Glaciers, Fjords & Frontier Alaska

Vancouver is one of the finest embarkation cities in the world and two nights here before boarding Azamara Pursuit gives genuine time to explore it. The city sits between the Coast Mountains and the Pacific Ocean in a setting of extraordinary natural beauty, and the contrast between the glass towers of the downtown financial district and the old-growth temperate rainforest of Stanley Park, just minutes from the city centre, gives Vancouver its distinctive dual character. Granville Island’s covered market, the Museum of Anthropology at UBC with its outstanding collection of Northwest Coast Indigenous art, the Gastown district’s Victorian heritage buildings and the seawall walk around Stanley Park are all excellent options. July is Vancouver at its finest: warm, clear and with the mountains reflected in the harbour throughout the day.

A second day in Vancouver and the city rewards deeper exploration. Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver, the Grouse Mountain gondola with its sweeping views over the city and the inlet, and the Lynn Canyon ecology centre all give access to the rainforest landscape that begins immediately north of the city. The Whistler day trip, 120 kilometres north on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, is one of the finest mountain drives in Canada and gives a sense of the scale of the British Columbia interior. The Richmond Night Market, the largest night market in North America running on weekends from May to October, is an excellent final Vancouver evening with over 600 food stalls representing the city’s extraordinary Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Southeast Asian food culture.

Azamara Pursuit departs Vancouver today and the harbour departure, past the distinctive green copper roof of the Canada Place cruise terminal and into the Strait of Georgia, gives the first sense of the Inside Passage ahead. The snow-capped Coast Mountains rise directly behind the city as the ship moves north, and the forested coastline of British Columbia begins the visual story that Alaska will continue for the next ten days. Settle into your stateroom, join the welcome event and watch Canada’s Pacific coast slide past as the ship finds its course north.

A sea day heading north through the Inside Passage as Azamara Pursuit makes its way through the protected waterway between the British Columbia and Alaska coastlines. The Inside Passage is one of the great scenic sea routes in the world: forested islands, glacier-carved fjords and the occasional pod of orca or humpback whales visible from the upper decks. The wildlife briefing from the onboard naturalist, covering the species likely to be encountered at each port, is worth attending today as preparation for the Tlingit culture, the salmon runs and the bear country ahead.

Ketchikan announces itself from the water by its extraordinary concentration of totem poles, more than anywhere else in the world, their carved cedar faces watching from the hillside above the waterfront. The Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples who created them maintained a visual storytelling tradition of exceptional sophistication, and the Totem Heritage Center preserves original 19th-century poles rescued from abandoned village sites in a way that contextualises the art form properly. Creek Street, the former red-light district built on stilts above Ketchikan Creek, is now the most photographed boardwalk in Alaska and the salmon visible jumping in the creek below are one of the most accessible wildlife encounters on the coast. The Misty Fjords National Monument, accessible by floatplane or boat, gives the finest view of the coastal fjord landscape from above. With over 10 hours in port, there is time for both the cultural history and the wilderness.

Klawock is a small Tlingit community on the western coast of Prince of Wales Island, Alaska’s largest island and one of the most remote inhabited places accessible by cruise ship on the Inside Passage. The community of approximately 800 people maintains a totem park of 21 restored poles in the centre of the village, one of the finest concentrations of standing totems in southeast Alaska and far less visited than the Ketchikan poles. The Prince of Wales Island hinterland, with its old-growth Tongass National Forest, is home to Alexander Archipelago wolves, black bears and Sitka black-tailed deer in densities rarely encountered closer to the main tourist routes. The coastal waters around Klawock are among the most productive salmon fishing grounds in Alaska and the village’s own fish hatchery operates one of the most successful salmon enhancement programmes in the state.

Juneau is Alaska’s state capital and one of the most unusually situated cities in the United States, accessible only by air or sea, with no road connection to the rest of Alaska’s highway system. The Mendenhall Glacier, flowing from the vast Juneau Icefield 19 kilometres from the city, is the most accessible glacier in Alaska and the walk to the visitor centre platform at the glacier’s face, with the waterfall and the calving ice visible simultaneously, is one of the finest short hikes in the state. The Mount Roberts Tramway gives the finest aerial view of the city, the Gastineau Channel and the surrounding ice fields from above. The Last Chance Mining Museum, housed in the former Alaska-Juneau gold mine complex above the city, tells the story of the underground gold mining operation that ran from 1893 to 1944 and shaped the city’s development. South Franklin Street’s local breweries, particularly the Alaskan Brewing Company, are worth visiting as a counterpoint to the historical content.

