Lessons learned from a first trip to Alaska

(And I would sail 500 miles, and I would sail 500 more . . .)

We left Denali by train, taking a scenic railroad car with a glass top to Fairbanks, our last Alaskan stop.  It was just a place to sleep for us:  We were on an early morning flight back to Seattle and then Chicago the next day.  I had another bout of motion sickness when I got home (even my own bed in Chicago seemed to be rocking underneath me), followed by a cold, and then, back to work and real life.

Before I left, I was already thinking about the cruise to Alaska in part as a scouting mission for a later return with friends, and I took mental notes on that topic throughout the trip.

So here are some lessons learned for those who are planning a trip to Alaska.  Some are my own travel preferences but some would apply to anyone.

1. Getting around in Alaska requires a lot of advance planning.  If you’ve been following this blog at all, you’ve noticed this theme: getting from Point A to B almost anywhere in Alaska can be a challenge. Doing so in the southeast almost always involves travel by sea (or, more expensively, air).  Options are limited and usually only available during a few select times during the day, week, and year.  If you don’t have a cruise ship company or a traveling companion making the arrangements for you, you’ll want to start your research well in advance and book early.
2. Big cruise ships are not for me.  In addition to the motion sickness, I found the food to be mostly bad the entertainment mostly unappealing.  And my cabin was the only quiet place on the whole enormous ship I could find to read a book in peace.  (There was annoying background music—or foreground music—everywhere.)
3. Small water vessels are.  All of my best moments in Alaska were in rafts, kayaks, and small ferry and whale watching boats, where I got to see spectacular mountain ranges, sea life, and glaciers large and small—sometimes all in the same hour.
4. A corollary: scenery from water beat scenery from land during every minute of my 11 day trip across 1,000 Alaskan miles.  I’ve planned plenty of trips to beautiful, land-locked mountain ranges  in the past (Glacier and Rocky Mountain National Park, most recently) and have been awestruck by the waterless views I was able to reach on my own two feet, along established hiking trails (after a long drive, of course).  My Alaskan trip wasn’t like that, and I think Alaska in general isn’t like that—because of the lack of established trails, the terrain, the climate and the ecosystem.  When you’re in Denali National Park, chances are good the clouds will not lift sufficiently to reveal Mt. McKinley (Denali).  In fact, this is the first vacation I can remember taking that included a national park, where the park wasn’t the highlight of the trip. If you’re not into mountain climbing, you’re better off in a small boat—which doesn’t limit you much. You have 33,000 miles of coastline and an uncountable number of lakes and rivers to choose from.  
5. Don’t be fooled by guide books—take a tip from your rearview mirror:  cultural institutions may be smaller than they appear.  If you like small, that’s fine, but from my point of view, outdoors is always better than indoors in Alaska if you can handle the rain.
6. Bring waterproof rain gear and wear moisture-wicking layers underneath.  And when you’re completely soaked through, and need to go inside for a while . . .
7. Avoid the stores on the first two streets that run parallel to the cruise ship docks in Ketchikan and Juneau (probably other places too).  Many are owned by the cruise ship companies, and most of their stuff doesn’t come from Alaska.  If you must have tchotchkes, you can find an independent artist’s gallery or bookstore or whatnot further into town.  Driving into the interior along Seward Highway, you can get books about Alaska for children and adults at the gift shops in the parks and cultural stops (e.g., the SeaLife Center.).

If you’re on a cruise and want some real time outdoors and off a 13-deck ship:

1. The excursions arranged by the cruise ship are probably going to fit best into your very tight schedule.  If you want to make separate arrangements, see #1.
2. Book longer excursions.  I signed up for a bunch of 3.5- to 4-hour rafting, kayaking and canoeing excursions, and, inevitably, a large chunk of the time was spent in a bus or van getting to the real destination, with less spectacular scenery from the road.  A 3.5-hour kayaking excursion will only get you 2 hours in a kayak.  Factor that in. 
3. It’s not just where you are—it’s who you’re with.   On this trip, more specifically, the quality of the guides made all the difference. 

Most of the trips I’ve taken over the last decade didn’t involve guides. It’s been more than 20 years since I took an entirely guided vacation (one of those 12-day “It’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” bus tours of Europe), and I’ve never taken a tour before where I’ve gone on excursions with new guides nearly every day in each new port (ten different guides, not counting the bus drivers or ship captains and spoke a little over a P.A.)

All of the best moments of the trip were with great guides, and it was wonderful to get a chance to meet a variety of people who choose to live in Alaska and find out a little bit about them and their lives there. The best guides conveyed a blend of knowledge and love for the place we were visiting.  The less wonderful ones were too busy selling excursions or uninterested in communicating (no doubt tired of tourists), and the scenery couldn’t completely overcome the negative vibe.

