Alaska delivers
Take a land and sea cruise in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness and get of taste of Northern exposure. . .
As you raft down Alaska’s icecold Talkeetna River something snags at your senses. Amid the confusion of the rushing water, the creak of the rowlocks, the straining of sinews as the oars cleave the current, there’s something else. Something surreal.
Gradually the sound becomes clearer. It’s a banjo.
Yes, you’ve seen Deliverance. It’s just your brain playing tricks.
And yet, as the raft rounds the bend in the river, you do a double take. Because there, sitting on the bank, plucking his banjo under a rainbowcoloured umbrella is singer-songwriter Steve Durr.
He’s come down from the hills for the summer as he has for, well, as long as anyone round these parts can remember. At the age of 74, he strolls from his camp in the woods, hunting rifle and banjo over his shoulder, and whenever a raft hoves into view he breaks into song.
But then this is Talkeetna, a pioneer town deep in the Alaskan backwoods which I am visiting as part of a land tour from a Princess Cruises voyage which also calls at Fairbanks, Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge, Whittier and the Mt Mckinley Princess Wilderness Lodge here.
Talkeetna is the one-street shanty town that spawned television’s strange Northern Exposure drama – think Twin Peaks with humour – and where the town mayor is a cat named Denali.
The previous mayor was a cat called Stubbs, and there are those who fear that feline first citizen may have passed before his time. Banjo player Steve says: “I write about the people and times I’ve known these last 40 years in Alaska. “I don’t write for ‘markets’ like the kids do these days.” (Apart from the raft market, presumably. It’s a niche thing. Not many other musicians have to watch out for bears when they’re setting up.) Talkeetna, you see, is a town of free thinkers, big pick-up trucks and even bigger beards. Wacky baccy is legal here. There are moonshine stills in the woods. And in the back room of the Denali Brewing Company, Led Zeppelin’s Going to California jangles out from the cassette tape deck. This is where former mountain guide Sassan Mossanen and Shawn B Standley, late of Anchorage institution Humpy’s Alaskan Alehouse, brew up the likes of Mother Ale, Blues & Wheat
and Slow Down Brown. “I got to know Sassan when I was at Humpy’s and he used to bring in the odd keg,” Steve says.
“We got to talking and we got to be friends. I’d always hankered for the rural lifestyle. I came here for a visit and just stayed. This is Alaska as it used to be back in the day.
“Sure, life here can be tough at times, but it’s a real community. And when the kids go off to college, they come back and work in the family business.”
There’s chicken lentil soup, turkey sandwiches and sweet potato fries followed by good oldfashioned conversation.
Our river guide Andrew is resplendent in shades and shirt that, he says proudly, were fished out of the river. “You find all sorts,” he says. “It’s living the dream out here, although I take folks out three
times a day and don’t get through till seven. But it’s the freedom people stay here for. That, and the wildlife you see.
“We see bald eagles most days. There are beavers everywhere. The other day one of the guys saw a bear and her cub down by the riverbank. She just slipped into the river and swam across to the other side. Where else will you get that?”
On a clear day you can see Denali, the 20,156ft mountain formerly known as Mckinley. Don’t count on it though. Such is the changeable weather that it’s estimated that 70 per cent of visitors never get to see the towering peak, the highest in America, at all.
A wander down the high street – the only street, in truth – is a trip back in time, the part-made road
lined by frontier stores with porches out front.
It could be a Disney set stripped of saccharine sweetness – but this is the real thing.
“Welcome to beautiful downtown Talkeetna,” reads a hastily thrown together wooden street sign, its wording agreed by the town council on behalf of the 800 or so people who live here, or in the
A wander down the high street is a trip back in time
nearby woods. There’s the picket-fenced Roadhouse lodgings; Village Arts-n-crafts has gold and furs; Mostly Moose is a gift shop; the Flying Squirrel bakery cafe boasts fast service; Talkeetna River Guides runs out of a yurt.
An un-named shopfront advertises herbal cures, with a smell of the sixties in the air.
At the head of town is the railroad, a mighty Alaska Rail locomotive rests on the tracks as if it has lost its way. It’s easy to lose yourself in Talkeetna.
But it’s during the cruise that the majesty and grandeur of Alaska really becomes apparent.
The Star Princess sails close to the Hubbard Glacier and its sisters in the aptly named Glacier Bay as it negotiates the Inside Passage.
The inexorable march of the glaciers is evident in towering ice walls that meet the ocean, glinting in aqua, green and grey.
They are every bit as impressive as The Wall that keeps out the White Walkers in TV’S Game of Thrones.
The ship slowly circles, time and again, to give passengers a view that is up close and personal as ice floes float past, bearing families of seals and sea otters, while bald eagles circle overhead.
There can be few better cruise ship balcony views.