Alaska & the Inside Passage

Ketchikan sits on the edge of the Inside Passage with a mountain immediately behind it, which is why the town is long and thin and partly built out over the water. It is the first Alaskan port most northbound ships reach and it is usually the shortest call of the week, often alongside by seven and gone by two.

It rains. Twelve to thirteen feet a year, which is among the wettest inhabited places in North America. Bring a real shell rather than an umbrella and go anyway, because the same weather is what makes the fjords look the way they do.

The totems are the reason to come. Ketchikan holds the largest collection of standing totem poles in the world, split between Totem Bight, Saxman Village and the Totem Heritage Center downtown. The Heritage Center is the interesting one: it holds unrestored nineteenth-century poles brought in from abandoned villages and left to age rather than repainted.

Watch the clock on flightseeing. Misty Fjords is genuinely spectacular and genuinely weather-dependent. Book the earliest slot: if it is canceled for cloud you still have the town, and if you book the late slot and the call is short you have neither.

Juneau is the only US state capital you cannot drive to. The mountains behind it are too steep and the icefield above them too big, so everything arrives by boat or by air, which is also why the cruise dock is a hundred yards from the state legislature.

It is usually the longest port day of the week, and that is the whole point of it. A twelve-hour call is enough for a whale-watching boat and the glacier, which is the standard combination and is standard because it works.

Mendenhall is a drive-up glacier, thirteen miles from the dock, and that accessibility is the trade: it is busy. The walk to Nugget Falls is flat, paved and worth doing; the West Glacier Trail on the other side of the lake is a real hike and is nearly empty by comparison.

Whale watching here is about as reliable as it gets. Auke Bay operators generally guarantee a sighting between June and August and generally do not have to honor the guarantee. Boats are small, the water is sheltered, and the humpbacks are feeding rather than migrating.

Rain gear, not umbrellas. Juneau gets around five feet a year and the wind off the channel makes an umbrella useless.

Skagway existed for about four years for one reason: it was the closest saltwater landing to the Chilkoot and White passes, and in 1898 roughly a hundred thousand people tried to get over them to the Klondike goldfields. Most of the town you walk through is from that window, and most of it is now a National Historical Park.

The railway is the thing. The White Pass & Yukon Route climbs nearly three thousand feet in twenty miles on two-foot-six-inch track cut into a cliff, past the trestle and the tunnel and the pack trail the stampeders actually walked. It is the single most-booked excursion in Alaska and it deserves to be. Sit on the left going up.

The alternative is the road. The South Klondike Highway climbs the same pass by bus and keeps going into British Columbia and the Yukon. It is a longer day, it crosses an international border, bring your passport, and it gets you into genuinely different country: dry, high and enormous, nothing like the rainforest at sea level.

The town is small and it is busy. Skagway’s permanent population is around a thousand, and on a summer day four ships can put ten thousand people onto seven blocks. Walk to the far end of Broadway or out toward Dyea and the crowd thins out within minutes.