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Alaska's Inside Passage: Dates, Rates and Itinerary
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Inside the Inside Passage
By Laszlo Buhasz

It isn't just about the glaciers, bears and sea lions. On a 22-passenger yacht in Alaska, Laszlo Buhasz encounters wildlife of a different kind - eccentric locals who fend for themselves and a legendary bar where dollar bills are pinned to the ceiling

GLACIER BAY NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA — We were moving slowly north along the edge of South Marble Island, a rocky hump in Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park and Reserve. Our vessel was so close to a sea lion colony that we could smell their fishy stench and hear the grunts of the huge, scarred males as they guarded their harems.

It was an intimate encounter with nature that the thousands of passengers on the giant cruise ship I could see sailing out of the bay to the west would never experience.

My wife, Suzanne, and I were aboard the 120-foot Safari Quest, a luxury yacht on an eight-day voyage from Sitka to Juneau, Alaska. We had already spent five days cruising along the narrow inlets and fjords of Baranof and Chichagof Islands, stopping each night in small coves surrounded by the spectacular mountains of Alaska's Panhandle. Already we had seen dozens of humpback whales, pods of Dall's porpoise, sea otters, bald eagles, tufted puffins, seals and both brown and black bears.
We had also stopped at a fishing outpost that had one permanent resident and another with a notorious bar boasting the slogan "Take your pants off. Let's have a party!"

Now, as Safari Quest passed the sea lion colony, we were approaching the climax of our trip: a close-up view of the glaciers that had carved out the bay.

More than a decade ago, I had rafted for 12 days with my son and daughter down the Tatshenshini and Alsek Rivers from the Yukon Territory to the vast, wave-pounded beaches of Dry Bay on Alaska's Pacific Coast. It was my first encounter with the massive glaciers and snow-capped mountains of Glacier Bay.

It left me wanting another encounter with this wild country, but this time without damp sleeping bags, biting bugs and meals cooked over a campfire. I found a compromise with American Safari Cruises, a small company that operates three yachts on a series of summer cruises around the thousands of islands that make up the Inside Passage.

The company promised "luxury in the pursuit of adventure." With the almost bespoke nature of the cruise, that luxury would come at a price - one that was several times as much as that charged by the large ships that ply the Passage.

We began our early June adventure in Sitka, the picturesque former capital of Russian Alaska on the west coast of Baranof Island. After our bags had been collected and taken to the Safari Quest, we were given a city tour that included the Alaska Raptor Center, one of the largest facilities in North America for treating and rehabilitating injured birds.

When we reached the sleek, white yacht, the first instalment of the promised luxury began when we were welcomed aboard with glasses of champagne by Captain Shawnda Gallup, her mate Megan Pearia and the other eight members of the crew.

As the boat got under way, it was time for cocktails and hors d'oeuvre in the comfortable salon. After the boat anchored for the night in a small cove, chefs Craig White and Brad Holtz served up a choice of roasted prime rib with rosemary au jus or wild white salmon with tropical fruit salsa, accompanied by a selection of fine California wines. It was the first in a series of gourmet meals that ranged from veal marsala and filet mignon to crab cakes and herb-encrusted rack of lamb.

The elegant and intimate dining room would also be the place passengers got to know each other. There were 16 of us - five Canadians, a couple from France, a couple from Britain and seven Americans. We ranged in backgrounds from a banker and a retired entrepreneur to a pair of young doctors on their honeymoon, a Texas executive, a financial consultant, the director of group sales for the Oriental Hotel Group and a photographer whose next trip would be to war-ravaged Darfur. Entertaining conversations and anecdotes roamed across French politics, the war in Iraq, infuriating encounters with the American health-care system and even a hilarious account of an ill-fated camper trip on Yukon's Dempster Highway.

But this cruise wasn't as much about good food, drink and companionship as it was about the scenery and wildlife. And that, too, was delivered in spades - along with the bonus of mostly mild, dry weather in a region known for a yearly average of more than 380 centimetres of rain.

