Sitka

Rain beads on carved cedar while, across the harbour, the dome of a Russian Orthodox cathedral catches the grey Alaskan light. Humpbacks surface between the fishing boats close enough that the crews barely glance up, and the town smells of woodsmoke, salt and spruce.

Sitka is the only Inside Passage community that fronts the open Pacific, spread along Baranof Island's shore beneath the volcanic cone of Mount Edgecumbe, and it is where Tlingit and Russian histories collide on one waterfront. This was the capital of Russian America until the 1867 purchase; the Russian Bishop's House of 1842 still stands with original furnishings, and St. Michael's Cathedral keeps its eighteenth-century icons in a living parish church rather than a museum. In Sitka National Historical Park, a rainforest trail of totem poles winds through the site of the 1804 battle between Russian forces and the Kiks.ádi Tlingit, whose descendants still tell it as their own history. Each spring, Tlingit harvesters set hemlock branches in the sound for the herring spawn, a subsistence tradition older than every flag that has flown here.