Alaska's Inside Passage: A Journey That Earns Its Name

Alaska's Inside Passage: A Journey That Earns Its Name There is a moment on the Inside Passage when the ship is moving through water the color of glacial melt and the mountains on both sides are so close and so vertical that the sky becomes a narrow band above you — when most travelers go quiet. Not the quiet of boredom. The quiet of something being registered at a level deeper than conversation. Alaska does this. It does it consistently, to people who have traveled extensively and people who haven't. Why the Inside Passage Specifically The waterway connects Juneau — the only U.S. state capital unreachable by road — the glaciers of Glacier Bay National Park, the gold rush history of Skagway, the totems of Sitka, and the fjords of the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the United States and one of the last intact temperate rainforests on earth. The Case for Land and Cruise Most Alaska cruises are ocean voyages that happen to go to Alaska. The ship is the destination. Our Inside Passage Land and Cruise trip combines sea days with time in the interior — Denali, Fairbanks, or the Kenai Peninsula — so clients experience both the scale of the landscape from the water and the texture of it on foot. Wildlife: humpback whales, orca, Steller sea lions, bald eagles so common they become almost unremarkable until one drops onto a fish thirty feet from where you're standing. Bears along the coastline. Moose in the interior. The Tongass National Forest is one of the largest carbon sinks in North America. The Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian communities have lived in relationship with this landscape for thousands of years. Traveling here with awareness of that history is the right way to travel here. June is our preferred timing: the summer has begun, the light is extraordinary, and the crowds haven't yet peaked.