Travelogue: Dan & Julie enjoy a visit to Alaska

Following in the footsteps, more or less, of both Dan's parents and Julie's, and as a 35th Anniversary celebration, we treated ourselves to a sea-and-land trip to Alaska in late August and early September. Here's Dan's writeup of the trip, illustrated with a few of his photos. Be sure to click the SEE MORE PHOTOS links for carefully curated albums from each leg of the journey, with captions adding more details. (Plus a bonus album for rail fans!) Don't worry, we've picked only the best of the 1,006 pictures he shot!

Dan writes: We chose a Holland America Lines package that included a seven-day cruise from Vancouver, B.C., up the Alaska coast to the port of Whittier, plus train travel from there to Anchorage and inland to Denali National Park, ending up in Fairbanks. We picked various excursions in the ports we would visit along the way. Including travel days, we were gone for two full weeks.

Wanting a chance to visit Vancouver - and to leave a cushion in case of any travel delays - we flew out on Friday, Aug. 23. The flight went smoothly, and we had time for a brief visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery before checking into our room at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. The next day, we took a bus tour that brought us through Stanley Park, to Granville Island for lunch, and to Vancouver Overlook, an observation deck atop an office tower. Morning clouds and showers had cleared by then, allowing us to take in the 360-degree view of the city and its surroundings. 

That evening, we found a spot in the Gastown district where we had dinner in an outdoor café followed by drinks in a downstairs bar with live music.

Sunday (Aug. 25) we were bused to the cruise ship port, went through the hours-long boarding process, and stepped onto our ship, the Nieuw Amsterdam. After finding our stateroom, we joined the crowd on the aft deck as the ship set out from Vancouver Harbour and headed north through the Inside Passage.

Although it was sunny as we departed, clouds moved in as we sailed. Clouds, rain and fog would alternate with clear spells throughout our journey up the coast.

Monday morning view: Clouds and fog

Our starboard-side stateroom was small compared to a typical hotel room, but larger than I expected aboard a ship, and had a balcony facing inland as we moved north. Over the course of the week, we enjoyed some of the restaurants and entertainment, although the highlights of the trip were what we saw and did on shore.

Monday was a day of “scenic cruising” through the Inside Passage between the mainland and coastal islands. Clouds obscured some of the landscape much of the time, but we did see a rainbow and a beautiful sunset. 

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Vancouver, Inland Passage

Tuesday, Aug, 27, we awoke in port in Ketchikan. We took a short excursion to the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary, where we followed a guide through a small slice of the Tongass National Forest, considered a temperate rain forest. We passed a salmon hatchery, and saw a black bear feeding on fish along the creek, and then visited a totem pole workshop. (As we were walking up to the workshop, our guide had to chase off a bear – which then headed toward the next tour group coming over a bridge across the creek. Their guide had them clap and yell, and eventually the bear moved back into the woods.)

Back in town, we walked to a spot on Ketchikan Creek overlooking a “salmon ladder,” where the fish were trying to swim upstream against a strong current. It was hard to tell whether any of them were succeeding. Then we strolled along Creek Street, a wooden walkway lined by gold-rush-era buildings built on pilings. Once the local red-light district, it is now full of gift shops.

Local restaurants were jammed, so we grabbed a quick lunch from a fish-and-chips shack by the cruise-ship dock and then reboarded for the next stage of the cruise, to Juneau.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Ketchikan

As we arrived in Juneau Wednesday morning, Aug. 28, it was pouring rain, and we donned waterproof coats and pants we had brought along for such occasions. We spent a bit of time souvenir shopping, then boarded a bus to see the face of the Mendenhall Glacier. 

When we arrived at the visitors center, the clouds had parted and we had a good look at it in the distance. But as we walked toward it, the clouds and rain returned and the glacier disappeared from view. We retreated into the visitors center to look at exhibits. Then, as we headed out to return to our bus, the glacier showed its face again and we got a few photos.

The bus then took us to a dock to board a whale-watching excursion boat. As it pulled away from land, we got another view of Mendenhall Glacier some five miles back. 

The boat took us across Auke Bay to an island lodge for a meal of Alaska cuisine – salmon, bison burgers and other dishes. Then we motored into Favorite Channel alongside Shelter Island (!) to a spot where humpback whales are often spotted feeding on small fish, and where excursion boats gather to watch.

A friendly humpback comes close to our boat. The blue in the foreground is the hat of the person in front of me on the boat's rail.

