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It wasn’t always fun sailing to Alaska. In 1778 Captain James Cook from Whitby became the first European to chart this coastline. His 460-ton ship Resolution was poorly built, uncomfortable, and beset by rough seas as it struggled ever farther northward in search of the fabled Northwest Passage around North America. (Among the men on board was William Bligh, later captain of the ill-fated Bounty.) Battling fog, high seas, and appalling winds, Cook was finally stopped in the Bering Straits by pack ice 12 feet high and forced to abandon his quest.
On his way back, Cook met a party of Russian fur traders. Russia and Spain as well as Britain claimed Alaska in those days but all of them found it remote and of doubtful value. Even 90 years later, when the US secretary of state William Seward bought Alaska from the Russian government, most Americans thought it an outrageous waste of $7.2 million. Horace Greeley (who coined the phrase ‘Go West, young man’) wrote, ‘We may make a treaty with Russia but we cannot make a treaty with the North Wind or the Snow King… We simply obtain nominal possession of impassable deserts of snow, vast tracts of dwarf timbers, frozen rivers, inaccessible mountains. Ninety-nine hundredths of Russian America are absolutely useless.’
How wrong can you be? Alaska turned into a gold mine, literally, at the time of the Yukon gold rush in 1897, and since then it’s produced countless other minerals and billions of gallons of oil. Not that the landscape will strike you as industrial. The immensity of the country turns mines and oil wells into mere specks. Even the coastal damage wrought by the wreck of the Exxon Valdez in 1989 has virtually disappeared.
Most cruise ships call at Juneau, the state capital. It’s probably the only capital city in the world inaccessible to motor vehicles. Repeated attempts to build a highway from Juneau inland have been defeated by landslides, so even today the only way to get there is by sea or air. (Perhaps this remoteness contributed some of the quirks to Sarah Palin’s character: she governed the state from there before being plucked from obscurity by John McCain in 2008.) Juneau, squeezed onto a small patch of flat land between the sea and the mountains, is the starting point for hikes into the temperate rain forest and excursions onto the glaciers that surround it. On the same latitude as Inverness (58° N), it’s virtually always light in summer. Bears, wolves, moose and even cougars roam the mountains, and eco-tourist guides hand out ‘bear bells’ so that you won’t take the wildlife by surprise.
Further north, most ships call in at Skagway, at the top of Chilkoot Inlet. This little town was founded during the Yukon gold rush. Between 1897 and 1900 tens of thousands of prospectors sailed into Skagway from British Columbia and the lower 48 states, then hiked over avalanche-fraught White Horse Pass to reach the headwaters of the Yukon River, down whose rapids they sailed in makeshift rafts to the gold fields. To set the scene and recapture the mood, make sure you’re reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild as you sail into Skagway — it’s still the best depiction of the horrendous difficulty faced by early prospectors and their sled dogs.
The opening of the narrow-gauge White Pass & Yukon Railroad in 1900 made the journey easier, though the building of its hair-raising curves, gradients and trestle bridges through the mountains cost dozens of labourers their lives. The railway, still thriving, runs magnificent steam locomotives every weekend during the season. Despite a lifelong romance with railways, I have never enjoyed a train journey as much as I did my ride up to the Canadian border on this tortuous route.
From Skagway the ships go either to Glacier Bay or Tracy Arm Fjord, where great glaciers flow into the sea. The captains edge their ships cautiously into these narrow waters, inching along dead slow, because in summer immense blocks of ice come shearing off the face of the glaciers all the time. These walls of ice dwarf the ships and the glare is intense. The water around you is full of icebergs, the bluest of them being the oldest, compressed over centuries into near opacity inside the glaciers.
Still further north, in Kenai Fjords National Park, visitors can see the ‘ghost trees’. An earthquake in this seismically active area caused the land to subside. The roots of the trees encountered salty seawater. It killed them but preserved the wood, creating a strange ‘pickled’ forest.
The paradox of Alaska cruises is that they enable you to visit wild places in lavish comfort — you can go straight from the freezing dawn of an ice-choked fjord to a hearty breakfast served by attentive waiters, just by stepping through a door from the deck. On-board environmentalists, historians, and Alaska wildlife specialists give high-quality talks about what to look for when you go ashore, and add an educational element to the experience.
Most cruises explore only the relatively accessible south-easterly panhandle of Alaska. Expeditions into the state’s vast interior, for hikers, mountaineers and river-rafters, require a lot more time, money and fortitude. There are so few roads that travel inland also requires a willingness to fly long distances in small planes, and to be tormented by the maddening mosquitoes of midsummer. If you can face these challenges, you will find that the sheer grandeur, strangeness and remoteness of the land more than repay your daring.
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