Alaska Cruise
Our Trip to Seward’s Folly
Written by Daniel, posted 3/7/2008
Lorraine and I had always wanted to see Alaska, so as a 50th anniversary treat for ourselves, on June 14, 2001 we flew out of Newark on Continental Airlines on our way to Anchorage.
We spent the night in Anchorage, and early the next morning boarded the Alaska Railroad for Denali National Park and Fairbanks.
We rode in Holland America Lines’ double-decker dome cars that provided a beautiful view of the scenery, and food service downstairs. We saw mostly miles of tundra with snow-covered mountains in the distance. I spotted a moose, but that was about all the wildlife we saw from the train.
We got off at Denali, where we had dinner at the McKinley Chalet and settled in for the night. I woke up briefly at midnight and was surprised at first to see bright sunshine, but it was June 16, close to the longest day of the year, when there’s only about two hours from sundown to sunup in Alaska.
RELATED SITES
Denali National Park: The official National Park Service web site
MS Veendam: Check out this Holland America Line cruise ship
On Wednesday, we arrived at Sitka, which was the capital when Alaska was under Russian rule.
There we visited the Russian Orthodox cathedral, a wooden building painted gray and white. One night a number of years ago, the cathedral caught fire. Local residents ran to the church in the midst of the fire and managed to save the holy icons, sacramental vessels and other treasures before the building burned down. Soon after, the church was rebuilt just as it had been.
Thursday, we landed at Juneau, the only state capital inaccessible by road.
The city is surrounded by mountains on three sides. The site is beautiful, but the only way in or out is by plane or boat. The capital was moved there from Sitka in 1906. Although downtown Juneau is fairly small and hemmed in by mountains, the official borders of the city extend as far east as the Canadian border, and it is the largest state capital in terms of area.
The next day we docked in Ketchikan, our last stop in Alaska. Here we visited Totem Bight State Historical Park, where there is a large display of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Indian totem poles and a ceremonial clan house brightly decorated with traditional Northwest Indian designs.
The next morning we boarded a bus for a tour of Denali Park. This was a place of rugged beauty. There were caribou grazing on the tundra and Dall sheep clinging to the sides of the cliffs. A fox scampered among the rocks. The driver stopped at a rest area, but we thought better about getting out when we saw that a grizzly bear had gotten there first.
We continued on until we stopped at an open area with a full view of magnificent Mt. McKinley and had some refreshments.
Later, in town, we did some shopping and took a stroll around Creek Street. This is one of the oldest sections of Ketchikan, whose buildings and wooden sidewalks are built on pilings over a stream.
It was a beautiful, sunny day, with a rare cloud-free view of the mountain, giving me a great photo opportunity.
The old wooden buildings have been restored, and are now occupied by various shops and tourist attractions, but it must have been a pretty wild place in the gold rush days. Ketchikan is also known as the Salmon Capital, and when we walked past one of the canneries, we noted that the big tree across the street was filled with dozens of bald eagles waiting for the cannery to close so they could help themselves to the fish scraps.
Saturday was spent sailing the scenic inside passage to Vancouver, where we docked early Sunday morning. On the way, a whale was sighted, but it dived and we didn’t get a good look at it. In Vancouver, we took a bus tour of the city, and spent some time strolling through the large and beautiful Queen Elizabeth Park across the strait from the city. We then settled for the night in the luxurious Pan Pacific Hotel overlooking the cruise ship terminal, and prepared for our flight home the next day.
Except for a brief shower in Sitka, we enjoyed fair and mild weather throughout the trip, which added to the enjoyment. Aboard ship, we had a large cabin with private veranda. We had our breakfast in the room, or out on the veranda on warmer days.
Then back to the Chalet to board the train to Fairbanks.
At Fairbanks we saw the Alaska pipeline and panned for gold at the site of one of the old gold dredges.
From Fairbanks we flew back to Anchorage, passing directly over Mount McKinley - so close we felt we could almost reach out and grab a snowball.
From Anchorage we headed by bus to Seward, where we were to board the MS Veendam for a cruise through the Inside Passage to Vancouver. On the way, we went past an area where a railroad yard and docks slid under the water in the great earthquake of 1964. Suddenly the traffic stopped. There had been a terrible accident up ahead, and nothing moved for a couple of hours. Our cruise guide fortunately was able to radio ahead, so they held the ship until we got there, and arranged a buffet supper for us.
The next day, Monday, we sailed down College Fiord toward Glacier Bay, arriving there on Tuesday morning.
Service on the ship was friendly and impeccable, and the Indonesian and Filipino crew often seemed to be having as much fun as the passengers.
After dinner every evening we enjoyed an excellent stage show; strolling through the on-board shops; and perhaps a drink and a dance or two in one of the lounges. Our only complaint was that the trip was over too soon.
The bay was full of ice floes and bergs broken off from the glaciers. Almost every one had a group of seals lying on it. I estimated that the faces of the glaciers were at least as high as a ten-story building. Every so often, there would be a grumble and then a roar and a splash as the glacier calved another berg. We were blessed with a bright sunny day to appreciate the grandeur of the surroundings.