Cruise Editor Johanna Jainchill recently embarked on a tour of Alaska and the Yukon Territory. In order to sample two different products, she chose the land portion of Holland America Line's cruise tour, which included Fairbanks and Canada's Yukon Territory; and a cruise on Cruise West. A portion of her dispatches follows; for more, see all five of Jainchill's dispatches (see box at right).
Dispatch: Dawson
On the third day of my trip, I was determined not to sit.
I had spent two full days almost entirely on my rear end, along with the rest of the Holland America Line tour group, on a motorcoach rolling through the dusty, gravel-packed roads of Alaska's eastern interior, en route to Canada's Yukon Territory.
When we finally arrived in Dawson, we had one free day to spend on our feet in the Yukon's capital city before embarking on another eight-hour ride to points farther into the province.
Such is life during a land tour of Alaska and the Yukon. This area is massive: Alaska itself is more than twice the size of Texas. So getting anywhere takes time and a willingness to appreciate astounding views from a window seat.
My HAL tour began two days earlier, in Fairbanks. Most of my group had already been traveling for four days, visiting Anchorage and Denali National Park.
For many of them, the tour began or will end with a Holland America Line cruise. I'm actually doing something a bit different: combining a HAL tour with a Cruise West cruise.
HAL has invested a great deal into being the tour company of the Gold Rush route, the leg of the trip that I joined. The Gold Rush route begins in Fairbanks and crosses the border into Canada's Yukon Territory.
HAL's mark is all over the route. In Fairbanks, we panned for gold at a site where HAL purchased and restored a massive gold dredge --a literal gold digger that tore up much of Alaska and the Yukon in the early half of the 20th century. The next day we were on the Yukon Queen II, a HAL-owned riverboat that took us down the 100-mile stretch of the Yukon River into Dawson.
HAL's Westmark hotels dot the path, even in places unlikely to have a hotel, such as two-road Tok, Alaska. We stayed there the night before we crossed the border into Canada.
Since HAL is the only company running tours here, their motorcoaches have become transporters of goods for some towns, like Chicken, a former Alaska gold-mining town with a population of fewer than 100.
The coach stops in Chicken for coffee and fresh baked goods from the Chicken Creek Cafe.
Besides the aforementioned Yukon Queen, most of our waking hours are spent on motorcoaches, so HAL put some money into a new fleet that entered service last year. They are very comfortable as far as buses go, with leather seats and legroom that HAL says is the equivalent of that on a first-class domestic flight. But it's still tough to sit for eight hours no matter how comfortable the seats are.
That's what we did on day two, beginning at 6 a.m. We left Tok, beginning a 160-mile ride to Eagle, Alaska, where we would board the Yukon riverboat.
Kurt, our driver extraordinaire from Michigan, let us stretch our legs at places where the view was too good to pass up. We had clear, sunny days with the snow-capped Alaska Range in view as we passed miles and miles of forests and rivers, still clogged with patches of breaking ice.
Most of the trip to Eagle was spent on the winding Taylor Highway.
The word "highway" is a stretch, since this narrow road is made of gravel. The Taylor begins where the famed Alaska Highway ends, and HAL is the only tour company that dares traverse it. The road has several drop-offs of many hundreds of feet, and several riders had the white knuckles to prove it.
Our coach was escorted by a local whose pickup truck had a sign on top of it that said "Two Buses Ahead," as there really isn't room on the road for a bus and car.
But the road was so empty that Kurt and Rachel, our tour guide up for the summer from Mississippi, started a game where we all put in $1 and waged guesses on how many cars we would see on the way to Eagle.
Dispatch: Skagway
This trip can be described as planes, trains and automobiles -- and boats.
In five days, our group traveled more than 900 miles, mostly on a motorcoach but also on the Yukon Queen riverboat and the White Pass & Yukon Route railroad from Fraser, British Columbia, to Skagway, Alaska.
Most of our group then boarded a Holland America ship bound for Vancouver, while a few of us got on a nine-person plane for a 40-minute flight to Juneau; most people on these trips do a combined land-cruise tour, but a few couples booked directly through Gray Line of Alaska, the company that runs the land portion for HAL.
While close in distance, it is impossible to drive from Skagway to Juneau, the only U.S. state capital inaccessible by road.
Traveling in Alaska means understanding time and distance in a different way. The next town over, Haines, is only 35 minutes from Skagway by fast ferry, but it is a 720-mile drive.
