© International Media Group

Watery Wilderness

Awesome scenery lies just outside your cushy cabin afloat Alaska’s Inside Passage

By Ellen & Hank Barone

Towering masses of ancient blue ice cracked off the pinnacled crystal facade of the massive glacier. Collapsing from the glacier’s face and plummeting into the icy seawater, great slabs of ice sank far below the water’s surface before rising again a hundred feet or more into the air, throwing up a great wall of water and torrents of freezing, frothy spray.

Nearly a quarter mile separated our tiny inflatable skiff from the thunderous explosions and reverberating roar of Southeast Alaska’s magnificent Sawyer Glacier. Harbor seals circled us, resting nonchalantly atop house-sized icebergs.

Rolling in the swell of the crashing glacier, we cheered and clapped like spectators at a sporting event, in awe of the breathtaking act of nature taking place before us. Eventually the calving ended, and we meandered back between icebergs, plucking up polished bits of ice from the water to chill our evening cocktails.

We had boarded the 105-foot, expedition yacht Safari Spirit, with its gleaming brightwork, teak cabinetry, luxuriously outfitted salon, library and dining room and six spacious staterooms, on a June day in Juneau. A friendly crew – Rod, Sara, Heather, April, Kristy and Vanessa – welcomed us aboard with hors d'oeuvres and champagne. Our ten affable shipmates were all Americans, ranging in age from 30-something to 70-plus.

Cruising is the most popular way to see Alaska for good reason: It’s available, comfortable and easy. With 33,904 miles of shoreline, more than double the shoreline of the entire lower 48 states, Alaska is synonymous with the sea. In 2001, an estimated 690,648 people cruised Alaska -- a total exceeding the state’s resident population. Visitor numbers continue to grow as boatloads of lower 48ers venture north to the "last frontier."

That said, you can cruise Alaska without traveling in a crowd. Many ships carry 2,000-plus passengers. Lines such as American Safari Cruises, with three luxury yachts that specialize in off-the-beaten-track itineraries, carry fewer passengers. The yachts visit native villages, fishing towns, wildlife sanctuaries and other spots where the mega ships simply cannot go.

Our route through Alaska’s Inside Passage to Prince Rupert, a 1,000-mile-long serpentine course through a jumbled mosaic of islands, is not new to marine traffic. Over thousands of years the Inside Passage has seen Native Americans, explorers, fur traders, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists and finally tourists from all over the globe.

In 1792 Captain George Vancouver’s famous explorer ship, Discovery, arrived here, cramped and smelly with 99 men, a dozen or so animals and a greenhouse aboard. Our elegant vessel, with its two-to-one passenger-to-crew ratio, was distinctly unlike Vancouver’s crowded ship but the watery wilderness outside our windows had changed little in the intervening years.

Aboard Safari Spirit, you feel as though you’ve passed through some sort of time warp. Each day we lived in two contrasting environments.

One was the civilized refinement of the yacht, with its cozy salon, well-stocked bar and hot tub-graced sundeck and climate-controlled staterooms, which included private baths with Jacuzzi tubs, televisions and VCRs. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were haute cuisine and elegantly served.

The other was the environment into which we were taken each day, a world of sky and sea, clouds, fog-shrouded cliffs, impenetrable forests, wildlife, glaciers and icebergs, a place where nature still exists untamed.

Boarding our Zodiac (the small inflatable skiff used for exploration), we were suddenly and intimately at sea. There, we entered a food-rich sea where gigantic creatures reign. The appearance of a whale was an impressive reminder of the powers below. While motoring slowly along remote coves, we searched for bear, eagles, whales, seals and sea lions. Silky-black, mirror-still water reflected the ocher, green and dark sienna woods along the shore.

Back aboard, Safari Spirit, Captain Rod Du Four offered a running commentary on everything from surfing in Hawaii to Alaska’s scoundrels from his post in the wheelhouse. Ever vigilant for wildlife, he altered course at each new sighting and summoned passengers over the ship’s PA system to come on deck and take a look. Du Four’s penchant for doubling back to watch a feeding humpback whale, a black bear scavenging along the shoreline or a surfacing pod of Dall’s Porpoise, quickly earned him the affectionate title, "Captain De Tour."

"There’s so much marine bounty here," exclaimed Heather Peterson, the ship’s 30-year-old expedition leader, as we watched a massive humpback whale rise, display its tonnage and barnacles, then dive deep, its huge scarred flukes tipped into the air. "The water is just full of life," Heather observed.

In fact, roughly 300 humpback whales spend their summers in Alaska’s Inside Passage.

Southeast Alaska receives more than 200 annual inches of precipitation annually. Our eight days at sea were spent under a spongy sky and a constant, thin precipitation. Certain places ought to have moody and mystical weather, and Alaska is one of them. Under a constant and prevailing layer of fog, we felt as if we were at the center of a soft, vague mystery. Even the local tee shirts take potshots at the weather by touting: "Alaska, where residents don’t tan, they rust."

Our fourth day at sea was yet another gray, foggy day, but our spirits were high. We were getting used to the weather. Donning rain gear, we set out with Heather in a drizzling rain to hike to Petersburg Creek.

We clambered cheerfully along a boardwalk that stretched across the top of a spongy muskeg, or bog, where we surveyed a moist and matted world of berries, mosses, pines and flowers. Every Sitka spruce and hemlock seemed to be draped with a wispy green lichen. "Old-man’s beard." Heather said.

As we neared the creek, the terrain changed and we entered a choking metropolis of vegetation: 6-foot-high cow parsnips, salmonberry bushes and dense stands of alders. A soft damp breeze, scented with salt, berries and wildflowers, floated around us.

