raffy
Nov 23, 01, 2:26 am
It's hard not to be smug when you're on a small-ship cruise of Alaska.
Whenever my wife, Lisa, and I were not congratulating ourselves for having chosen our little 84-passenger ship for a journey through Alaska's Inside Passage this past August, somebody else was doing it for us: the crew, our fellow passengers, even local residents at the ports of call.
Our boat, the Cruise West Spirit of Discovery, was smaller and nimbler than the big ships, able to get in and out of narrow inlets, and at liberty to slow down any time somebody saw a grizzly bear on shore, or speed up to catch a pod of breaching humpback whales. It could maneuver through ice floes without disturbing the sleeping seals, and linger at thousand-year-old glaciers. Unlike some boats, ours had no rigid schedule dictated by the need to get back into international waters to resume gambling; in fact, there was no gambling at all.
Never having taken a cruise before, I was concerned that a small ship would be less stable in choppy waters. I worried that the tiny cabins and lack of on- board entertainment would drive us stir-crazy after a few days.
I needn't have worried. Our cabin was small, but cozy. The simply prepared food - everything from fresh Alaskan halibut to barbecued chicken and ribs - was plentiful. The public spaces, including a cafeteria-like dining room and a comfortable lounge with a bar and a shelf of books, were crowded only when rain (or a brimming platter of snacks) forced everybody indoors. We never needed our seasickness pills, barely cracked the paperbacks we brought from home and rarely tore ourselves from the majesty outside our window.
Alaska's natural beauty is a never-ending spectacle and our small ship gave us front-row seats.
Nature's front-row seats
We knew we had made the right choice on our arrival in Ketchikan, where we boarded. At the dock, we were treated to a side-by-side comparison. To our left stood the 166-foot-long Spirit of Discovery, no bigger than a Circle Line boat. To our right was a 2,000-passenger megalopolis of the seas. The ship's anchor was nearly the size of our entire boat. Only after the gargantuan cruise ship pulled out of port did I realize that its 12 stories had been blocking out the sun. The four-foot swells created by the leviathan's wake would be the roughest waters we encountered during the entire trip.
For the next few days, we nearly forgot about the existence of the bigger boats as we cruised through inlets too narrow for them to negotiate.
Our first full day of sightseeing brought us early in the morning to Misty Fjords National Monument, which was indeed misty. But by 8 a.m., the fog began to dissipate, unveiling a world of vibrant evergreens. The steep, forested cliffs on either side of the fjords presented a landscape like none we had ever seen.
The next day we cruised through the Wrangell Narrows on our way to the LeConte Glacier. Lisa and I had tried to see a glacier once before, in Patagonia, but bad weather had forced us to turn back. So we were excited the minute we saw the Windex-blue ice floes mining LeConte Bay. The crackling of the glacial chunks made us feel as if we were cruising through a bowl of Rice Krispies. The floes got bigger and bluer as we traveled closer, until we finally stopped, 400 yards away from the glacier itself, the biggest and bluest berg of all.
At that distance, you see things happen before you hear them. By the time we heard the thundering explosion of a huge piece of ice calving, the event was over. So we scanned the horizon diligently, hoping to rest our eyes on the exact spot where the next bus-sized chunk would break off the glacier and plunge into the water below.
In the ship's central corridor, Margie McGregor, the cruise's coordinator and staff naturalist, posted a list of wildlife seen during the cruise. For the first few days, it remained fairly short: a group of orcas as we moved toward LeConte Glacier, a few bald eagles and a mountain goat that was hard to see even with binoculars. But by day five, as we cruised through Glacier Bay, additions came fast and furious.
Humpback whales were a major reason to brave the cold on deck. At first they were identifiable only by their plumes of mist in the water, but as we got closer, we could make out heads, fins, tails. None of the whales did a Shamu-worthy leap out of the water, but dozens breached within gasping distance of the boat.
