Seattle, Washington
Juneau, Alaska
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.)
Skagway, Alaska
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.
Hubbard Glacier, Alaska
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.
Ketchikan, Alaska
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.