. The Haida peoples were especially adept at this, so much so that they are considered to be the Vikings of the Pacific. All of this is to say, because food and shelter were so easily accessible, these societies had the time and stability to develop highly stratified cultures with social hierarchies and some of the most distinctive and beautiful art in human history, including the iconic totem poles that still stand today. They really had mastered this hostile, wet environment and managed to build a prosperous world entirely isolated from the rest of the globe. But these seemingly infinite wells of natural resources, particularly the rich marine life, would eventually attract a brutal new player to the region. In the mid-18th century, the Russian Empire was rapidly expanding eastward. Having conquered the vast, freezing expanse of Siberia, Russian explorers, led by figures like Vitus Bering, finally hit the Pacific Ocean and just kept going. What they found in the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska wasn't gold or silver, but something equally valuable at the time, the sea otter. At the time, sea otter pelts were prized in China and Europe for their unmatched warmth and density. This was a colder period of time globally after all, and this soft gold sparked a furious rush of Russian fur traders across the Bering Strait and down the Alaskan coast. They mercilessly subjugated the local indigenous populations, forcing them to hunt otters to feed the insatiable global market. As the Russians pushed further south in pursuit of unhunted waters, they eventually hit the Alexander Archipelago. In 1799, they established a fort that would eventually become Sitka, effectively planting the flag of Russian America deep into the North American coastline. The Russians had successfully secured an icy, lucrative American empire, but they were about to realize that grabbing land is entirely different from actually being able to hold onto it. By the mid-19th century, Russia was in deep trouble. They had hunted the sea otter population to the brink of total extinction, which completely tanked the economic value of their American colony. Furthermore, the Russian Empire had just suffered a devastating defeat in the Crimean War against Turkey, leaving them completely broke. Even worse, their global rival, the British Empire, was rapidly expanding its territory in modern-day Canada. It was at this point that the Russians looked at a map and realized what was barreling towards them. They had an undefended and essentially unprofitable colony sitting right next door to British North America. They knew it was only a matter of time before Britain simply marched over the border and took the territory by force. So, in a desperate move to get some cash and simultaneously stick it to the British by blocking their access to the northern Pacific, Russia offered to sell the territory to the United States. In 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward brokered the deal, purchasing the entirety of Alaska, including the Alexander Archipelago, for just $7.2 million U.S. dollars, or about $171 million today. Not nothing, but still very cheap for the size of land. But this purchase left a glaring problem for the United States and British Canada. Where exactly did Alaska end and British Columbia begin? When the United States bought Alaska, they inherited a border agreement that Russia and Britain had hastily drawn up in 1825. That original treaty was incredibly vague. It essentially stated that the border would follow the crest of the mountains running parallel to the coast, sitting about 30 miles inland from the ocean. For decades, nobody really cared to clarify this ambiguous line because the region was considered a worthless frozen wasteland. That all changed in the 1890s when someone stumbled upon an absolute fortune in the Klondike region of Canada's Yukon territory. Overnight, tens of thousands of prospectors flooded into the region, and the only viable way to reach the Canadian gold fields was by docking ships in the protected harbors of the Alexander Archipelago and hiking inland. Suddenly, this useless strip of coastline was the most strategically valuable real estate on the continent, and the border dispute between the U.S. and Canada erupted. Canada argued that the border should cut straight across the deep fjords, which would give British Columbia critical deep water ports and direct access to the ocean. The United States, however, disagreed, arguing that the border must perfectly trace the deepest inlets of the fjords, meaning every single port, harbor, and beach completely belonged to the U.S. The dispute grew so intense that the U.S. military actually began moving troops to the region. To avoid a full-blown war, the two countries agreed to a tribunal in 1903. The panel was made up of three Americans, two Canadians, and one British official. In one of the greatest geographic betrayals in North American history, the British official voted with the Americans. Britain was far more concerned with maintaining a strong alliance with the rising power of the United States than protecting the economic interests of its Canadian dominion. Canada was furious. The tribunal ruled almost entirely in favor of the United States, cementing the bizarre, jagged border that still exists today. And so, the United States had officially won the land on paper. But claiming a jagged, rain-soaked, isolated archipelago is one thing. Convincing Americans to actually live there is entirely another. The 1903 tribunal ruling didn't just bruise Canada's national pride. It fundamentally crippled the economic potential of the country's west coast. You see, there's immense wealth trapped just on the other side of that jagged Alaskan border. The northern half of British Columbia is vast, wild, and absolutely packed with natural resources. We're talking about billions of dollars in timber, precious metals, and natural gas. In any normal geographic scenario, Canada would simply extract these resources, load them onto trucks or trains, and