The hundreds of islands that buffer Alaska's Inside Passage from the storms and great swells of the Pacific Ocean are mesmerizing in their rugged beauty. Each day presented a new panorama of a land only relatively recently free from its burden of ice. About 20,000 years ago, most of southern Alaska was covered by 1,500-metre-thick glaciers. Their retreat into the high passes of the St. Elias, Alsek, Takinsha and Fairweather Mountain ranges scoured out the craggy fjords and inlets, leaving a landscape not yet smoothed by erosion.

At anchorages, such as Takatz Bay on the east side of Baranof Island, we would wake to mist-wreathed temperate rain forests of hemlock and spruce climbing the flanks of snow-tipped peaks and black cliffs threaded with silver waterfalls. Part of Tongass National Forest, the rain forest stretches across the islands and mainland of Alaska's Panhandle to encompass nearly seven million hectares. It is the largest forest preserve in the United States.

After breakfast, we would explore the shoreline, either in the yacht's two-person kayaks or in a motorized inflatable with expedition leaders Kevin Martin and Amy Miller. At almost every stop, bears were spotted grazing in lush meadows or foraging on rocky beaches.

When at sea, the Captain would often turn to follow whales or other sea creatures or slow to allow for photographs. Priorities were clear when even a dinner of duck breast was interrupted when a shout of, "porpoise off the starboard" was followed by a stampede for cameras and a prime spot along the railing.
On rare cool days, we would return to the yacht from our excursions to find one of the young stewards ready with a tray of hot toddies and mugs of hot chocolate. Some warmed up in the hot tub on the boat's upper deck before cocktails and dinner. Evenings were spent chatting, reading or watching one of the hundreds of DVDs from the yacht's library on the flat-screen TVs in each comfortable cabin.
There were also daily discussions and lectures. Amy Miller, who had studied humpback whales in Hawaii, showed some amazing underwater footage of the creatures and explained their fish-hunting techniques. Kevin Martin improvised with peanut butter and cereal on sheets of cardboard for an entertaining illustration of plate tectonics. He then explained the formation and movement of glaciers with a mountain made of tinfoil, powdered sugar and honey as props. (Perhaps you just had to be there.)
The islands of the passage are dotted with isolated fishing communities of people making a living from the sea and eccentrics escaping from the world. In Warm Springs Bay, while the others hiked up a trail to soak in thermal springs, Suzanne and I spoke with Christine, a Peggy Lee look-alike who ran a tiny store and was the only full-time resident of the seasonal outpost. For 20 years, she worked as a news reader for a major ABC television affiliate in Los Angeles before moving with her two young daughters to this remote cove on the east coast of Baranof Island.

"I wanted them to learn how to fend for themselves and to run a small business away from all that's bad about Los Angeles," she said. Today, one is a veterinarian and the other is in law school, but they still come back in the summer to run the store.

Christine has no TV and only Sirius satellite radio and a spotty Internet connection to the outside world. She generates her own electricity from a raging waterfall next to her raised house, "enough to work two freezers, a microwave and a stove."

Winters, she said, can be harsh here, dumping as much as nine metres of snow.
We found the frontier spirit on a larger scale during the fifth day of our cruise when we stopped for a few hours at Pelican, a fishing village in Chichagof Island's Lisianski Inlet. Populated by a few hundred permanent souls, it is slightly enlarged in the summer by sport fishers and the Bulgarians and Yugoslavs shipped in to work in its fish plant. Here, along the elevated boardwalk that passes for main street, passengers and some of the crew found Rose's Bar & Grill, a legend among the West Coast's boating community. Rose Miller, who's somewhere in her 80s, was presiding behind her long bar wearing blue-tinted glasses. The bar was a storehouse of lovingly accumulated kitsch and hundreds of signatures were scrawled on the walls. Tradition at Rose's is to stand on the bar and pin a dollar bill with a message on it to the ceiling. That's when everyone nearby - including Rose - rushes over to pull your pants down. The bar's motto is "Take your pants off. Let's have a party!" and T-shirts with the slogan sell like hot cakes. Many shots of tequila were consumed here by the passengers to celebrate the birthday of the young bride on our cruise.

