3 days ago
The last frontier isn't as far away from San Francisco as you imagine
The wind was blowing in from the ocean, and even though it was winter, we were thinking of summer. We heard the call of the sea and the call of the wild. So the Sailor Girl, my companion in small adventures, signed us up for a cruise from San Francisco to Alaska and back. Eleven days at sea aboard a big white cruise ship.
Adventure is where you find it: hull down on a schooner in the far Pacific, huge ocean swells off Cape Horn, an Atlantic crossing. It's an adventure just getting underway from the Sausalito dock in our own dream boat. So why not pay somebody else to provide a nice warm cabin, three meals a day, a balcony on the sea world, and a steward to make the bunk?
It's easy to sail away if San Francisco is your home port. On a good day you can be aboard a ship and unpacking your stuff in less than an hour after leaving your doorstep. It's still light when the Farallones are abeam, wild, gray and windswept. Course northwesterly to Alaska.
We were aboard the Ruby Princess, 16 decks of easy living, 951 feet long, 113,000 tons, so big you can hardly feel the ship move. But still, that's the North Pacific Ocean just over the rail, and for two days there is no land in sight. No ships, no birds either. A different world.
On the third morning — Alaska. Even the name is something special. It makes you think of snowy mountains, ice, forests, bears, tundra, cold, the last frontier. Just thinking about Alaska makes you want to put on a warm sweater. Of course, passengers on cruise ships see only a small part of the largest American state, just the coast, but not the vast interior. It's something to dream about.
Alaska can be frustrating and annoying — overcrowded, commercial, soggy, gray, a bit disappointing. But it's also full of wild stories, unexpected surprises and small towns. It's so beautiful it can take your breath away — something you notice on a sharp, cold day.
Ketchikan is one of the rainiest small cities in the world — 149.54 inches a year. It was raining steadily when we got there, then rain turned to mist, then back to hard rain, then to damp. There were five big cruise ships there that morning. Thousands of tourists crowding the narrow sidewalks. The shops all open, selling diamonds, watches, T-shirts, totem poles, rain slickers.
Juneau was next, a small city nearly drowning in cruise ships. This season Juneau has scheduled 600 cruise ship calls, well over a million visitors in a five-month season. There were five ships at Juneau the day the Ruby Princess was there, the next day six ships, the day after that seven.
So there were lines for everything in Juneau. Despite that, Juneau has a kind of offbeat charm. It's the state capital, so the town has another life. Juneau is both a city and a borough, with about 30,000 people, spread out so much between the mountains and the water that the borough of Juneau is bigger than Delaware. Juneau has lots of cars and trucks and buses, but only 18 miles of roads, which lead, essentially, nowhere. Everything comes to town by plane or boat: cars, refrigerators, furniture, groceries, the hops to make Alaskan Amber beer, the whiskey they serve at the Red Dog Saloon. The Red Dog Saloon is a particularly raucous and noisy tourist trap. Fun, too.
Juneau made national news a few days after we stopped there when an overflow lake that takes meltwater from the Mendenhall Glacier, about a dozen miles from downtown, spilled over the rim like a bathtub overflowing. The water roared down a small river and into the edge of town. Luckily, the city and borough had just built a levee of special sandbags, so a flood was averted. But it was a lesson: The power of nature is never very far away in Alaska.
We saw that the next day when the Ruby Princess called at the small town of Haines, not far from Skagway. Haines has only 1,657 permanent residents, and the Ruby Princess was the only ship in town that summer Tuesday, so we felt more like visitors than tourists. Haines has had booms and busts, a fish cannery, an Army post, a paved road into Canada and good prospects. In season, the woods are full of bald eagles and the waterways full of salmon.
We took a trip up the Chilkat River, a big, wide, fast stream on the edge of wilderness. In Ketchikan we saw the Loyal Order of Moose lodge on the main street. On the river we saw a moose.
We saved best for nearly last — a long, slow voyage on the big ship up the Endicott Arm, a fjord that extends 30 miles from Holkham Bay east toward the Canadian ice fields. The water is deep and dark, sometimes cobalt blue and sometimes green. Small and occasionally larger pieces of ice float on the surface, small bergs and growlers, drifting down the water. The pieces of ice are brilliant white when the sun hits them.
Sailing up Endicott Arm is like sailing up Yosemite Valley thousands of years ago in the ice age, when Yosemite was a deep lake fed by glaciers. The walls of Endicott Arm are steep sheer cliffs and rounded domes — 'Sublime Yosemite cliffs,' John Muir wrote of the place. He and the Rev. S. Hall Young were the first outsiders to see Endicott Arm in 1880. The native Tlingit people took them there.
Muir explored nearby Tracy Arm and Glacier Bay in 1879 and 1880 at a time when much of Alaska was unknown to the outside world.
At the end of Endicott Arm is the wall of the Dawes Glacier, 600 feet high and half a mile wide, a river of ice thousands of years old extending into Canada.
The ship turned at the face of the glacier and moved slowly out; we passed another ship with room to spare. This time, facing south in the afternoon sun, it was possible to see up the canyons and dozens of waterfalls and cascades, some hundreds of feet high. The streams rise from high mountains and empty faraway valleys, not a house, not a sign humans were ever there. True wilderness.
The Dawes Glacier and the Sawyer Glacier in nearby Tracy Arm have been melting, moving back. In Muir's time they were much larger; in 23 years ending in 2013, the bigger of the two receded by nearly 2 miles. Yet there is plenty of beauty left.
Still, you can stand at the rail of a luxurious ship and look up past the face of the cliff, up a steep slope lined with trees and brush toward a high ridge and wonder what might be on the other side. Maybe an adventure.
Three days after the Ruby Princess left Endicott Arm, a series of small earthquakes rattled the area. They triggered a massive rock slide in Tracy Arm just after dawn. It was huge, the biggest slide in 10 years. The slide went into the water and set off a wall of water 10 feet high. No one was hurt; because the country was nearly empty, no ships in either waterway.
We sailed back, of course, stopping in Victoria, British Columbia, for a day, two days at sea and the Golden Gate on a foggy dawn. It was a Monday morning, and San Francisco was just waking. You could tell. The first sound from the city was the Pier 39 sea lions barking.
