THE PLACE I'M LOOKING for is a few miles inland, in a settlement of weather-beaten boxes surrounded by hardy, aggressive spruce. After ringing a few wrong doorbells, I finally find the house, with surfboards leaning under the porch and the tiny sign that reads icy waves surf shop. I knock on the back door and Jack Endicott lets me in. With a white beard and a Hawaiian shirt over his belly, he looks like the Aloha Santa.

Endicott never envisioned himself as a surfer. "I made the mistake of taking the kids to Hawaii, and they fell in love with surfing," he says. He'd moved to Yakutat back in 1980—having already worked for the National Weather Service in Utah, Nebraska, and Alaska—met and married a local girl, converted to Mormonism, and started a family. Endicott quickly learned that outfitting seven teenagers with surfboards and wetsuits was going to break the bank, so in 1999 he opened the shop to buy the stuff wholesale. Six years later, he estimates that 400 visitors a year ring his hard-to-find doorbell, and while only about 50 of them are actual surfers, he and his wife, Laura, do a brisk business selling T-shirts heralding THE FAR NORTH SHORE.

But Endicott's true passion is the weather. His mind is an almanac of swell direction, tide schedules, wind speed, and projected rainfall. "Man, isn't this cool?" he says, clicking his mouse beneath a signed poster of Greg Noll dropping in at Waimea. He's just discovered GoogleEarth, and he's giving me a satellite tour of Yakutat's surf spots. Because of unpredictable winds and because local tides can fluctuate by 16 feet, conditions change quickly.

"This one only breaks with a big southwest swell and a negative tide," he says, pointing to a spot on the bay. He glances at his watch. "By the time you get out there it will be done. Tomorrow morning will be good, but by Tuesday it will be flat again."

I thank him for the advice but don't believe him. Yet when I get out to the driftwood-strewn beach a half-hour later, I see I should have listened. The water where the waves are supposed to be is as flat as a mirror. The next day, when I hit it precisely at low tide, it's just as he predicted. There's a lone guy surfing—he tells me that whenever a good swell hits, he cashes in frequent-flier miles and comes over from Juneau. I don't know if he qualifies as a local, but I've never been so welcomed at anyone else's surf spot.

"It's good to see somebody else in the water," he says. "I get used to being the only one out."

We surf together, set after set rolling through. The beach is contained by thick forest, and out across the bay the fog lifts just enough to show the toe of a glacier cracking off the snowy base of St. Elias. Let me repeat that: I'm surfing incredible waves within sight of a glacier. The water numbs my fingers and face, but after a while it doesn't seem all that cold—nothing worse than Northern California, anyway. The waves rise out of nowhere, glassy peeling lefts we ride a few hundred yards, all the way to shore. After an hour, the tide rushes in so fast that you can watch it climb the beach, and as quickly as the waves arrived they disappear, leaving the spruce-ringed inlet once again calm, gillnetters pushing toward the open sea.