Being aware of this principle won’t actually help you plan your cruise tour.  There is no way to know who will be guiding you before you sign up for any given outing.  Perhaps what it should do is keep you open to a range of possibilities. My predictions about what I would enjoy the most on the trip were largely inaccurate.

An Alaskan return?

So, with 33,000 miles of coastline to choose from, where would I want to go if I returned to Alaska? 

If/when I can get the time, money, and traveling companions assembled, I think I would want to fly into Anchorage and then spend the better part of a week kayaking, camping, and hiking around the Prince William Sound. Alaska Sea Kayakers —which ran my kayaking excursion from Whittier—offers preprogrammed and tailored multiday excursions, and I’m sure other outfitters do as well.  Ideally, I’d get some more kayaking experience under my belt before going, but it might be possible to arrange a beginner’s trip.

Prince William Sound is certainly not the only great place to undertake such a trip—but it’s the area I got a peek at that I’m most interested in returning to, and one of the easier ones to reach without needing to spend a lot of nausea-inducing time on a big vessel out in the ocean.  (The area around Haines is also appealing, but I believe it would be harder to get there directly from home.)

I’m curious about the coastal regions that are farther west along the Alaska Marine Highway than we ever got—the Kodiak Islands and the Aleutian Chain—because they’re even more remote than the places we went to—but I haven’t done any research on them. 

If any of my camping and paddling buddies are interested in such a trip, let me know.  I’m in no particular hurry.  As I said, I’d like to get some more kayaking experience before returning.  And there are plenty of beautiful places in the lower 48 that are less expensive, more accessible, and better suited to our current interests, skills, and commitments (such as diaper washing, for instance).  As an example, Acadia National Park in Maine seems to offer a great combination of kayaking, camping, and hiking along a beautiful mountainous coastline, without the same expense and logistical difficulties that a trip to Alaska entails. 

I’m pretty sure that Alaska will still be there if and when we’re ready—although the glaciers will be smaller.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we can at least avoid a massive oil spill before we get there.

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Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve Photo Gallery

Our first view of the Tsirku River

 

Mom and I are geared up to go

 

And we're off

 

Sylvia checks conditions

  Mountains!

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“They look like golf balls”: Rafting in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve

Sylvia rows us down the Tsirku River

 

When we arrived at the bank of the Tsirku River, I was loaned standard-issue rubber boots and a wool hat (since my Tilley hat blew off on the catamaran ride over), and our busload of travelers was divided into four or five rafts.  Mom and I chose to join Sylvia, a thin but strong young woman who guided us skillfully down the very shallow waterway. 

We passengers didn’t get paddles—Sylvia was perched atop the center divider of the raft with an oar rig—but we did have a job.  Probably half a dozen times, our raft got stuck on the river bed, and we all did the “Chilkat bounce” in an attempt to get moving again.  Twice, I think, Sylvia had to get out and push.  (That aspect of the trip—if not the scenery—was reminiscent of fall “canoe drags” with friends in Indiana.) 

You wouldn’t necessarily guess it to look at her, but Sylvia is hard core.  Unlike C.P. and most of the other guides we met over the course of our trip, she lives in Alaska year round.  (C.P. works in Hawaii and Oregon during the winter, and other guides I met later were college students and recent grads there for the summer only).  In addition to the difficulty of enduring winter weather and limited daylight in Alaska, there simply aren’t a lot of jobs available for the people who are hired to handle the summer tourist rush.) 

Sylvia is soft spoken compared to C.P., but not shy.  She willingly answered many questions about life in Haines and what keeps her there.   She didn’t grow up in Alaska—but moved around the country with her opera singer mother, living in an artist’s collective for a time—which prepared her to like the supportive, small-town environment of Haines.  She had a career as an oboist before coming to Alaska and now makes her living through a combination of guiding, music, jewelry making, and subsistence.  “You really have to want to be here to live here in the winter,” Sylvia said.  “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.” 

We passed Sylvia’s boss, who was stationary in a canoe as we floated downstream, and Sylvia explained that she was setting up a net for fishing purposes.  Tourists sometimes tell her that fishing with a net “’is cheating,’” Sylvia commented, but she doesn’t see it that way.  People like Sylvia and her boss fish to live—not for sport. 

