On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
PAM Dirac
My wife and I did an Alaskan cruise the end of August. 10 nights with 6 stops where you could get off the ship, all in the southeast “tail” of the state. First time in Alaska for the both of us. A very pleasant and interesting trip. Turns out cruising fits well in this area as almost all the transportation is over water. I don’t think any of the places we visited are accessible by car from the lower 48 without at least one leg being a ferry ride.
The cruise started and ended in Seattle. Coming from the Balt/Wash area, Seattle doesn’t seem to be too big or crowded, but the population is almost 25 times the population of Juneau, the largest Alaskan stop on the cruise. This part of Alaska is really empty.
The first night was cruising the inner passage on the way to Ketchikan. Almost all the sights you see are mountains with forests down to the water and lots of water. Fortunately we really enjoy sitting on our balcony, watching the world go by, sipping some wine.
We took a trip (by boat, of course) from the dock near Ketchikan to the Hump Island Oyster Company. Very interesting place. Once a year they go down to Hawaii and get about 3 million baby oysters. They grow then in baskets. It takes about 5 years to get them to marketable size. The major predator is starfish. They feel they are doing pretty good if they only lose half the oysters in 5 years. I’m not a big fan of oysters, but my wife is and she says these were great.
more mountains, trees, and water from the balcony of the Hump Island Oyster Company.
The Mendenhall Glacier as seen from the lake. We bussed from Juneau to the take out point for a raft trip.
Further down the river with the Glacier in the background.
We saw many bald eagles on the trip. This one on the riverbank was munching on a salmon. On the float down the river we saw 3 or 4 eagles, which isn’t that different from what we might see on a trip down the Potomac River near us. The difference is that in Alaska, you see the eagles almost everywhere. In Juneau most of the eagles we saw were hanging out on street light poles.
A couple of weeks before our trip, the Mendenhall Glacier had a flood event that took out some houses. They were still shoring up what they could and cleaning up the mess.
Haines, Alaska was a stop where we just got off the ship and wandered. Lots of quirky artists with quirky shops. This was a basement/foundation of some building that used to be part of old Fort Seward and it was done up with a lot of whimsical sculptures from found materials.
Haines also has the Bamboo Room, as the sign says, famous for it’s halibut fish and chips. I have to say the fish and chips were extremely good, prob better than the ones I had in London.
AM in NC
Very cool! Love the snacking eagle and the hourglass sculpture especially. How cold were things there in August?
Thanks for sharing these with us!
randy khan
When we did the Alaska cruise, I remember being excited by the first few eagles we saw, then by the time we got to Sitka walking past a tree full of them and just kind of shrugging, as they’d stopped being interesting.
eclare
Great photos! Sounds like a wonderful cruise.
PAM Dirac
@AM in NC:
I think I mention it in Part 2 tomorrow, but I don’t think the temperature ever got below 50F. Stayed mostly in the low 60s. I guess that isn’t unusual for this part of Alaska in August. What was unusual was that we got almost no rain. I had been looking at the weather forecasts before we left and the week leading up to our trip the rain forecast chart was a strait line at 85% chance for the whole week. The skies cleared for our time there so we were real lucky.
PAM Dirac
@randy khan: The guide in Juneau said that when the fish processing place dumps their trash there will be over 50 bald eagles circling the dump. We are used to seeing a few at home when we take a trip near the Potomac River, but it is nothing like Alaska.
frosty
I went to Alaska in 1978 with my 80-year old grandma. We took a float plane to Glacier Bay National Park and I saw my first Bald Eagle. It was the only one I saw anywhere in Alaska. Things have changed for the better.
Another Scott
@PAM Dirac: Thanks for the info.
Alaska has been on my bucket list since I was a kid hearing about my grandpa driving from Delaware to Fairbanks.
J and I got seasick on the old Cat ferry across the Bay of Fundy (Yarmouth to Portland, IIRC), so haven’t seriously looked at cruises, but the water looks like glass in your shots. Gotta do more figuring…
Looking forward to part 2!
Cheers,
Scott.
EarthWindFire
Haines sounds like an interesting place. Thank you for sharing your trip!
My dad’s SE Alaska fishing trip spent an overnight in Ketchikan. On Fourth of July morning, he and his buddy got up to look around and get breakfast. They somehow ended up on the main drag, walking in the town parade. They just went with it, shaking hands and waving. Said everyone was really friendly and had a good sense of humor about it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Beautiful scenery.
Mustang Bobby
I’ve been going to Valdez, Alaska, for a week every June since 2019 (skipping 2020 ’cause of Covid-19) for the Valdez Theatre Conference. I am enthralled by the scenery: the mountains rising up from Prince William Sound and the near-24 hours of daylight. We also take a cruise down the sound to see the Schupp Glacier — or what’s left of it — and watch the otters playing (and occasionally gettin’ busy). Thank you so much, PAM Dirac, for sharing these pictures and sparking fond memories… and getting me hopeful to make more next June.