Standing beside the wide creek, we watched an eagle turning in tight spirals above us, then flying away. In the water, Alaskan Salmon, driven by the strange hormonal eruption that urges them ever onward to spawn and promptly die, struggled upstream, their bodies providing food for bears, eagles and other of nature’s critters. "Once they hit fresh water, they’re basically living off themselves," Heather said.

"See these barnacles?" Heather asked, holding up a small barnacle-encrusted rock from the water. "Barnacles have a penis 10 times the length of their bodies. He can fertilize a neighbor three blocks away," she added. "and never leave home to do it!" It was like stepping into an R-rated nature movie with Heather as the narrator.

Back in town, Heather turned us over to Patti Norheim, a sprightly 73-year-old native and local legend, who loaded us into her "Patti Wagon" for an insider’s tour of Petersburg, a hardscrabble fishing town where boats greatly outnumber buildings. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other gripping a radio mike, Patti dispensed tidbits of local history and lore. "What’s the most significant change you’ve observed during your lifetime in Petersburg?" one of us asked. "Paved roads." Patti replied.

The excursion ended with a visit to NorQuest Cannery, owned and operated by Patti’s family since 1903. It’s no longer a canning operation; fresh salmon are unloaded from fishing boats and flash frozen, producing a much more profitable and high-quality product. NorQuest’s most profitable product is salmon eggs, once considered a messy waste product. The eggs are a popular Japanese delicacy and "one they pay dearly for," Patti added.

Back at the marina, the sleek and elegant Safari Spirit looked out of place tucked amid a cluster of sturdy and well-used fishing vessels.

Petersburg fishermen delivered dinner to us, a bountiful feast of Dungeness and king crab. Outfitted in large paper bibs, we bantered cheerfully, laughing loudly, frequently and unabashedly as we fumbled with crab mallets and messy, but tasty, sea creatures. Later, the party moved to Kito’s Kave, a down-and-dirty fisherman’s bar.

The next day, we visited the tiny hamlet of Myer’s Chuck, population 25 (more or less). Myer’s Chuck gives new meaning to the word "remote." Approaching the village’s protected harbor, Captain Du Four announced our arrival on the marine radio. "Thanks for the notice!" an affable voice on the other end replied. "I’ll let everyone know you’re here."

As we pulled into the public dock, a tiny skiff piloted by a robust woman appeared. The woman shouted a friendly hello, alighted, then hustled off to open the town’s sole retail establishment, a quaint local craft shop. Across the harbor, a shuttered window opened at the post office, and the local postmistress welcomed us with a vigorous wave.

We liked Myer’s Chuck, a tiny village of looping paths lightly sprinkled with wooden cabins, from the moment we arrived. Flowering shrubs grew wild, artfully concealing the accumulation of terminally rusted fuel tanks, upturned boats, and defunct appliances that surrounded nearly every building -- standard Alaskan landscaping. Hummingbirds clustered around feeders hanging from porch roofs. It seemed in contented abdication from the world, its only intruders a trickle of summer pleasure boats like ours.

At the village Post Office, open every Wednesday, we mailed postcards simply to see if they’d make it home. Du Four had warned us earlier that the cards might not reach their destination, recounting his own humorous misfortune when he mailed himself a postcard. "More than a year had passed," he said, "when I received a polite typewritten letter of apology from Postmistress Mary Ann Glenz. ‘Dear Captain Du Four,’ it read, ‘It is with great regret that I must inform you that a postcard you mailed from the Myer’s Chuck Post Office was damaged when eaten by a rather hungry banana slug.’"

We celebrated the Fourth of July with a brief break in the weather; still no sunshine, but the rain had stopped, the fog had melted away, and the clouds rose to 1,000-feet. As we approached Misty Fjords National Monument and Wilderness Area, the landscape revealed itself, bit by bit, exposing a towering ridgeline of glacier scoured rocks, gaunt crags and precipices.

Guided by the roar of a thundering waterfall, Du Four maneuvered the yacht beneath the powerful plunge of an extraordinary 1,000-foot cascade. "Alaskan snorkeling." Heather quipped, donning a mask and snorkel ordinarily used during the yacht’s winter visits in Mexico’s warm Sea of Cortés, and playfully plunging into the downpour.

That evening, shoehorned into a kayak, we knifed silently through the inky dark water of Yes Bay, a picture-perfect combination of wilderness, grand scenery and solitude. Only the raindrops broke the water’s mirror-still surface. Everything smelled of water and earth. Lonely and romantic, the silence was profound. Overhead, a Bald Eagle lazily rode the thermals. About 30-feet ahead, a lone harbor seal periscoped, watching us watch him, then sliding soundlessly into the calm water, making not a ripple.

There was no doubt. We were completely and utterly seduced by our journey into Alaska’s Inside Passage.

Getting There: Air Canada (1.888.247.2262) and Alaskan Airlines (1.800.426.0333) offer regular flights to Juneau via Vancouver, BC or Seattle, WA.

Extend Your Vacation: American Safari Cruises can help arrange pre/post-trip stays at King Pacific Lodge, an exclusive floating wilderness lodge located on its own bay on the Inside Passage of British Columbia’s spectacular northwest coast. Guest activities available include helicopter fly-fishing, saltwater fishing, whale watching, kayaking, helicopter sightseeing and hiking excursions into the Great Bear Rain Forest home to the elusive Kermode Bear. The lodge offers all-inclusive packages including flights to and from Prince Rupert. For more information call toll-free 1.888.592.5464 or visit www.kingpacificlodge.com

Copyright Ellen and Hank Barone, International Media Group. All rights reserved.

All materials contained on this site are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of International Media Group. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.