Lituya Bay

A flying boat dropped Paddy Sherman’s mountaineering expedition at Lituya Bay on June 17, 1958. Over the next three weeks, the climbers made the second ascent of Mount Fairweather, a first ascent of an unnamed peak, and had come within 200 feet of the first ascent of Mount Lituya. When hot weather made glacier travel untenable, they returned to Lituya Bay and radioed a request to be picked up on July 10.

Lituya Bay offers the only sheltered anchorage for a long stretch of Southeast Alaska coast, but the bay itself is hardly safe. Cenotaph Island, a large wooded mound at the center of the bay, is named for the 21 members of the La Perouse expedition who drowned in 1798 after capsizing in the tidal bore at the bay’s shallow entrance.