Smoky Point is a point of land in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sover ...

Alaska Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S., ...

, located at , where

Ugashik Bay Ugashik Bay is a bay of the Bering Sea in the U.S. state of Alaska. It is an elongated, comma-shaped estuary formed where the Ugashik River empties into Bristol Bay, on the western coast of the Alaska Peninsula. Its waters are characteristicall ...

joins the much larger

Bristol Bay Bristol Bay ( esu, Iilgayaq, russian: Залив Бристольский) is the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea, at 57° to 59° North 157° to 162° West in Southwest Alaska. Bristol Bay is 400 km (250 mi) long and 290 km, ( ...

. The most easily distinguishable landmark is the

United States Coast Guard The United States Coast Guard (USCG) is the maritime security, search and rescue, and law enforcement service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the country's eight uniformed services. The service is a maritime, military, mult ...

lighthouse A lighthouse is a tower, building, or other type of physical structure designed to emit light from a system of lamps and lenses and to serve as a beacon for navigational aid, for maritime pilots at sea or on inland waterways. Lighthouses mar ...

which is visible to mariners on the eastern shore of Bristol Bay and all of Ugashik Bay. The long beaches, shoals, and sandbars of lower Ugashik Bay and the eastern shore of Bristol Bay make navigation through the area particularly troublesome.

Shipwreck A shipwreck is the wreckage of a ship that is located either beached on land or sunken to the bottom of a body of water. Shipwrecking may be intentional or unintentional. Angela Croome reported in January 1999 that there were approximately ...

s, even of smaller vessels, are not unusual. Deaths arising from vessels in distress and from drowning are also commonplace. The combination of extremely rough sea conditions—surf arising in Bristol Bay is commonly 1–5 m (3–16 ft) high—and cold water make survival rates extremely low. On a single day in July 2006, to illustrate, two vessels of the Bristol Bay fishing fleet were lost on the shoals of Smoky Point. The crew of the fishing vessels ''Kaos'' and ''Silver Tide'' were rescued by heroic efforts of the ''M/V Farwest Leader'' in extreme weather conditions in the dark.

Demographics

Besides the lighthouse, the area also hosts several homes and beach cabins belonging to the

salmon Salmon () is the common name for several list of commercially important fish species, commercially important species of euryhaline ray-finned fish from the family (biology), family Salmonidae, which are native to tributary, tributaries of the ...

gillnet Gillnetting is a fishing method that uses gillnets: vertical panels of netting that hang from a line with regularly spaced floaters that hold the line on the surface of the water. The floats are sometimes called "corks" and the line with corks is ...

families who fish the nearby waters, dotting the coastline from

Dago Creek Dago Creek (Sugpiaq: ''Kuigaa'aq'') is a stream, long, on the Alaska Peninsula in the U.S. state of Alaska. Beginning in a small lake southeast of Egegik, it meanders southwest across the flats to enter Ugashik Bay southeast of Smoky Poin ...

, approximately east of the lighthouse to

Cape Greig Cape Greig is a geographical feature of the Alaska Peninsula in the U.S. state of Alaska, where a 290-foot (88 meter) ridge juts into the Bering Sea. It is located on the Bristol Bay coast eight miles north of Smoky Point (Ugashik Bay) and 32 mile ...

, approximately {{convert, 8, mi, sp=us to the north. The area population typically exceeds 30 in summer, dropping to just a single resident in winter.

Flora and fauna

The terrain consists of a series of long ridges which once comprised the ancient coastline of the Bering Sea punctuated by numerous long, narrow lakes and marshland which provide food and shelter for any number of nesting seabirds and annual migrations of the

emperor goose The emperor goose (''Anser canagicus''), also known as the beach goose or the painted goose, is a waterfowl species in the family Anatidae, which contains the ducks, geese, and swans. It is blue-gray in color as an adult and grows to in length. ...

