This island was named Cape St. Elias in 1741 by the late Captain Vitus Bering. He was the first European to voyage to Alaska, naming it after the holiday on which the island was discovered. Saint Elias day was a Russian Orthodox Church holiday celebrated July 20^th. A giant pointy rock, Pinnacle Rock, sits off the end of the island peaking at a height of 1,665 feet.

The cape is at the southwestern end of Kayak Island, which extends twenty miles out into the Pacific Ocean. The name Kayak Island comes from the year 1826 by Lieutenant Sarichef of the Russian Navy. He said the island resembled an indigenous canoe. The defining feature of the island is Pinnacle Rock that stands a half-mile off the western end of the cape like a giant exclamation point. Due to hidden rocks and reefs, the waters around the cape were regarded as one of the most dangerous points along the entire Alaskan coast.

In 1911, just months after Cape Hinchinbrook Lighthouse was placed in operation, the Lighthouse Service provided the following justification for a light and fog signal at Cape St. Elias that was expected to cost $115,000:

This point is one of the most important to navigation in southern Alaska, being a landfall for nearly all vessels between southeastern and western Alaska and for vessels bound to Prince William Sound. This is a coast frequented by fog and storms and many requests have been received for this aid to navigation, and it is believed to be the most urgently needed in Alaska.

The first attempt at establishing a light to mark Cape St. Elias was in 1912, when the lighthouse tender Armeria left Seattle, bound for Alaska where it was scheduled to deploy fourteen acetylene light buoys. Each of these lights was equipped with storage tanks that could keep a beacon burning day and night for at least six months. While anchored off Cape Hinchinbrook in preparation for delivering supplies to the lighthouse established there in 1910, the Armeria was driven onto an uncharted rock by heavy swells. With a hole in the hull and water entering the engine room, the captain had no choice but to beach his craft. 

A survey team visited Cape St. Elias in June 1914 and established a temporary acet at the base of Pinnacle Rock. That location was considered as the site for the permanent lighthouse, but instead, a shelf on the southwest end of Kayak Island was selected instead, as it would afford more space for the station.

Tinkham spent five weeks on the cape finishing his designs for the station’s structures and selecting their locations. The lighthouse was built on a terrace, forty-two feet above the water, and consisted of a two-story, twelve-foote-square tower attached to the southwest corner of the one-story, twenty-five by thirty-six-foot, fog signal building.

Most of the construction party left the cape on October 7, having completed a storage building, a retaining wall for the keepers’ dwelling, and most of the reinforced concrete work required for the lighthouse. Two men were left behind to tend a small light and serve as camp caretakers during the winter.

Since supplying the construction site was troublesome, the island’s resources were used whenever possible. Over 190,000 bricks were made on site from sand and gravel procured from the beach and then used during the second season to construct a boathouse, a hoist house, and the keepers’ dwelling. Besides having storage space for three dories, the boathouse sheltered a six-horsepower engine for pulling a car up the tramways that extended to both the east and west beaches.

The Cape St Elias hoist house stood just east of the dwelling and contained a nine-horsepower engine for pulling a cart up the tramway (pictured above) from the boathouse to the storage house, located just north of the lighthouse. The two-story keepers’ dwelling rested atop a basement where a heating plant was located along with storage space for coal and other provisions. A kitchen, pantry, dining room, office, and a spare room for visitors were found on the first floor, while four bedrooms and a bathroom were situated on the second floor. Five tanks for storing water were located in the attic.

For fog signal equipment, duplicate sirens blown by compressed air generated a double blast every minute. Two eighteen-horse-powered engines propelled air through a pair of Y-shaped, double-mounted copper trumpets. Similar models are still on display in San Francisco. The unique shape of the trumpets was meant to redirect the sound around either side of Pinnacle Rock. It was placed in commission on January 30th, 1917.

When completed, Cape St. Elias was considered one of the most important stations on the Alaskan coast as it was a landfall light for vessels bound to Prince William Sound or Cook Inlet from either the Pacific Coast of the United States or from Southeast Alaska. A radio beacon was installed at the station in 1927 to further aid navigation.