Skagway is the most perfectly preserved gold rush town in North America, its false-fronted saloons, wooden boardwalks and historic hotels maintained as part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in a way that makes 1898 feel genuinely present. The White Pass and Yukon Route Railway, built in 1898 to supply the Klondike gold fields, climbs from sea level to the White Pass summit at 873 metres in just 32 kilometres, the track clinging to cliff faces and crossing gorges on steel bridges above the White Pass Trail where thousands of gold-seekers walked and many died. The Dead Horse Gulch and the Summit Lake views from the train are extraordinary. For those who prefer to stay in town, the Skagway Museum in the former federal courthouse and the Broadway District’s restored historic buildings give an excellent sense of the town’s brief and dramatic boom.

Icy Strait Point is one of the most culturally authentic port experiences in Alaska, built on the site of the former Hoonah Packing Company salmon cannery and operated by the Huna Tlingit people of Hoonah, the largest Tlingit community in Alaska. The restored cannery buildings house a museum telling the story of the industrial salmon canning era alongside the Tlingit cultural tradition that preceded and survived it. The wildlife in the surrounding waters is exceptional: humpback whales feed in Icy Strait throughout the summer and Chichagof Island behind the port holds one of the highest concentrations of brown bears per square mile in North America. The ZipRider, a zip line from the hillside above the cannery to the beach below, is the world’s largest zip line by total vertical descent and gives an aerial view of the strait and the surrounding forest that is genuinely memorable.

Hubbard Glacier is the culmination of the voyage and one of the most powerful natural experiences available in the northern hemisphere. The ship moves through Yakutat Bay and into the narrow Disenchantment Bay as the glacier’s 10-kilometre-wide face appears ahead, rising 30 storeys above the waterline in a wall of ancient blue ice. Hubbard is one of the few glaciers in the world that is advancing rather than retreating, its extraordinary mass still growing as the climate changes around it. The calving events, when sections of ice shear from the face and crash into the water below with a sound like thunder, happen continuously throughout the ship’s time in the bay. Harbour seals haul out on the ice floes surrounding the ship. The mist that sits above the glacier creates a light that makes the blue of the ancient ice glow in a way that no photograph quite captures. This is the image that stays with passengers long after every other memory of the voyage has faded.

Valdez sits at the head of a fjord in Prince William Sound, surrounded on three sides by the Chugach Mountains and accessible only by the Richardson Highway through the Thompson Pass. The town has two defining historical events: the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in North America at magnitude 9.2, which destroyed the original town and prompted its relocation to the current site; and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, when the tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef 40 kilometres away and released 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. The Valdez Museum covers both events with honest detail. The marine environment of Prince William Sound has largely recovered and the Columbia Glacier, 48 kilometres from town, is one of the most actively calving glaciers in Alaska and accessible by day boat. The salmon fishing in Valdez is exceptional and the waterfall at Bridal Veil Falls on the Richardson Highway is one of the most spectacular in the state.

Seward sits at the head of Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula, with the Harding Icefield and the Kenai Fjords National Park directly behind the town. The Kenai Fjords is one of Alaska’s most spectacular national parks, its coastline carved by glaciers into a series of fjords that are home to extraordinary marine wildlife: orca, humpback whales, Steller sea lions, thousands of seabirds nesting on the sea stacks and the tidewater glaciers of the fjord system. The day boat tours of the fjords from Seward’s small boat harbour are among the finest wildlife boat trips in Alaska. The Alaska SeaLife Center on the waterfront, a marine research facility and public aquarium, gives excellent close encounters with Steller sea lions, harbour seals, sea otters and Pacific seabirds. The Mount Marathon Race, held on 4 July each year, involves contestants running to the summit of the 1,400-metre mountain above the town and back in under an hour, and the race’s fame within Alaska gives Seward a specific character that no other Kenai Peninsula town quite has.

Azamara Pursuit arrives in Whittier this morning and your Glaciers, Fjords and Frontier Alaska journey concludes at one of Alaska’s most unusual communities. Whittier is accessible by land only through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, the longest combined rail and road tunnel in North America at 4.3 kilometres, which makes the town feel genuinely remote despite its road connection to Anchorage 60 miles north. The majority of Whittier’s 200 residents live in a single 14-storey building, Begich Towers, making it one of the most concentrated communities in the United States. Transfer from Whittier to Anchorage for your flights home, or ask your Cruiseabout specialist about extending your Alaska stay with a Denali National Park addition before departing.