Sylvia commented a couple of times about her struggle to earn respect among her peers in this environment: “I’m always one of the few women around here, and always one of the youngest.”  The male:female ratio in Alaska is 8:1.  Sylvia is a volunteer firefighter, and, the day before we came, some of the new volunteers were learning to install IVs by practicing on her.  One of them accidentally hit a nerve, and Sylvia passed out from the pain.  “That was really embarrassing,” she said.  She doesn’t want to be thought of as the girl who passed out. 

We had four passengers on each side of our raft, with Sylvia in the middle.  On my side, my Mom and I sat with two undertakers from L.A. (Seriously.)  I offered to take a picture of the two of them on their camera as we set out, and Undertaker #1 handed the camera over, saying something like, “you can do that, if we live.”  His body language suggested that he was genuinely afraid, which, I confess, amused me, given the warnings we had received about the likelihood of frequently scraping the bottom.  He relaxed eventually. 

In the meantime, his traveling companion asked Sylvia about life in the area.  “What would you say is the biggest problem in Haines? 

“You mean the weather?” she asked. 

“No – the biggest social problem.” 

Sylvia struggled to think of one.  “There are a lot of poor people here, but it’s not like the lower 48, where there’s a big gap between rich and poor,” she said.  “The problems that have hit the rest of the country from the financial crisis haven’t really affected us. Now the rest of the country is more like us.  We were already living subsistence.” 

When Undertaker #2 specifically asked about alcoholism, which apparently was what he was thinking about all along, Sylvia rejected the suggestion:  “Not more than anywhere else.” 

Finally, she settled on a different answer: “Gossip.  It’s a small town.  Everyone knows what you’re doing.” 

We saw more than 20 bald eagles as we floated/bounced down the Tsirku—most of them perched in Sitka spruce trees but a few flying around.  I had trouble seeing them in the trees at first, until I was told to look for white spots that look like golf balls, which were really their “bald” heads.  

The day was partly cloudy, but beautiful, and Sylvia had a tendency to sing “Blue Skies,” when a lull in the conversation occurred.  When our trip was over, I asked Sylvia if there was a good place to go camping in Haines for a week and if there were outfitters who would rent us the gear to do so.  She said yes—that we should come to the town campground and befriend some locals to learn about the area.  

Mom and I were lucky, ultimately, that we hadn’t managed to follow through on our original attempts to wander the town of Haines as our activity for the day.  We drove through on the way back, and, as with Ketchikan and Juneau, everything about town seemed smaller than I had imagined from reading about it.   Lesson learned.  You may want to visit cultural institutions in Alaska when the weather is bad, but, given a choice, never pass up an opportunity to explore the out-of-doors instead.

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C.P.’s Alaska 2: Waste Not, Want Not

I just did a quick Google search on “Haines Alaska CP” and found an article in the Chilkat Valley News  about a brown bear that was shot, declawed, and abandoned in the Chilkat River. It’s a good illustration of local attitudes about subsistence living.

Incidentally, I love the fact that the other people in the story are identified by first and last name, but C.P. is just “C.P.”

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C.P.’s Alaska: “Salmon are everything”

 

When we got off the catamaran at Haines we were met by our guide, C.P.—a hunky, boisterous, bearded guy with great comic timing. 

We had just traveled down the deepest fiord in North America, and were on our way to see the largest collection of bald eagles in North America, but what C.P. talked about most was salmon. He told us far more about salmon than I can possibly remember, but here’s what I’ve got. 

There’s a five-finger mnemonic for remembering the five kinds of Alaskan salmon: (1) thumb is for chum, (2) pointer is for sockeye (make the motion of socking yourself in the eye), (3) middle finger is for king; (4) ring finger is for silver, and (5) pinkie is for pink.  (Hey, it worked!)  Salmon are born in freshwater, travel to saltwater, and then return to freshwater to spawn and die (almost immediately). 

“Salmon are everything” to the people of Alaska, C.P. insisted, because they feed the eagles, the bears, the whales, and the people.  Their decomposing bodies feed other fish. 

If a bald eagle sees a salmon in the water, it can swoop down from a great height, a la the Nature Channel, but in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, that rarely happens.  The water is a green, milky color, so full of silt that C.P. said you cannot see more than a millimeter below the surface.   So there’s no diving from a great height to grab salmon. 

Still the river provides the eagles with a different type of advantage. The water is so low that many salmon end up running aground on a rock, at which point an eagle will grab the convenient feast before it can get away.  Or, even better, an eagle will grab a salmon from another eagle that has already picked it up — even when other salmon are available on the ground.  Why bend down when you don’t have to?