In May 1961, a large Alaskan brown bear, weighing about 800 pounds, tried to force its way into the keepers’ residence at Cape St. Elias. The startled coastguardsmen fired a shot over the beast’s head, and the bruin beat a hasty retreat into the woods. Roughly an hour later, the bear returned and again tried to paw its way into the dwelling. Fearing for their lives, the coastguardsmen were forced to take “the first step toward converting the brownie into a bear rug.”

William McClosky, Jr. recalls a trip to Cape St. Elias aboard the USCGC Sweetbrier in 1962 to investigate “repeated dead-of-night calls from a seaman on watch, who kept breaking into sobs.”

McClosky relates that they “found a boatswain’s mate in charge, remembered by a former shipmate as a sturdy fellow, who had developed a disturbing giggle and whose eyes, framed in a sallow face, wandered to far horizons. He had made himself emperor of the station. Advisories to his three subjects were posted everywhere in their cramped quarters: ‘Wipe your damn boots – THIS MEANS YOU’ and ‘No loud talk or damn laughing anytime – THIS MEANS YOU’.” The removal of the coastguardsman from the station must have been a relief to his crew. The isolation of the cape definitely had an effect on people as just a year before this incident, one of the crew had rowed out to sea in a dinghy to relieve his claustrophobia and never returned.

At 17:36 on Good Friday, March 27, 1964, the largest earthquake ever to occur in the United States struck Prince William Sound. The keepers at Cape St. Elias felt the quake for five full minutes, but it did little damage to the station, even though it caused an uplift of between six to eight feet. Frank O. Reed, who had been relieved of the watch at 16:00, was photographing the nearby sea lion colony when his leg was broken by a quake-triggered rockfall on Pinnacle Rock. When Reed didn’t return to the lighthouse, three of his comrades went to search for him. While carrying the injured Reed back to the station, the crew was caught in a tsunami that flooded the gravel bar leading to Pinnacle Rock with chest-deep water at 17:15. The men survived the first wave, but just seconds later a ten-foot surge swept them all into the sea. Frank Reed was carried out to sea and drowned, but the other men survived.

Twenty-two-year-old Reed, who had entered on duty at Cape St. Elias on Feburary 15, 1964 and was scheduled to be discharged in just a couple of weeks, sent a request to the armed forces radio station in Anchorage just one day before the earthquake, asking that they play “I Want to Go Home – Detroit City.” The radio station finally played Reed’s request on April 9, dedicating it to the three men and two dogs at Cape St. Elias. Sergeant Ervin Elswick, who ran the radio program, told his listeners, “We hope somehow, somewhere, Frank is listening.”

Fearing additional tsunamis, the personnel evacauted the station at 18:05. A total of three tidal waves struck the area. The men returned to the station at 21:30. Newspapers reported that the quake and resulting tidal waves knocked Cape St. Elias Light Station out of commission for three days, but the station’s logbook shows that Cape St. Elias Light was active the night right after the earthquake. The crew at nearby Cape Hinchinbrook evacuated the station at the time of the earthquake and did not return until noon the following day. Reed’s body was recovered four days after the earthquake.

The Cordova Times edition of October 31, 1968 carried a notice that the Seventeenth Coast Guard District planned to automate five Alaskan light stations, including Cape Hinchinbrook and Cape St. Elias. Technological improvements in automatic aids made possible the automation, which would result in an annual savings of $15,000 per station. The automation, scheduled to begin in July of 1970, was estimated to take approximately five years, but the process finished ahead of schedule at Cape St. Elias and Cape Hinchinbrook as both stations lost their personnel in 1974. Sometime before 1973, the Fresnel lens was removed from the tower at Cape St. Elias and replaced by a smaller beacon.

Cape St. Elias Lighthouse was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, along with Eldred Rock Lighthouse and Cape Spencer Lighthouse. These three lighthouses were the first Alaskan lighthouses to be added to the register. The other eight surviving Alaskan lighthouses were not added to the register until 2002 – 2005

Kevin Anderson recorded his feelings on the automation of Cape St. Elias in the station’s logbook. “Saint Elias light is now history. It was downgraded to a minor aid. It seems the best things in life weren’t meant to last. This has been the best job I reckon I will ever have the pleasure of doing. I just hope these lighthouses are never forgotten.” The Cape Saint Elias Lightkeepers Association, organized to restore and preserve the buildings on the cape, obtained a thirty-year lease from the Coast Guard in 1997 and is working to fulfill Anderson’s wish.