Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A day of glory, clear blue skies and a temperature in the 80s. The ship offers a shore ex-
cursion out of Skagway on the 8 a.m. White Pass & Yukon Railway train to Fraser, British
Columbia, after which 11 of us would ride bicycles back over White Pass Summit and
down to Skagway. Sometimes you looked out the window and all you saw was down. So-
metimes you looked out the window and all you saw was bears.
At Fraser we mount our bikes and push off for the summit. The Cathedral Peaks stand
like a cluster of mitered bishops against a dark-blue sky and the sun is simply blazing
down. A golden-crowned sparrow trilled out a three-note descant. After the summit the
road, a wide, well-paved expanse with little traffic, becomes a thrill ride straight down to
Skagway. Wheeeeeee!
Days 6 and 7: May 19
th
and 20
th
,
Glacier Bay and Yakutat Bay
The weather holds all the way into Glacier Bay, right up to the Margerie and Grand Pa-
cific glaciers. There are humpbacks spouting with sea lions somersaulting next to them.
On shore, mountain goats are grazing on narrow patches of green. Margerie Glacier obli-
gingly calves for us, big booming ice falls that cause the ship to rock gently in the result-
ing swells.
John, Jan, me and a revolving gallery of assorted new friends hold down a table on the
aft deck, binoculars and sunscreen at the ready. The whine of cameras rewinding film
competes with the sizzle of burgers on the grill, because the weather had given the crew
an excuse for an aft-deck barbecue. Life is just so tough.
That evening John, Jan and I climb to the Navigator's Lounge, an aerie over the bridge,
to watch the sun set over the Gulf of Alaska, giving its best imitation of a 500-mile wide
reflecting pool. We are afraid to take our eyes off the sea for fear that if we stop baby-sit-
ting it, it will start to act out.
But it doesn't. The next morning registers Force 0 on the Beaufort Scale (according to
the poster in the Navigator's Lounge: “wind speed less than 1 knot… sea like a mirror”)
as we sail into Disenchantment Bay, a misnomer if there ever was one, navigating our way
carefully at minimum speed through the ice that clusters thickly on the surface. Harbor
