Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
sugar and salt hammers and gavels and fur stamps and bookbinder's hammers and cob-
bler's hammers and my personal favorite, little wooden drink hammers the flappers of the
Roaring Twenties would use to tap the table to applaud shows, including one from the
Cotton Club in Harlem.
The Hammer Museum got a kind of seal of approval from the local spirits when Dave
was digging out a new foundation and excavated an 800-year old Tlingit war club. It's
there, too, right across from a wall of hammers hung next to copies of their patents.
I could have spent all day in the Hammer Museum but I had to tear myself away to go
on a glacier cruise, oh darn. Chilkat Cruises runs the fast ferry between Haines and Skag-
way, thirty-five minutes point to point, and then they hit the gas with the
Chilkat Express
,
a 65-foot catamaran equipped with four 800-horsepower Caterpillar engines coupled to
four Hamilton water jets. “Just how fast is this boat?” I ask Larry Sweet, Chilkat Cruises'
senior captain. “Forty, forty-two knots?”
Larry shrugs and rolls his eyes. “Oh, at least,” he says.
“'At least?'” I say to Rose, who is along for the ride, and I do like my mother taught
me, I keep one hand always for the boat.
We zoom over to Skagway to pick up our passengers and then zoom out of the harbor
again, only to stop on a dime when Larry spots a humpback cow and calf feeding. “That's
the best part about this tour,” Larry says. “We're fast enough that we've got time to stop
and look.” Everyone crowds into the bow to gawk and snap pictures. “For most of these
folks this is a once in a lifetime thing,” Larry says, “and we try to give them the best ex-
perience we can.”
They try pretty well. Larry noses the boat up to the Glacier Point beach, we climb on
buses and drive through the forest primeval to the edge of a lake. From the other side rises
Davidson Glacier, a steep, showy river of ice. They load us into canoes and we paddle
right up to it, close enough to see the sun turning the fractures and fissures an almost pain-
fully glorious range of blues from forget-me-not to turquoise. And then, when we turn
around to paddle back, the entire Chilkoot Range is looking down its collective nose at us
with a properly lofty disdain. That moment right there was worth the whole trip.
There are a ton of events around which you can structure your visit to Haines, including
in 2003 a summer solstice bicycle relay race from Haines Junction to Haines (160 miles