In covering as much distance as this tour has, the group appreciated the different modes of transportation. Many cited the train to Skagway as a highlight of the tour. The railway was built in 1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush, and the restored train climbs almost 3,000 feet over 20 miles, through tunnels blasted in the mountains and along bridges and steep cliffs. The route begins in moonscape-like alpine tundra and becomes greener and more mountainous as the train crosses from Canada back into the U.S.
Skagway is a crossroads between two kinds of travel in this region. It is the beginning of the Gold Rush route that continues north, through the Yukon and into Fairbanks. Skagway is the port where most of the tens of thousands of men and women in search of gold began their arduous trek that for the vast majority ended in failure.
Places like the former saloon and brothel, the Red Onion (now only a saloon) are vestiges of that time. Built in 1897, the staircase by the bar and restaurant on the first level leads up to the former brothel area, now a museum that tells how some women who participated in the search for gold ended up making a living.
Going north or south from here offers breathtaking scenery and chance for wildlife viewing, but the Yukon is clearly the history buff's Alaska. The one full day spent in a town along the Yukon route was in Dawson, a place that one member of our bus group described as feeling about 150 years behind the rest of the world. The roads aren't paved, the sidewalks are made of wood planks and Diamond Tooth Gertie's Gambling Hall is the nexus of the nightlife.
Dawson's charming buildings were built mostly during the Gold Rush and retain their original look. Many of us felt as if we had walked onto the set of an old Western.
The much more popular coastal sightseeing destinations -- Juneau, Glacier Bay and Ketchikan -- lie south of Skagway. These places are famous for glaciers, whale watching and a lot of rain and are where a majority of cruises spend most of their time. This is where someone most interested in nature and scenery would be better off.
I will be able to experience both. Tomorrow, I board a Cruise West ship, the Spirit of Endeavour, for a seven-day trip through Alaska's Inside Passage.
Dispatch: Glacier Bay
Three days later, as Cruise West's Spirit of Endeavor wound through the straits of Glacier Bay, the ship's captain, Michael Fleming, and Matt, a young waiter, put on an impromptu guitar sing-along in the dining room.
The Eagles and Bob Dylan were on the set list, as was a lot of fumbling for the right lyrics.
The captain had already shown off his talents earlier in the day when he played a few songs with the Huna cultural interpreter who was brought onboard for the day of Glacier Bay cruising. That was after the national park ranger, who also came onboard for the day, played us a farewell tune on the violin.
Such spontaneity is the way on Cruise West sailings. The small-ship exploration line launched in 1983, as part of the Chuck West family of Alaska tourism companies.
Captain Fleming will slow down the 100-passenger Spirit of Endeavour if there is wildlife worth stopping for, such as a pod of orcas on our first evening out of Juneau, mountain goats on a steep cliff or a grizzly bear scouring for food on a rocky beach in Glacier Bay. The ship's small size allows the captain to get within 70 yards of the shore, as close as I wanted to be to a hungry grizzly bear.
During dinner, Jess, our exploration leader, made a surprise announcement that we would make an unplanned stop at the Bartlett Cove Lodge, home to the ranger and interpreter. After a full day of glacier and bear viewing from the small vessel, which doesn't have a running track or fitness center, I was grateful to get off and spend some time hiking in the lush forest, especially since in Alaska in June you can hike until almost midnight and still have sunlight. Despite a run-in with a porcupine, with its quills ready to shoot, my hike was a very welcome surprise activity.
Others hung out in the lodge and listened to a ranger give a lecture on Glacier Bay or took a guided forest walk nearby.
Cruise West is all about what's outside, which is good since there is not much on the inside. The 25-year-old Spirit of Endeavour is rather bare bones.
Besides the dining room, there is one indoor gathering area -- a lounge that is also a bar, lecture area, hangout, viewing room, Internet cafe, library and souvenir shop.
But the cabins have windows, and some windows are pretty big -- that is the most important amenity one could ask for here. Even when I can't rouse myself out of bed for a 6:45 a.m. wake-up call, it is usually followed with an announcement about a humpback whale off the starboard side, eagles fishing off a nearby coastline or seals lazing on rocky outposts. So I just slide open my curtain and enjoy the view.
The outdoor decks are where people, clutching cameras and binoculars, spend much of the time while sailing.
It's a small vessel, so you get know your neighbor, especially when there is a big nature sighting and everyone is suddenly crammed together.