drive them a short distance west to a coastal deepwater port to be shipped across the Pacific to markets in Asia. But because of that bizarre Alaska tail hanging down the coast, they can't. Instead of a 50-mile trip to the ocean, Canadian companies in northern British Columbia hit a wall. First, the towering ice-capped Coast Mountains, and immediately after that, the jurisdiction of the United States Customs and Border Protection. Because the US owns every single inlet, fjord, and viable harbor along this 300-mile stretch, Canada is completely locked out of its own coastline. Admittedly, they do have a tiny foothold at Stewart, British Columbia, but that's basically where the border ends anyways. So to export anything from this resource-rich region, Canadian industries are forced to route their goods hundreds of miles south to the port of Prince Rupert or even further south to Vancouver. This adds massive transportation costs, eats into profits, and effectively suffocates the economic development of northern British Columbia. The United States successfully used a few miles of jagged mountains and water to build an economic tollbooth that Canada still pays the price for today. So the United States boxed Canada out. But that brings up another glaring question. It's one thing to claim a piece of land to deny it to your rival, but who's actually braving the elements to hold this territory today? Currently, over 70,000 Americans live in the Alaskan Panhandle, heavily concentrated in communities like Juneau, Ketchikan, and Sitka. But living in this region is nothing like living in the lower 48 states. It's not even like living in Anchorage, Alaska's more northern and largest city. In fact, it's one of the most logistically challenging places to live on the entire planet. If you look at a highway map of the United States, you'll notice a glaring omission in southeast Alaska. There are essentially no roads. You can't pack up your car in Seattle and drive to Juneau, the capital of Alaska. But it goes further than that. You can't even drive between the towns inside the Panhandle itself. The geography is simply too disconnected and too hostile. In fact, Juneau is the only state capital in the entire country that is completely inaccessible by road. To leave town, you either have to buy an expensive plane ticket or you have to load your car onto the Alaska Marine Highway, a state-run ferry system that acts like the only lifeline between these isolated communities. This extreme isolation means that everything is harder and everything is wildly more expensive. Groceries have to be shipped in by barge, meaning a gallon of milk or a simple loaf of bread can cost triple what it does in the lower 48. Construction materials are astronomically priced, and the weather is famously gloomy, with some towns experiencing over 230 days of heavy rain and cloud cover every single year. It begs the question, why on earth would tens of thousands of people voluntarily subject themselves to this level of isolation, expense, and dreary weather? What's the advantage? The answer lies in the exact same geographic features that make it so difficult to live there in the first place. First, the deep, frigid waters that isolate these islands are also incredibly nutrient-dense, supporting one of the most lucrative commercial fishing industries on the planet. Millions of pounds of salmon, halibut, and crab, all things the tribal communities relied on in centuries past, are still pulled from these fjords every single year. For generations, the fishing industry has been the absolute lifeblood of the panhandle, providing high-paying, albeit incredibly dangerous, jobs that keep these communities afloat. It's not quite as harsh as what we've seen in the famous show Deadliest Catch, but it's still not Second, the imposing geography has birthed a massive economic engine. Tourism, those towering, glacier-carved fjords that make road-building impossible, just so happen to be perfectly designed for cruise ships. Every single summer, the population of these tiny, isolated towns swell way beyond their population. A town like Ketchikan, with a year-round population of around 8,000 people, can easily see well over a million cruise ship passengers flood its streets between May and September. This influx of tourist dollars effectively subsidizes the rest of the year, allowing small businesses to survive the long, dark, wet winters. And finally, there's the sheer momentum of history. Juneau remains the capital of Alaska strictly because of the legacy of this region. Back during the Gold Rush and the early days of Russian and American occupation, the panhandle was the most accessible, wealthy, and populated part of the state. Even though the vast majority of Alaska's population now lives hundreds of miles away in Anchorage, the political power remains locked in the rainy, roadless fjords of the southeast, providing thousands of stable government jobs that anchor the local economy. The Alexander Archipelago should probably be completely empty. It's a dense, dripping rainforest sitting locked in on all sides. It's physically, culturally, and geographically a continuation of Canada, yet it operates as a fiercely independent outpost of the United States. It's a place where geography dictates absolutely everything, from international borders that suffocate a neighboring economy to the ferry boats that dictate when you can leave your hometown. And today, it stands as a wild, beautiful, but very harsh reminder that, while countries can draw arbitrary lines on a map, it's the physical geography of the Earth that ultimately decides how, and if, humanity can survive there. Hey, go get a full free month of ad and sponsor-free videos, extra geography articles, and a free digital world map of the Coppin climate classification by going to my site, thebyte.co, and subscribing. Link is in the description below. I hope you enjoyed learning all about the Alaskan Panhandle. If you did, be sure to check out this video all about Western New Guinea. Thanks for watching. See you next time.