, lesser

Canada goose The Canada goose (''Branta canadensis''), or Canadian goose, is a large wild goose with a black head and neck, white cheeks, white under its chin, and a brown body. It is native to the arctic and temperate regions of North America, and it is o ...

Arctic tern The Arctic tern (''Sterna paradisaea'') is a tern in the family Laridae. This bird has a circumpolar breeding distribution covering the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Europe (as far south as Brittany), Asia, and North America (as far south a ...

cormorant Phalacrocoracidae is a family of approximately 40 species of aquatic birds commonly known as cormorants and shags. Several different classifications of the family have been proposed, but in 2021 the IOC adopted a consensus taxonomy of seven ge ...

mallard The mallard () or wild duck (''Anas platyrhynchos'') is a dabbling duck that breeds throughout the temperate and subtropical Americas, Eurasia, and North Africa, and has been introduced to New Zealand, Australia, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, Arge ...

duck, fish duck, and others. The land is also host to the American

bald eagle The bald eagle (''Haliaeetus leucocephalus'') is a bird of prey found in North America. A sea eagle, it has two known subspecies and forms a species pair with the white-tailed eagle (''Haliaeetus albicilla''), which occupies the same niche as ...

sandhill crane The sandhill crane (''Antigone canadensis'') is a species of large crane of North America and extreme northeastern Siberia. The common name of this bird refers to habitat like that at the Platte River, on the edge of Nebraska's Sandhills on t ...

willow ptarmigan The willow ptarmigan () (''Lagopus lagopus'') is a bird in the grouse subfamily Tetraoninae of the pheasant family Phasianidae. It is also known as the willow grouse and in Ireland and Britain, where the subspecies '' L. l. scotica'' was prev ...

, barrenground

caribou Reindeer (in North American English, known as caribou if wild and ''reindeer'' if domesticated) are deer in the genus ''Rangifer''. For the last few decades, reindeer were assigned to one species, ''Rangifer tarandus'', with about 10 subspe ...

brown bear The brown bear (''Ursus arctos'') is a large bear species found across Eurasia and North America. In North America, the populations of brown bears are called grizzly bears, while the subspecies that inhabits the Kodiak Islands of Alaska is kno ...

, foxes, porcupines, ground squirrels, and wolves, to name but a few. Although treeless, some stands of

willow Willows, also called sallows and osiers, from the genus ''Salix'', comprise around 400 speciesMabberley, D.J. 1997. The Plant Book, Cambridge University Press #2: Cambridge. of typically deciduous trees and shrubs, found primarily on moist s ...

and

alder Alders are trees comprising the genus ''Alnus'' in the birch family Betulaceae. The genus comprises about 35 species of monoecious trees and shrubs, a few reaching a large size, distributed throughout the north temperate zone with a few sp ...

grow in the more protected valleys between the ridges; the region is mostly covered with low

shrub A shrub (often also called a bush) is a small-to-medium-sized perennial woody plant. Unlike herbaceous plants, shrubs have persistent woody stems above the ground. Shrubs can be either deciduous or evergreen. They are distinguished from trees ...

bery,

moss Mosses are small, non-vascular flowerless plants in the taxonomic division Bryophyta (, ) '' sensu stricto''. Bryophyta (''sensu lato'', Schimp. 1879) may also refer to the parent group bryophytes, which comprise liverworts, mosses, and hor ...

es, and

lichen A lichen ( , ) is a composite organism that arises from algae or cyanobacteria living among filaments of multiple fungi species in a mutualistic relationship.tundra In physical geography, tundra () is a type of biome where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons. The term ''tundra'' comes through Russian (') from the Kildin Sámi word (') meaning "uplands", "treeless moun ...

of the plain. The area is frequently buffeted by strong winds off the Bering Sea which keep the growing season short and cool, and undermines vegetation growing on the unstable sand dune ridges. Headlands of Alaska Landforms of Lake and Peninsula Borough, Alaska