Glacier Bay was where we also got our first grizzly bear sighting. A mother and her two cubs frolicked on a hill above the shoreline, oblivious to our presence 200 feet away. Seals and sea lions were plentiful, often napping atop ice floes. Sea otters swam, dived, chased each other through kelp or simply lay on their backs while eating shellfish off their chests. A family of puffins floated silently off the starboard side.
Each time an animal was sighted, a crowd jumped up to see it. The person who seemed the most excited was McGregor, who presumably had seen all these critters many times before. Only Big Al Carter, who delivered the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to the lounge each afternoon, was more popular.
That morning in Glacier Bay had started out foggy, but by late afternoon it was sunny and I was in shorts and a T-shirt on the top deck, working on my tan.
The gloriously sunny 75-degree weather followed us for the last three days of the trip.
The next morning in Skagway, Lisa and I went ashore and biked to the ghost town of Dyea, 10 miles away. During the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898, this boomtown was the last place where prospectors could stock up before setting off on the Chilkoot Trail. Two years later, when the White Pass and Yukon Railroad chose Skagway for its depot, Dyea literally disappeared. Even the boards used for the houses and stores were carted up and moved to Skagway. Today, the Alaska Highway dead-ends in Dyea, so there's little automobile traffic. All that remains is a cemetery and some historical markers.
We pedaled up one finger of the Taiya Inlet and down another, looping back and forth several times until we reached Dyea. Along the way, vistas proliferated, each more picturesque than the last, where the snow-capped purple mountains perfectly framed the landscape of teal waters and evergreen forest.
Shopping invasion
When we returned to Skagway, we saw that the quaint, sleepy town had been overrun by thousands of shoppers from the two cruise ships that dwarfed our little boat in port. People packed stores selling T-shirts, fudge and overpriced trinkets.
In Haines, late that afternoon, our timing was more auspicious. The bigger boats go to Haines too, but they didn't show up that day until after we left. When our little boat arrived, the port was empty except for three extremely warm-blooded (some might say foolhardy) souls bobbing in the 45-degree water around the pier. Lisa and I chose a rafting excursion through the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve.
This was no death-defying trip through whitewater canyons. The shallow river's current moved slowly and steadily, while Sarah, our strong-armed 20- year-old guide, did all the rowing for our eight-passenger raft, leaving us free to watch for wildlife. Bald eagles were plentiful, but the heat of the day scared off wolves, moose and grizzlies.
When we disembarked the last day in Juneau, we joined the crowds of other cruise ship tourists in the stores and restaurants buying postcards and smoked salmon. But we wanted one more uncrowded Alaskan experience before we returned home. So we abandoned the shopping streets in favor of a web of hiking trails, where the city's water supply cascaded through mossy glens.
After a 6-mile hike, I looked at a map of Alaska. Over the entire nine-day cruise, we had gone fewer than 500 miles. We hadn't even set foot on mainland Alaska. But we returned home wishing not that we had seen more places, but that we had had more time to explore the ones we did.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IF YOU GO:
-- GETTING THERE: Alaska Airlines flies from San Francisco to Juneau.
-- ROUTES, RATES: The 166-foot-long Spirit of Discovery sails in Alaska during the summer months. All three of its routes offer nature lovers the chance to view wildlife. "Explorers' Route," the first in the season, is an eight-night cruise sailing between Seattle and Juneau, beginning May 16. Rates run $2,799 to $4,049 per person, double occupancy, and include all meals and applicable taxes. "Secluded Waterways," another eight-night route, sails between Juneau and Ketchikan from May 23 through Aug. 22. Rates are $3,399 to $3,499. Latest in the season is Cruise West's "Gold Rush Voyage," which sails between Juneau and Seattle for 10 nights, beginning on Aug. 29. Rates range from $2,519 to $3,719. If you book any voyage by Nov. 30, the company offers an early booking discount of $200 per person. If you book by Feb. 15, the discount is $100.
-- FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Cruise West, phone: (800) 888-9378; fax: (206) 441-4757; Web: www.cruisewest.com. (http://www.cruisewest.com.)
