A DIY trip through Alaska’s Inside Passage
See the beauty of the north without all the cruise ships
Long before his extravagantly bearded profile appeared on postage stamps and commemorative coins, John Muir was a struggling travel writer.
Muir, revered today as the founder of the Sierra Club and an early advocate for national parks, was largely unknown to America’s reading public in 1879 when he first departed San Francisco bound for Alaska’s mysterious Inside Passage, a seafaring route through the densely islanded panhandle of America’s northernmost territory.
His primary goal was to study Alaska’s glaciers; newspaper travelogues paid the bills. His adventures, guided hundreds of miles by Tlingit Indians paddling a dugout cedar canoe, became rhapsodic dispatches that found an enthusiastic audience. Within a few years, West Coast steamships were hawking Alaska sightseeing trips to the “frozen Niagara” of the Muir Glacier, a spectacular river of ice — today located in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve — discharging massive bergs from its 300-foothigh face.
Newspaper editors might have hired Muir solely on the basis of his expense reports; he endorsed sleeping on the ground and often carried little more than bread, a notebook and a change of underwear on his long rambles. Today’s prototypical Alaska to a life-raft.”
The rigid structure of Alaska cruises had never appealed to me, either, but thumbing through an old copy of “Travels in Alaska” not long ago, I began to wonder if it was still possible to wander the Inside Passage serendipitously as its author had, “borne smoothly over calm blue waters, through the midst of countless forest-clad islands.” Fortunately, there’s a seagoing option that allows for flexibility and discovery: the Alaska Marine Highway System, a flotilla of utilitarian ferries sometimes known as the Blue Canoes, owing to their signature colour scheme. Alaskans are a seafaring people. Most of the state’s 740,000 residents live in towns and cities near the coast. The state’s huge size and
crazy topography make road construction impractical; even Juneau, the capital, can be reached only by sea or air. The marine ferries are used primarily by Alaskans as an inexpensive way to move themselves and their vehicles from place to place as they read, work or watch the miles go by. I bought a couple of waterproof notebooks and flew off to join them.
Ferry travelers can book an austere room, or they can crash out in almost any public space. One popular budget option is to pitch a tent on the deck, which during peak season can feel like a Coachella campground with better scenery. Late on a Saturday evening in late May, I boarded the MV Kennicott in Bellingham, Washington, along with 300 other passengers and a few dozen cars, pickups and recreational vehicles, several of which bore bumper stickers reading “Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat Farmed Salmon.” At the purser’s desk I picked up the keys to a tiny roomette and splurged $3 for a cheery yellow sheet and scratchy bath towel that could have exfoliated an alligator. Two seats and a table folded into a narrow bed; I fell asleep almost instantly to the low hum of the engines.
The trip from Bellingham to Ketchikan takes about 38 hours. Liberated briefly from cellular coverage, people completed crossword puzzles, read detective novels, played checkers and, mostly, shot the breeze with anyone and everyone. Longtime Alaska residents, nicknamed Sourdoughs, expressed relief to be returning from Outside, as Alaskans call the world beyond their state borders. As the green shoreline of British Columbia scrolled slowly past behind a blue-grey screen of mist, I thought of Muir’s last trip to Alaska, as a member of the Harriman Expedition in 1899. Muir and two-dozen other leading American naturalists had been invited as guests of railroad magnate Edward Harriman. When the scientists disembarked to stretch their legs amid this temperate rain forest, they encountered knee-deep mosses and nail-sized thorns, a land as impassable as the Amazon jungle.
We docked in Ketchikan around noon. When Muir last sailed through in 1899, this spot held a salmon cannery and a few shacks. Today, it is a metropolis by Alaska standards: home to 8,000 residents, a Starbucks and, on most summer days, several gleaming white monoliths: the 10-storey cruise ships that dwarf the downtown. As the Inside Passage’s visitor numbers grow, so do its ships. This month, the first 4,000passenger vessel entered service, to be eclipsed by a nearly 5,000-capacity one in 2019.
Ketchikan’s anarchic waterfront once hosted perhaps the greatest concentration of dive bars in America. It’s now thick with shops pushing souvenir T-shirts and knick-knacks. The forecast called for rain, as it usually does in Southeast Alaska. I returned early to the ferry terminal to wait for the midnight boarding of the northbound MV Matanuska. Inspired by Muir (and trying to save a few bucks), I attempted, unsuccessfully, to sleep on the extremely hard deck of the observation lounge.
The Matanuska docked in Wrangell around 7 the next morning. I dropped my bag at the Wrangell Extended Stay and Trading Post. A sign in the hotel’s front window advertised for beaver, mink and otter furs, which the owners, Mike and Lydia Matney, sewed into hats and mittens. The ferry schedule left me with several days in Wrangell, a former timber town Muir described as “a rough place,” and with good reason. Upon returning in 1880 for his second glacier-seeking expedition, he learned that the Tlingit chief who had guided him the year before had been shot dead.
