A trip through Alaska’s Inside Passage
Sur les traces d’un glacier spectaculaire...
Inspiré par les voyages en pleine nature de John Muir – le « père des Parc Nationaux américains » – Mark Adams, journaliste de The New York Times s'est embarqué dans une série de croisières jusqu'au coeur de l'Alaska. Découvrez son voyage au printemps, à la poursuite d'un des plus spectaculaires glaciers du nord du monde.
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. 2. His primary goal was to study Alaska’s glaciers. 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.
3. 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 go through Alaska's Inside Passage. Fortunately, there’s a seagoing option that allows for flexibility and discovery: the Alaska Marine Highway System.
4. 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.
5. 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. 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.”
6. The trip from Bellingham to Ketchikan takes about 38 hours. Longtime Alaska residents, nicknamed Sourdoughs, expressed relief to be returning from Outside, as Alaskans call the world beyond their state borders.