We saw several whales breach and spout – and at one point, a pair of them seemed to put on a synchronized-swimming show for us, breaching and ducking in unison as they approached our boat. One swam off but the other came very close.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Juneau 

Overnight, the ship took us to Skagway, where we had booked two excursions. The first, billed as Gold Fever Experience, brought us to Dredge Town, a tourist attraction that includes a recreated gold-rush village and a sled-dog kennel. 

Trip Advisor photo of Dredge Town

We tried our hands at panning for gold (and left with a few dollars’ worth) and saw exhibits about the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush, including a large dredging machine. 

Then we listened to a former Iditarod contestant talk about the famous sled-dog race, watched a demonstration of a dog team pulling a cart, and had the opportunity to meet and hold some of the puppies.

After lunch, we took an excursion-train ride on the White Pass & Yukon Route, a narrow-gauge railroad built in 1898-1900 to carry prospectors to the Yukon Territory and gold back to port. We opted not to ride the full length – an all-day trip – but took a train that goes to White Pass Summit (elevation 2,864 feet) and back in about three hours. 

The scenic ride runs alongside the Skagway River, and over it on a steel cantilever bridge 215 feet above the valley floor. Clouds and fog obscured some of the views, but it was still an enjoyable trip.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Skagway, WP&YR

The next two days – Friday and Saturday, the last days of August – were spent entirely at sea. En route from Skagway to Whittier, our ship took us into Glacier Bay on Friday and College Fjord on Sunday. The clouds and rain that are very typical along the Alaska coast had the courtesy to break at the right times for us to get good views of the numerous glaciers that terminate in the two waterways. 

In Glacier Bay, the ship took us close to the face of Johns Hopkins Glacier, which has continued to advance while others have been retreating from the water’s edge. We also saw seals and sea otters in the water. 

As we headed back out of the bay, the clouds were breaking up, creating the impression that distant mountain peaks were floating above them.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Glacier Bay

In College Fjord, we passed several glaciers before moving in for a closer look at Harvard Glacier. We had a good view from the forward deck, although it was cold and windy, but the ship rotated and we were able to retreat to our cabin and get the same view from our partly-sheltered balcony.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: College Fjord

For our last evening aboard, we had a reservation at one of the ship’s premier restaurants, the Pinnacle Grill. With the exception of a mediocre hamburger stand by the indoor pool, the food aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam ranged from quite good at the buffet to very good in the main dining room – and most excellent at the Pinnacle. That dinner was a fine way to finish our first cruise.

But our Alaska adventure wasn’t finished. We awoke Sunday, Sept. 1, docked in Whittier, a former military port converted to a cruise ship terminal. We debarked and boarded an Alaska Railroad train to Anchorage, where we would spend the night at the Westmark Anchorage Hotel (owned by the same company as the cruise line). The train took us along the shore of the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet, lined by wide mud flats that, we were told, disappear quickly when high tide rushes in. 

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Whittier to Anchorage

Our day in Anchorage was a pause in our sightseeing – unless you consider the large REI store at the Midtown Mall to be an attraction. (Julie needed to replace her hiking boots.) That evening, we sampled the local cuisine, so to speak, and a little live music at Humpy’s Great Alaskan Alehouse, a couple of blocks from the hotel.

On Monday morning, Labor Day, we boarded the McKinley Explorer train for the day’s journey inland to Denali National Park. (The mountain formerly known as Mt. McKinley was officially renamed Denali, a native name, by the Interior Department in 2016.) The train runs on the Alaska Railroad but its domed cars are owned and operated by Carnival Cruises, the parent company of Holland America Line and Princess Cruises. The McKinley Explorer carries passengers from both cruise lines between Anchorage and Denali Park, where guests are bused to Holland America’s McKinley Chalet Resort or Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge. 

The ride, with one stop at the resort town of Talkeetna, takes eight hours, but runs through spectacular scenery, viewable in all directions from the glass-domed cars. We had lunch in the dining area on our car’s lower level, and snacks at our upstairs seats. Dan walked out to the train’s rear platform a couple of times to take photos. As we moved inland, we left the coastal clouds and rain behind. 

Denali, we were told, stands so tall that it can be seen for many miles around – except it is obscured by cloud about 80% of the time. Our train-board guide was excited to point it out when it appeared a few times as we rolled along, looming in the distance behind other mountains of the Alaska Range and peeking through a few low clouds. The mountain’s South Summit is the highest peak in North America, at 20,310 feet above sea level. (Its North Summit is slightly shorter, at 19,470 feet.) 