All the rafting guides I encountered along the way made reference to “subsistence” in Alaska.  C.P. began to fill in some of the details.  “Subsistence” refers to all the things you’re probably already thinking of (living on exactly what you need without extraneous belongings or unnecessary income; living on food you acquire yourself), but it also has some specific local meanings.  Alaskan law allows certain residents to catch and eat a specific quantity of various fish and animals annually (I remember that you’re allowed one moose, but I’ve forgotten the other species and counts). 

Not everyone gets this free lunch.  Only people living in very small communities benefit.  Urbanites in Anchorage, obviously, are excluded—but even little Sitka recently got big enough that its residents lost their subsistence rights.  When we repeated this to the guide in our raft, Sylvia, she said that she hadn’t been aware of that, and hoped Sitka residents would get their rights back soon because so many people rely on them. (More on Sylvia and the rafting trip in the next post.)

The river we floated down that day was chosen over others in the area so that we wouldn’t get in the way of a salmon run.  To make our trip complete, on the way back to the catamaran, we pulled off the road, and C.P. showed us a salmon spawning area just a few yards away.  Sure enough, we saw dead and dying fish that had recently done the deed.  (Not as pretty as the live ones in the video above.) 

We made a second stop to see a salmon catcher (a revolving Ferris-wheel-type device with its top half above the water line) that the Department of Fish and Wildlife uses to catch the fish so it can tag them, release them, track them, and estimate their numbers that year.  People who later catch a tagged fish are supposed to return the tag to the scientists at Fish and Wildlife, where they get a cap for their effort.  C.P. said that everyone who lives and works in the area is happy to do so.  They rely on the data for their livelihood.  (“Salmon is everything.”)

A typical C.P. joke:  We pass a sign that reads “State Troopers,” and he asks, “What’s wrong with that sign?”

[Perfect comic pause.]

“It’s plural.”

 [Laughter from the crowd.]

 “There is only one trooper – Trooper Otis.” 

Tidbits about Trooper Otis and his lifestyle followed. 

Yeah, I know.  You had to be there.

C.P. has some great short videos on YouTube that can give you a wonderful (if overly sunny) feel for the area.  In addition to the one at the top of this post—which he took of a salmon run shortly before we arrived—he has a great one of rafting under a glacier . . .

 

. . . and another that shows you a spectacular view of the mountains around Haines: . . .

 

I believe you can see some of these same mountains in my previous post—and in the next one — but C.P. shows them on a much sunnier day. 

Don’t be fooled.  Clouds, fog, and rain are the real southeast Alaska.

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“The Real Alaska”: Rain over Mendenhall

As we docked in Juneau, we were greeted by rain, clouds over the mountains, and the same types of tourist shops we had seen surrounding the docks in Ketchikan.  (“That’s the real Alaska,” I heard over and over again, every time it rained, from everyone who worked in the tourist industry.)  In general, people don’t let rain slow them down (although I heard that the “flightseeing” helicopter rides were canceled). 

But the rain didn’t disrupt anything I had planned (other than photography).  My first order of business was to get on a bus that took me roughly 17 miles north of town for a rafting trip in Mendenhall Lake and Mendenhall River.  The primary point of the trip was to see Mendenhall Glacier, which was clearly in view as the raft trip began.  The weather conditions at the Glacier were halfway between what you see in these two photos, and you can find more photos on the Tongass Web site. Parts of the glacier did look light blue–due to the compression of the ice caused by higher parts of the ice field on lower sections, I was told.  I was also told that glaciers look blue on cloudy days but white on sunny ones.

The excursion description that I read before signing up indicated that this was a “float” and likely would be quite tame—although there was a vague comment about water conditions being weather dependent.  I ended up lucking out in that regard.  It had rained hard the preceding night, and the continuing precipitation helped the river achieve its highest level of the summer: 13 inches—officially an inch above the flood level. We occasionally passed $500K – $1M houses scattered along the shores of the river—although none of them appeared to be flooded.  We also ran into a few patches of class III and IV rapids. 

A fun time was had by me (although some of my fellow passengers were not too pleased).  We all had paddles, but our guide had oars and did all of the steering and most of the work.   We ended up with a lot of water in our raft and spent quite some time bailing with a large bucket.  The lake and river were fed by Mendenhall Glacier—so the water temperature was just a few degrees above freezing.  But we had been provided with knee high rubber boots and waders—so we were dry—if not 100% warm. 

So this trip was nothing like the first whitewater rafting trip I took 10 years ago on the Youghiogheny River in West Virginia—where the guides were in kayaks, leaving us to steer and paddle on our own—and where getting dumped into the river (4 times in my case) was just part of the fun.  Here, the guides were determined to keep us in the boat. They weren’t playing around with hypothermia.

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