Seattle has shopping, fine restaurants, attractions galore, good air service, culture, and a wide range of accommodations—more, in fact, than you’ll be able to take in on just a short pre- or post-cruise visit. It is very much a water-oriented city, set between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, with Lake Union in the center. Practically everywhere you look, the views are of sailboats, cargo ships, ferries, windsurfers, and anglers.

 

Photo: John MacDonald

Juneau’s a great town. Fronted by the busy Gastineau Channel and backed by 3,819-foot Mount Juneau and 3,576-foot Mount Roberts, its location is beyond picture perfect. But it’s the city's quirks we appreciate, like the fact that it’s the capital of the state but is completely surrounded by water, forest, and the massive Juneau Icefield, and is therefore unreachable by land. Or the fact that the whole town lies at the base of a landslide zone, and has numerous treeless hillsides to prove it. Or that at one time a bull terrier named Patsy Ann was the official town greeter, trotting down to the docks whenever a ship came in. (Long dead now, there’s a bronze statue of her in Marine Park.)

 

Photo: John MacDonald

Remember the actor Walter Brennan, who played the old coot in every other Hollywood Western from the '30s through the '50s? Well, every single person in Skagway seems to have gone to his acting school. Yes, people do live here (about 825 of them, year-round), but most of the folks you see in the summer are seasonal workers, brought in essentially as actors to man the set. And we gotta admit, it’s some set, with the wide main drag, Broadway, lined end-to-end with gold-rush-era buildings and protected as a National Historic District. A few that look like real businesses turn out to be displays showing how it was back in frontier days, but most house gift shops—lots and lots of gift shops.

 

Said to be Alaska’s longest cruise ship–accessible ice face—it’s about 6 miles across—Hubbard lies at the northern end of Yakutat Bay. The glacier has a rather odd claim to fame: It is one of the fastest moving in Alaska. So fast and far did it move about a dozen years ago that it quickly created a wall across the mouth of Russell Fjord, one of the inlets lining Yakutat Bay. That turned the fjord into a lake and trapped hundreds of migratory marine creatures inside. Scientists still can’t tell us why Hubbard chose to act the way it did, or why it receded to its original position several months later, reopening Russell Fjord.

 

Photo: John McDonald

Ketchikan sits just north of the Canadian border, and like many border towns it wears its mercantile heart on its sleeve. They call it “Alaska’s first city” because it’s the first port visited on most northbound cruises, but the way people throng the port area’s gift shops, you’d think it was the last chance they had to use their credit cards before Judgment Day. Here’s our advice: Walk down the gangway, take three deep breaths, and say to yourself, “I do not need to shop.” Instead, walk right past the shops and head for one of the town’s several totem-pole parks or take an excursion to Misty Fjords. When you get back you can spend a little time poking around the galleries and shops on Creek Street.