PAM Dirac
@Mustang Bobby: Otters and more glaciers coming up in Part 2!
mvr
Thanks for these photos!
An Alaska cruise is the only cruise I have the vaguest interest in. The scenery would make it interesting in a way that other cruises don’t strike me as providing. But I would still like to be able to get off in certain places for days at a time and from what I can tell that isn’t an option with most of them. I may have to plan my own trip some day with some boat portions and some other modes of travel to go around on land.
Back in the day friends of mine would hitch hike up on the highway through Canada. Never did it myself.
MelissaM
I echo mvr’s sentiment: were I to cruise, it would be an Alaskan cruise, and a smaller one at that. (Ok, I’d also do those European riverboat cruises.)
Thanks for taking me along for the ride!
Betty
The glacier image is so majestic, but climate change is certainly affecting the glaciers in a serious way.
Miss Bianca
Oh, Alaska. The most beautiful spot on earth, in my partial, prejudiced, and ignorant opinion.
My one and only trip was 40 years ago, and then I worked the processing barges, but a cruise such as you describe would be the boat trip for me next time round. Thanks for the photos!
WhatsMyNym
For anybody think of doing an Alaska cruise, there are many options on routes and size of boat. You can even charter a boat (with or w/o friends & family). The two main starting points Seattle and Vancouver BC. Well worth checking out
ETA: There is always the Alaska Marine Highway if you have the time.
Sandia Blanca
Haines is very special to me, as my sibling (and family) and two of my children live there. It’s a lovely small town, with spectacular mountains, river, lakes, grizzly bears, moose, eagles, etc. The weather is fantastic in the summer, and usually tolerable in the late spring and early autumn, but you won’t catch me there in the winter! Lots of locals migrate to such places as Twenty-Nine Palms (Calif) and Hawaii. Those that stay have to lay in lots of wood months in advance. Being so far north, they get short days in the winter and very long days in the summer.
The local public radio station is a little bit like the old station on “Northern Exposure.” Listen online to Home | KHNS Radio | KHNS FM for listener personals (“ski found on the Haines highway, call xxx-xxxx to claim it,” local birthdays, and eclectic music of all genres, as well as most of the standard NPR show. And it is technically possible to reach Haines by road, but it requires a detour of several hundred miles through the Canadian tundra, so most people rely on the Alaska Marine Highway or the small seaplane company.
piratedan
for anyone passing thru Juneau…
now this is all old information (pre-COVID) but if these places are still in bidness…
lunch at The Hangar – it’s a restaurant situated at sea-level on the waterfront. You can enjoy a pretty decent lunch and watch the float planes come in and take off
Glacier Gardens – Juneau does have this weird little joint that offers flowers grown in tree root planters from specimens that have been lost due to nature, they plant the “top” of the trees in the ground as platforms and grow the the pretty stuff up top. They also have a tour (walking or riding) that takes you up the side of the mountain as you go thru the separate grow zones. A pretty decent restaurant there as well.
There is also a Native Alaskan Museum in Juneau that has a very nice collection of regional peoples artifacts.
BigJimSlade
Very nice!
dibert dogbert
We took the ferry south from Juneau to Seattle on the Princess Patrica in April 1945. We were escaping from Haines AK where my older brother was auditioning for a criminal career. Actually my. mom got cold feet about Haines when my uncle got hurt and it took a day for the Coast Guard to evacuate him to a doctor.
Sadly the trip south of Ketchikan was in fog. I have always wanted to do the Inside Passage on a small boat. Old age and unoriginal sin have canceled that trip. My wife did a bike trip from Skagway into Canada. She and a friend took the train into Canada and road their bikes back down to Skagway. Lucky her.
My mother’s brother Ara Powell went north to AK to help build the highway and got stuck in Haines.
way2blue
Pam Dirac, did you see any marine mammals while traversing the Inland Passage? Like Orcas?
Years ago I traveled the ‘outer passage’ from Seattle to Kodiak in June. I mostly remember how long it took to cross Puget Sound & the Strait of Juan de Fuca to get out to the Pacific Ocean. Oh. And the glorious sunsets & sunrises that blended into each other. Thanks too for sharing your photos. Sipping wine on your balcony while the coastline slips by sounds perfect.
PAM Dirac
Dan B
In your picture of Seattle the wall of skyscrapers are almost entirely Amazon – new in the last 5 years. Seattle had the greatest number of big cranes in the US.
phein64
@frosty: I was stationed at Ft. Rich in the latter half of the 1970’s, and we would occasionally bivouac down by Ship Creek. We’d wake up in the morning to the sounds of dozens of bald eagles on the bank or out on the rocks in the water, just preening and looking vaguely menacing.