Whenever my wife, Lisa, and I were not congratulating ourselves for having chosen our little 84-passenger ship for a journey through Alaska's Inside Passage this past August, somebody else was doing it for us: the crew, our fellow passengers, even local residents at the ports of call.
Our boat, the Cruise West Spirit of Discovery, was smaller and nimbler than the big ships, able to get in and out of narrow inlets, and at liberty to slow down any time somebody saw a grizzly bear on shore, or speed up to catch a pod of breaching humpback whales. It could maneuver through ice floes without disturbing the sleeping seals, and linger at thousand-year-old glaciers. Unlike some boats, ours had no rigid schedule dictated by the need to get back into international waters to resume gambling; in fact, there was no gambling at all.
Never having taken a cruise before, I was concerned that a small ship would be less stable in choppy waters. I worried that the tiny cabins and lack of on- board entertainment would drive us stir-crazy after a few days.
I needn't have worried. Our cabin was small, but cozy. The simply prepared food - everything from fresh Alaskan halibut to barbecued chicken and ribs - was plentiful. The public spaces, including a cafeteria-like dining room and a comfortable lounge with a bar and a shelf of books, were crowded only when rain (or a brimming platter of snacks) forced everybody indoors. We never needed our seasickness pills, barely cracked the paperbacks we brought from home and rarely tore ourselves from the majesty outside our window.
Alaska's natural beauty is a never-ending spectacle and our small ship gave us front-row seats.
Nature's front-row seats
We knew we had made the right choice on our arrival in Ketchikan, where we boarded. At the dock, we were treated to a side-by-side comparison. To our left stood the 166-foot-long Spirit of Discovery, no bigger than a Circle Line boat. To our right was a 2,000-passenger megalopolis of the seas. The ship's anchor was nearly the size of our entire boat. Only after the gargantuan cruise ship pulled out of port did I realize that its 12 stories had been blocking out the sun. The four-foot swells created by the leviathan's wake would be the roughest waters we encountered during the entire trip.
For the next few days, we nearly forgot about the existence of the bigger boats as we cruised through inlets too narrow for them to negotiate.
Our first full day of sightseeing brought us early in the morning to Misty Fjords National Monument, which was indeed misty. But by 8 a.m., the fog began to dissipate, unveiling a world of vibrant evergreens. The steep, forested cliffs on either side of the fjords presented a landscape like none we had ever seen.
The next day we cruised through the Wrangell Narrows on our way to the LeConte Glacier. Lisa and I had tried to see a glacier once before, in Patagonia, but bad weather had forced us to turn back. So we were excited the minute we saw the Windex-blue ice floes mining LeConte Bay. The crackling of the glacial chunks made us feel as if we were cruising through a bowl of Rice Krispies. The floes got bigger and bluer as we traveled closer, until we finally stopped, 400 yards away from the glacier itself, the biggest and bluest berg of all.
At that distance, you see things happen before you hear them. By the time we heard the thundering explosion of a huge piece of ice calving, the event was over. So we scanned the horizon diligently, hoping to rest our eyes on the exact spot where the next bus-sized chunk would break off the glacier and plunge into the water below.
In the ship's central corridor, Margie McGregor, the cruise's coordinator and staff naturalist, posted a list of wildlife seen during the cruise. For the first few days, it remained fairly short: a group of orcas as we moved toward LeConte Glacier, a few bald eagles and a mountain goat that was hard to see even with binoculars. But by day five, as we cruised through Glacier Bay, additions came fast and furious.
Humpback whales were a major reason to brave the cold on deck. At first they were identifiable only by their plumes of mist in the water, but as we got closer, we could make out heads, fins, tails. None of the whales did a Shamu-worthy leap out of the water, but dozens breached within gasping distance of the boat.
