Hoonah Harbour and a visit to Pitt Island Cemetery

 Tonight we are at the Tenakee Harbour in Tenakee Inlet.

This post is about our stay in Hoonah Harbour last night (lots of cool place names in Alaska).

We stopped at Hoonah, located at the north end of Chichagof Island, a couple weeks ago and, besides stocking up on food, water, and fuel, we really enjoyed the town and the people. Now that we are working our way gradually south, we decided to stop there a second time to refill tanks and larder, and also to have a look at an amazing cemetery that we did not have time to see on our first visit.

 The cemetery is located on Pitt Island adjacent to the harbour. We used our dinghy to go from our harbour slip over to the island. The city of Hoonah has plans for a bridge to the breakwater and walkway along the top that will allow people to walk to the cemetery. We did not see any new looking graves so it appears that the cemetery is no longer being used. We also wondered if the holes had been dug by hand because of the difficulty of getting a machine over there.

 

When we got to the island, two Sitka blacktail bucks were laying in the grass chewing their cud. They were very tame and we were able to approach them. Oblio wanted to eat one but we talked him out of it.

 

The cemetery is beautiful, almost mystical, and offered some great photographic opportunities. I tried my best to capture some interesting shots to give you some idea of what it was like. It was evening light with a thick forest as a backdrop so the photos are a bit dark. I did not try to edit that because I think they accurately reflect the scene. The same applies to the colors, especially the rich greens - they were so rich and saturated that there was no need to pump up the photos.

In the center of the cemetery there was this beautiful little 'house' over a grave. Like everything else, it was no longer level and appeared to be gradually sinking into the soft ground.

The setting is spectacular. Everything is so green and lush.

The wrought iron fence was beautiful even though partially destroyed.

This pattern and the colors on the side of the little house were so beautiful and reminded me of an abstract painting.

There is obviously a lot of history in each of the headstones. Each one would have a story. We both felt a clear sense of this as we wandered around. The oldest date of death that we found was 1902.

The poor condition of some of the gravestones gives pause for thought too. What happens to gravestones from so long ago after all the descendants have died or moved away?

Some of the graves were in amongst huge trees that may not have even existed when the person was buried. 

We noted a number of Russian Orthodox crucifixes with three bars, one of which is slanted. 

There were some interesting cast concrete forms that we weren't sure of the purpose. They did not appear to have any markers anywhere on or in them. Here are pictures of two of them but there were many more.

 

Many of the gravestones were broken, leaning over or completely tipped over. There were some markers that were barely visible beneath the dense vegetation.

 

This person's nickname was Tootsie! Very rare.

There was this interesting fungus growing on the trunk of a broken tree.