Matney told me to borrow his truck if I wanted to have a look around — he left the keys in the ignition, a common practice in Alaska. I decided to explore on foot. Much of Wrangell looked unchanged since 1899: false-front buildings and clapboard churches, including one where Muir had mooched a night sleeping on the floor his first night on Alaska soil.
In 1899, when Muir stopped in Juneau with the Harriman Expedition, the gold rush was in full swing. Nowadays, Alaska’s economy runs on oil. A 2008 spike in gas prices paid for the gorgeous new $140 million State Libraries, Archives and Museum, where I browsed through the 12 beautiful bound volumes of “The Harriman Alaska Series,” chronicles compiled by Muir and his fellow naturalists. The series had a huge influence on President Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to preserve what is now the 17-million acre Tongass National Forest, the scenic wilderness that encompasses most of Alaska’s Inside Passage.
For more than a week I had subsisted largely on coffee, fried halibut sandwiches and the Alaskan Brewing Co.’s Icy Bay IPA, which is sold pretty much everywhere in the state (including aboard the ferries). The company’s Juneau brewery offered a flight of more obscure flavours, including an especially tasty one brewed with local spruce tips. Slightly tipsy on tips, I splurged on a bowl of miso ramen with salmon chorizo at the Rookery Café and a king-size bed at the Westmark Baranof Hotel, where state legislators have been caught accepting bribes from oil industry executives.
Downtown Juneau is small and hilly, like a pocket-size San Francisco, and easy to navigate. I had a day to spare before my next ferry, so I caught a $2 city bus that dropped me off about a mile from the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center. I arrived an hour before the daily cruise-ship shuttles started unloading and so had the place almost to myself. The glacier, a frozen river that winds back 13 miles, is as spectacular as anything in Yellowstone. Blessed with a sunny day, I couldn’t resist hiking a few hours out to the Mendenhall Ice Caves, an ice cathedral inside the glacier, illuminated as if through indigo stained glass. I recognized the hue immediately: Muir had described it as “the most startling, chilling, almost shrieking vitriol blue.” (Sadly, there are no longer ice caves reachable by foot. The ones that remain require special expertise and equipment.)
The next leg on my DIY Passage voyage was on the MV Columbia, which runs from Juneau to Haines, via Lynn Canal, a 90-mile-long fiord lined with snow-capped mountains. Occasionally a passenger would spot some wildlife — a black bear, a pod of dolphins, the splash of a whale’s tail. The captain announced it over the PA system, and everyone rushed to one side of the boat.
Haines and Skagway, both of which sit near the top of Lynn Canal, are two of Alaska’s three Inside Passage towns connected to the road system. (The third roadaccessible town, Hyder, population 87, uses a British Columbia area code, and its bars accept Canadian dollars.) Skagway is unabashedly touristy, welcoming as many as 10,000 cruise ship visitors on a summer day.
Haines, which sees less than a tenth of Skagway’s cruise tourism, is often cited as the inspiration for the quirky ’90s TV series “Northern Exposure.” Much like its fictional counterpart, it has a hyperlocal radio station, KHNS, that intersperses eclectic music playlists with announcements about lost wallets, weekly vinyasa classes and exhibits at the Hammer Museum, devoted exclusively to a certain tool. Both the real and the TV town are populated by Alaska characters who would be considered eccentric elsewhere.
I knew exactly where I was going to finish my Inside Passage trip even before I finished reading the transcendent chapter “The Discovery of Glacier Bay” in “Travels in Alaska.” For it was in this bay that Muir unexpectedly encountered “a picture of icy wilderness unspeakably pure and sublime.”
Gustavus, the tiny town that serves as the gateway to Glacier Bay National Park, is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Alaska — by acreage, anyway. Over recent decades, average air temperatures near Glacier Bay have increased, and billions of tons of ice have melted. This weight loss causes the land to rebound about two inches per year. One family has reclaimed enough solid ground from the surrounding waters to open a nine-hole golf course.
In 1899, the Harriman’s luxury steamship spent several days anchored in front of Muir’s namesake glacier, bobbing in a slurry of newly birthed icebergs a safe distance from what Muir once called “the tremendous threatening cliffs of the discharging wall.” Eager to see some calving glaciers, I booked the final leg of my marine journey on the Glacier Bay tour boat out of Bartlett Cove. The full-day, 130-mile round-trip circuit of the bay provides an excellent narration by a National Park Service naturalist in a Smokey Bear hat, as well as a cold lunch and unlimited coffee. (Icy Bay IPA is, of course, available for purchase.)
We motored slowly past a chunk of rock swarming with bald eagles on top and sea lions below, and approached the spot that, in the 1890s, had marked the terminus of Muir Glacier. The inlet was now open water. The on-board ranger explained that the one-time showpiece of Glacier Bay has receded out of sight, a retreat of more than 30 miles since Muir first saw it.
Continuing north, we eventually stopped in front of the Margerie Glacier and parked next to a gigantic cruise ship. Every 10 minutes or so, a thunderclap rang out and a chunk of ice plummeted from the Margerie’s mile-wide blue face, creating an epic splash. The effect was spellbinding.