The high point of any journey along the Inside Passage is a visit to the great tidewater glaciers at the head of Glacier Bay National Park's Tarr Inlet and ours was no exception.

The yacht would spend the last two days in the fjord as American Safari Cruises has a rarely granted overnight permit. After a hike along a mossy trail above Bartlett Cove and the park headquarters, we picked up Linda Lieberman, a ranger who would accompany us for the two days we would spend in Glacier Bay. Lieberman said only two large cruise ships were allowed into the park each day, and just for the day.

"About 400,000 visitors enter the park each year," she said, "but 98 per cent come on large cruise ships and never set foot in the place. The ships don't stop to let them off. They come in, sail up to the glaciers and head out again before dark. Your group is very lucky."

Our first day in the bay was warm and calm and the kayaks were lowered for several hours of paddling in Sandy Cove, where we stopped for the afternoon after our encounter with the sea lions. Here, too, we were rewarded with the sight of two enormous black bears foraging along the shore. When we all returned to the yacht, our newlywed doctors were brave enough to swing from a rope, Tarzan-style, for an icy dip off our stern.

We anchored overnight off Russell Island near the head of the bay. The following morning, the massive faces of the Grand Pacific and Margerie Glaciers in Tarr Inlet, both next to the Canadian border, were only a short cruise away. For an hour, we watched as Margerie calved bergs into the bay, some large enough to send a wave that rocked the yacht. Heading south again, we anchored near Lamplugh Glacier. Some of us kayaked to the 20-storey-tall wall of ice while others motored in the inflatable to the mouth of Johns Hopkins Inlet, an iceberg-choked fjord with another massive glacier at its head. But all we could do was look at it from afar because seals were pupping on the floes and entry was restricted. Looking back at the glittering waters of Glacier Bay as we cruised back to the fjord's mouth, it was stunning to think about how quickly the massive glaciers here have receded in the past two centuries. The landscape closest to their retreating forms are still bare of vegetation. When explorer George Vancouver arrived here in 1794, he found Icy Strait, running across the bay's entrance, choked with ice. The bay itself was little more than a dimple in a wall of ice 1,220 metres thick, 32 kilometres wide and extending for more than 160 kilometres to the St. Elias mountains. By 1879, the ice had retreated 77 kilometres up the bay, and by 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier's head in Tarr Inlet was 105 kilometres from Glacier Bay's mouth. Ten per cent of the world is still under ice, but here at least that vast reserve of the planet's freshwater is melting fast.

"Such a rapid retreat," says the printed guide to the national park, "is known nowhere else."
The next day and the end of the cruise came too soon with our morning arrival in Juneau. Hugs all around and e-mail addresses exchanged, we went our separate ways, hoping the next group of passengers on the yacht's reverse cruise to Sitka would be as lucky as we were, with both weather and wildlife. Juneau's harbour was crowded with five massive cruise ships. Its main street swarmed with thousands of passengers, many with cellphones pressed to their ears, shopping for jewellery and souvenirs and posing for photos outside the touristy Red Dog Saloon. It was a typical summer day here.

Alaska has become one of the most popular cruising destinations in the world, drawing an estimated 8 per cent of the worldwide market. This year, more than a dozen cruise lines have dispatched 45 floating resorts to carry close to one million passengers into the Inside Passage. We were glad we had travelled a different, more intimate path through this magical landscape.
Pack your bags .

American Safari Cruises: 206-284-0300; http://www.amsafari.com. The company has three mega-yachts cruising Alaskan waters: the 120-foot, 22-guest Safari Quest and the 112-foot Safari Escape and 105-foot Safari Spirit, both of which carry 12 guests. In 2008, they are introducing the 39-passenger Safari Explorer for eight-day cruises from Juneau. Eight-day, seven-night cruises on the Safari Quest between Sitka and Juneau range from $4,976 to $7,730 a person.