From timber to tourism: Hoonah evolves to meet its economic needs.

• Author: Dobbyn, Paula
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Alaska Native Corporation Review

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Hoonah resident Floyd Peterson powers his 35-foot catamaran in the waters near Point Adolphus, a major feeding ground for whales in Southeast Alaska. Aboard his vessel are clients from Oklahoma City.

"We always get to see whales when we go out with Floyd," says Annette Hott. "He seems to attract them."

As if on cue, a pod of humpbacks soon surfaces near Peterson's boat, the Silver Spoon. To the delight of Peterson's passengers who have been sampling smoked salmon dip, the whales perform acrobatic stunts. They do partial breaches, roll on their sides, slap their flukes and forcefully exhale salty-smelling air through their enormous blowholes.

"This is the highlight of the trip, no question," says Shannon Wilcox, who is touring Southeast Alaska's lush Inside Passage with her husband, Spencer, aboard the Celebrity Millennium cruise ship.

The Oklahoma visitors joined Peterson at Icy Strait Point, an Alaska Native-owned cruise ship port developed in 2004, the first of its kind in Alaska. It's on the outskirts of Peterson's hometown of Hoonah, a predominately Tlingit community on Chichagof Island, about 40 air miles west of Juneau, Alaska's capital. The backdrop to Hoonah, in the Alaska Panhandle, is the Tongass National Forest, a 17-million-acre temperate rain forest with old growth spruce, cedar and hemlock trees and more than 17,690 miles of salmon-bearing rivers, streams and lakes, according to the US Forest Service. Because of its abundance, the Tongass is often called a "salmon forest." But it's also home to thousands of migrating humpback whales, which attract tourists from all over the world every summer.

Plenty of Business

Although he's seen thousands of whales over the course of his lifetime, Peterson seems as thrilled as his passengers each time one of the behemoth animals surfaces. In contrast to his four decades as a commercial fisherman and a sport-fishing charter operator, Peterson's latest career in whale watching is a lot easier and more reliable.

"The whales have to come up to breathe but the fish don't have to bite," he says. "This has been good for me. It's a lot less work and everyone's happy."

Peterson has been offering whale watch trips for nine years. He started the company after witnessing Hoonah's economy--like that of much of Southeast Alaska--undergo a shift from natural resource extraction to visitor services. In recent decades, the town's focus was heavily centered in forest products, a sector...