Northern Passage by Sea
A father-son team packs action into a luxury cruise of Alaska's fabled waterway
BY JOHN VALENTI
STAFF WRITER
February 6, 2005
A steel-gray clouded sky hung overhead, and a cool rain fell lightly as we stood on the deck of the chartered sport fisherman praying for salmon.
We were somewhere in the middle of nowhere: about 250 yards off the tree-lined shore of remote Chichagof Island, Alaska, not far from the Tlingit Indian town of Hoonah, in a stretch of water known as Icy Strait.
A brown bear cub wandered the rocky shoreline in search of a morning meal. A humpback whale came swimming past. Admiralty Island, home to the 1 million-acre Kootznoowoo Wilderness and known as "The Fortress of the Bear," loomed in the distance - all as baitfish churned hotspots on the surface and a lone white fishing trawler lolled through the strait.
"Isn't this incredible?" I said to my son, Jarek, then 14.
"Yeah," he said, with a hint of a smile. "This is really cool."
We had come to Alaska - often billed as "The Last Frontier" - in search of adventure. I, a divorced dad closing in on my mid-40s. Jarek, then a soon-to-be high school sophomore beginning to exert his teenage independence: 6-2, 225 pounds, wearing size 16 sneakers, no longer the little kid who used to give me a hug and a kiss when I dropped him off at school in the morning.
We were on a seven-day cruise on the Royal Caribbean International Vision of the Seas that took us from Seward on the desolate Kenai Peninsula down through the fabled Inside Passage to Vancouver, British Columbia. A trek on which we could wander, fish, spend a week together and still have time to ourselves - me to sing karaoke and gamble in the on-board casino, him to hang out with kids his age in the supervised onboard activity center - all without guilt. Or fear.
Though we were able to see but a small sliver of the 49th state, whose vast acreage makes it larger than all but 15 countries on Earth, we found ourselves awestruck by Alaska: big, bold, beautiful and built on a scale that's near incomprehensibile if you're from a congested big city.
First-time visitors
A traveler at heart, I crossed the country on a Greyhound bus with my dad when I was 8 and had gone across the United States four times by age 10. By age 44, I had been to 44 states and much of Canada. But I had never been to Alaska. I was restless to get there.
To be honest, a cruise was not my first choice. I had done a cruise once and felt like a tourist. But Alaska is big - 365 million acres, 580,000 square miles big - and if you covered 1,000 acres a day, 365 days a year, it would still take 1,000 years to see it all. The highway system is rudimentary, the landscape unforgiving, the reason Alaska - the northern-most, western-most and, with the Aleutian Islands crossing the International Dateline, the eastern-most state - has more private pilots than truck drivers and cabbies combined. If Manhattan was as unpopulated as Alaska, one person would live there.
I didn't want to get stuck somewhere with a 14-year-old in a rented RV. Which left a cruise as the best option.
I booked the cruise online. There was a world of choices: more than 40 ships of all sizes from almost 20 cruise lines, and the state-owned fleet of ferries that services much of Alaska. I chose our ship mostly because I liked the itinerary.
The cruise season in Alaska runs May to September. The best advice is to book early. We left JFK airport on a 7 a.m. flight to Salt Lake City, then Anchorage, and Royal Caribbean took us on a three-hour bus trip to Seward. It was a long, tiring first day. But we had only a week - and this still gave us the chance to see famed Cook Inlet, with its dramatic tidal surges reminiscent of the Bay of Fundy, and a good portion of the starkly beautiful Kenai Peninsula.
The Vision of the Seas is huge: 915 feet long, crew of 765, a passenger capacity of 2,435. Our cabin was sparse but tasteful, with two beds, a bathroom and shower. Selecting a room around the corner from a staircase and an elevator on one of the mid-decks made navigating the ship a breeze.
The first morning onboard, we woke to find ourselves cruising open water en route to the massive Hubbard Glacier. Standing on deck on a warm, sunlit morning, we noticed what looked like faint clouds in the distance. Looking closer, Jarek and I got our first big surprise: Those weren't clouds but the snow-covered peak of Mount
St. Elias, rising 18,000 feet straight out of the Pacific Coast. It was stark, white and simply majestic.
Spellbound
By the time we reached the inlet to Glacier Bay National Park, passengers had lined the deck. We grabbed a spot near the bow - and were amazed to see the cobalt-blue face of the glacier nearing. The captain got on the loudspeaker and casually told us we were still 12 miles away - startling, since we guessed it was more like a mile or two. We couldn't imagine the scale. Until, that is, we were informed that the glacier was six miles wide, 300 feet high - and that the black dot at the center of its base was another cruise ship.
There were seals in the harbor and floating ice chunks that had sheared off the glacier face. A geologist onboard explained that the ice absorbs all bands of light except blue, which is reflected back - giving the glacier its bluish tone. We watched the glacier calve, sections shearing off to crash into the water as we all "oohed" and "aahed." That was just the start.
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