SEE MORE PHOTOS: McKinley Explorer to Denali

From the train’s Denali station we were taken to the McKinley Resort Chalet, a 60-acre property adjacent to the 6-million-acre Denali National Park and Preserve. There are 582 guest rooms, some in a couple of dozen small cabins, others (including ours) in a larger hotel-style building a short walk from the central square with a restaurant and shops. After settling in and having dinner, we went to bed early after a long day – and to be rested for a very early start the next day.

We were up at 5 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 3, to catch a 6 a.m. “Tundra Wilderness” bus tour into Denali National Park. The converted school bus carried us some 40 miles along the park’s only road – which was blocked beyond that point for a construction project to shore it up from ongoing landslides. 

The ride afforded us beautiful views of Denali in the pink glow of sunrise, as well as the tundra landscape in an amazing palette of fall colors, and a sampling of its wildlife. About halfway along the route we saw a grizzly bear feeding in a field of berries; we saw one later on the return trip, which may have been the same bear. We saw Dall sheep high up on the sides of mountains. And we had a close look at two moose, who seemed to be having a friendly meeting in the middle of the road before meandering off and allowing our bus to pass.

The bus returned us to the resort, where we had lunch and then hopped a shuttle to the Denali National Park Visitors Center to take a hike on one of the many trails that start there. Surrounding us was a mix of coniferous trees, such as spruces, and deciduous trees including Quaking aspen, whose leaves had turned their golden fall color – creating a brilliant contrast with the evergreens. 

The trail took us to a pedestrian bridge across Riley Creek, just a short distance from the Alaska Railroad’s bridge over the creek, which we had crossed the day before. By luck, a train crossed that bridge while we were there – not the McKinley Explorer, but another of its passenger trains, with another tour company’s domed cars riding along at the end.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Denali National Park

Then it was back to the resort for a nap and dinner. The resort offers the option to get a wake-up call if the Northern Lights are spotted during the night, and before turning in for the night, we decided we were rested enough to sign up for that. Indeed, the call came around 3 a.m., and we trundled outside along with a fair number of the other guests. What we saw was an arc of whitish light stretching across the sky, roughly from northwest to southeast. People with better phone cameras than ours got photos that brought out a variety of colors that weren’t visible to our eyes. Our own attempts at photos produced only black squares.

On Wednesday, Sept 4, we had a leisurely breakfast and then boarded a coach bus for the next leg of our travels, north on Route 3 from Denali to Fairbanks. Just outside the city, we stopped for our last scheduled excursion: lunch and a riverboat tour on the Yukon River. The meal, served family-style in a sort of mess hall, was unimpressive, but the boat ride was entertaining. 

It included a stop at Chena Village Living Museum, a recreated Athabascan village with cabins made of spruce logs, where guides explained how their indigenous ancestors lived for thousands of years before Western civilization moved in. We also had another look at Alaskan husky sled dogs from the adjacent Trail Breaker Kennel, founded by the late Iditarod champion Susan Butcher and now run by her family.

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Fairbanks riverboat tour

We ended the day at the Westmark Fairbanks Hotel, where we had dinner and prepared for our trip home. Our flight out Thursday wasn’t until 4 p.m., and we considered trying to visit the city’s Museum of the North, but decided there wasn’t really enough time before getting to the airport the recommended two hours early. So we had a good breakfast at the hotel and then relaxed and waited for our bus to Fairbanks International. We were booked on Alaska Airlines, with a flight to Seattle, a layover of about two hours and an overnight flight to Newark.

Fortunately, our flights back were as smooth as our outbound flight. Arriving at Newark International about 7 a.m. Friday, Sept. 6, we got a car home and headed to bed – probably after getting some sort of breakfast, although I have no recollection of that!

Everything about the trip had gone about as well as could be expected. There were no flight delays, no missed connections, no lost luggage. We didn’t miss the boat and get stranded at any of the ports of call. Despite some spells of clouds and rain, we saw black bears, whales, sea otters, seals, a couple of eagles, a grizzly bear, moose, sheep and sled dogs. We saw glaciers and amazing landscapes all along the coast and into the mountains. And we saw Denali from several angles, putting us in the “20% Club” of visitors who’ve gotten a good look at the often-shrouded mountain. 

One thing we heard from various tour guides along the way: Alaska is a great place to be – in summer! Nearly all of them spend the winter months in the Lower 48. If we ever return, it will definitely be during the warmer months.

ALL THE HIGHLIGHT PHOTOS in one album

RAILFAN SPECIAL: More photos of WP&Y and Alaska Railroad trains