Adventure awaits
Fully vaccinated passengers venture out on one of the first Alaska cruises since 2020
Alaska inspires and attracts adventurers. Over the centuries, it has drawn explorers from neighboring Asia, Russian fur trappers and Klondike-bound gold miners seeking their fortunes, and naturalist John Muir chasing a shadowy rumor of “ice-mountains.”
All risked danger and a cold, lonely death. Perhaps most of all they grappled with a great uncertainty — the mysteries contained in a vast, magnificent wilderness more than twice the size of Texas.
Until COVID-19 came along, ultimately shutting down the cruise industry, this century’s typical Alaska explorer wasn’t risking much more than arterial blockages from a steady diet of crab legs swimming in melted butter. The coronavirus has changed all that and shaken us, no doubt. But when I told a friend that my wife, Mica, and I would be among the first passengers on an early all-vaccinated Alaska cruise this May, his response surprised me: “A risk-taker, huh?” he said.
No, not really. Nor, after a week aboard UnCruise Adventures’ (uncruise.com) Wilderness Legacy, would I lump the other passengers into that category.
Most, in fact, told me they had patiently waited a year after seeing their intended 2020 Alaska sailings canceled. When UnCruise announced plans this spring to pioneer the country’s first all-vaccinated (crew and passengers) cruises, they were ready to go.
Some uncertainties lingered, especially around masks and distancing. But as we walked down a gangway to board the ship in Juneau, crew members told us that to align with new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our masks could come off for the whole week.
Settling into this unfamiliar, unmasked reality with the other vaccinated passengers felt strange, but somehow comforting.
“This is the safest I’ve felt in a year,” Joanna Lasher of Galway, New York, told me.
Many said it was their first trip to Alaska or their first cruise ever. Some had never seen a whale or brown bear in the wild, nor even heard of a tufted puffin, an adorably cute seabird with a bright orange beak.
UnCruise vessels are small — the Wilderness Legacy’s capacity is 86 passengers — so you get to know one another pretty quickly. Our new friends told us they wanted to get outside, stretch their legs, experience nature.
“I’m not looking to sit around and relax,” Debbie Swan of Amissville, Virginia, said. “I need an adventure.”
On the weeklong Inside Passage journey to Sitka via glorious Glacier Bay, we kept the binoculars at hand in hopes of spotting abundant wildlife. But at the same time, the eyes of the world — the cruising world, anyway — stayed focused on us, the early adopters of the vaccinated cruise experience.
Much is riding on the experiment’s success.
More people cruise Alaska each summer (1.3 million in 2019) than the state has permanent residents (731,000). Alaska is the top U.S. cruise destination by passenger volume, according to the Cruise Lines International Association.
Major lines announced last month that they would resume big-ship (capacity, generally, 2,000 to 4,000 passengers) summer sailings to Alaska in late July. Companies have said proof of vaccination will be required.
Smaller lines such as UnCruise were able to get a head start on the Alaska season because their vessel capacity of fewer than 250 passengers falls outside of CDC restrictions.
Dan Blanchard, UnCruise’s owner and CEO, joined the Wilderness Legacy for the week to sample the experience firsthand. He’s kind of an evangelist for Alaska, breaking into poetry or song or a hearty shout of “bear” as we kayaked one morning in Glacier Bay. Turned out to be not one but two — a coastal brown bear and her cub.
We saw humpback whales spouting and breaching, angel-like Arctic terns fishing, Steller sea lions congregating and too many bald eagles to count.
We watched sea otters and river otters, mountain goats and marbled murrelets, porcupines and porpoises. Guides helped us identify wildlife, like a red-breasted sapsucker I spotted high in a tree.
In a smaller ship, the crew and vessel become more nimble and responsive. Passing South Marble Island, one of the crew members exited the bridge to say we were veering off-course for a better peek at some tufted puffins in the water.
A group of puffins, incidentally, is known as an “improbability.”
Along with the wildlife, a star of any Alaska cruise is the natural scenery — snow-capped peaks, forests of Sitka spruce and western hemlock draped by moss, and castle-like glaciers.
Muir, the legendary naturalist, first visited Alaska in 1879. In “Travels in Alaska,” he describes his first glimpse of Glacier Bay, the “ice-mountains” that Muir’s guide recalled from childhood, as “a solitude of ice and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious.”
Among Alaska’s mysteries and natural beauty, Glacier Bay is in the first rank. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is home to over 1,000 glaciers, nearly all of them in retreat.
Only a handful are tidewater glaciers, which calve icebergs directly into saltwater with a thunderous crash. Among them is the Margerie Glacier, where we moored briefly one morning before kayaking near the brilliantly blue Lamplugh Glacier.
On another kayaking outing, guide Brady Clarke grounded us in southeast Alaska’s intertidal life of sea stars, oysters and more, quoting the native Tlingit saying: “When the tide goes out, the table is set.”
Forest areas are so dense and relatively unexplored here that our land excursions, with rare exception, involved scrambling over and under downed logs and through thick underbrush. Rather than hikes, they were referred to as “bushwhacking.”
Guide Andrew Mountsier led us past skunk cabbage and fiddlehead ferns to a muskeg — the colloquial term for a peat bog. It was like walking on a mattress.
I only slipped and fell once, on a mossy log.
“The good thing when you fall in the forest,” Mountsier said, “is it’s usually a soft landing.”
The guides challenged us to abandon our comfort zones: Taste a citrusy spruce tip newly pulled off the branch. Or sample a briny piece of bullwhip kelp plucked from the bay.
Those two seemed worth trying, but when guides dared us to kiss a slimy banana slug I took a pass. You have to draw the line somewhere, and for me it falls right after banana and before slug.
Similarly, when a handful of passengers and crew lined up one morning for a plunge into the frigid waters of Glacier Bay, I cheered them on, camera in hand, from a comfortable perch at the rail. And stayed there.
As adventures go, it just wasn’t worth the risk.
The UnCruise Adventure’s small-ship sailings are designed for active individuals who want to experience nature from up-close. There’s no Wi-Fi, disco dancing or casino; instead, expect knowledgeable guides on walks and kayaking excursions, friendly service and exceptionally good food. Aboard Wilderness Legacy, head galley chef Brendan Monts and pastry chef Tanya Radney performed wonders. All activities, meals and drinks (including most alcoholic drinks) are included. Current protocols call for proof of vaccination and a negative molecular COVID-19 test result no more than four days before embarking. Seven-night Alaska sailings start at $2,995 per person. 888-8628881, uncruise.com.