Glacier Bay was where we also got our first grizzly bear sighting. A mother and her two cubs frolicked on a hill above the shoreline, oblivious to our presence 200 feet away. Seals and sea lions were plentiful, often napping atop ice floes. Sea otters swam, dived, chased each other through kelp or simply lay on their backs while eating shellfish off their chests. A family of puffins floated silently off the starboard side.
Each time an animal was sighted, a crowd jumped up to see it. The person who seemed the most excited was McGregor, who presumably had seen all these critters many times before. Only Big Al Carter, who delivered the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to the lounge each afternoon, was more popular.
That morning in Glacier Bay had started out foggy, but by late afternoon it was sunny and I was in shorts and a T-shirt on the top deck, working on my tan.
The gloriously sunny 75-degree weather followed us for the last three days of the trip.
The next morning in Skagway, Lisa and I went ashore and biked to the ghost town of Dyea, 10 miles away. During the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898, this boomtown was the last place where prospectors could stock up before setting off on the Chilkoot Trail. Two years later, when the White Pass and Yukon Railroad chose Skagway for its depot, Dyea literally disappeared. Even the boards used for the houses and stores were carted up and moved to Skagway. Today, the Alaska Highway dead-ends in Dyea, so there's little automobile traffic. All that remains is a cemetery and some historical markers.
We pedaled up one finger of the Taiya Inlet and down another, looping back and forth several times until we reached Dyea. Along the way, vistas proliferated, each more picturesque than the last, where the snow-capped purple mountains perfectly framed the landscape of teal waters and evergreen forest.
Shopping invasion
When we returned to Skagway, we saw that the quaint, sleepy town had been overrun by thousands of shoppers from the two cruise ships that dwarfed our little boat in port. People packed stores selling T-shirts, fudge and overpriced trinkets.
In Haines, late that afternoon, our timing was more auspicious. The bigger boats go to Haines too, but they didn't show up that day until after we left. When our little boat arrived, the port was empty except for three extremely warm-blooded (some might say foolhardy) souls bobbing in the 45-degree water around the pier. Lisa and I chose a rafting excursion through the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve.
This was no death-defying trip through whitewater canyons. The shallow river's current moved slowly and steadily, while Sarah, our strong-armed 20- year-old guide, did all the rowing for our eight-passenger raft, leaving us free to watch for wildlife. Bald eagles were plentiful, but the heat of the day scared off wolves, moose and grizzlies.
When we disembarked the last day in Juneau, we joined the crowds of other cruise ship tourists in the stores and restaurants buying postcards and smoked salmon. But we wanted one more uncrowded Alaskan experience before we returned home. So we abandoned the shopping streets in favor of a web of hiking trails, where the city's water supply cascaded through mossy glens.
After a 6-mile hike, I looked at a map of Alaska. Over the entire nine-day cruise, we had gone fewer than 500 miles. We hadn't even set foot on mainland Alaska. But we returned home wishing not that we had seen more places, but that we had had more time to explore the ones we did.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IF YOU GO:
-- GETTING THERE: Alaska Airlines flies from San Francisco to Juneau.
-- ROUTES, RATES: The 166-foot-long Spirit of Discovery sails in Alaska during the summer months. All three of its routes offer nature lovers the chance to view wildlife. "Explorers' Route," the first in the season, is an eight-night cruise sailing between Seattle and Juneau, beginning May 16. Rates run $2,799 to $4,049 per person, double occupancy, and include all meals and applicable taxes. "Secluded Waterways," another eight-night route, sails between Juneau and Ketchikan from May 23 through Aug. 22. Rates are $3,399 to $3,499. Latest in the season is Cruise West's "Gold Rush Voyage," which sails between Juneau and Seattle for 10 nights, beginning on Aug. 29. Rates range from $2,519 to $3,719. If you book any voyage by Nov. 30, the company offers an early booking discount of $200 per person. If you book by Feb. 15, the discount is $100.
-- FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Cruise West, phone: (800) 888-9378; fax: (206) 441-4757; Web: www.cruisewest.com. (http://www.cruisewest.com.)