Photo by Ilona Open View Photography
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Ten Minutes to the Real Alaska
By Edward Readicker-Henderson, May & June 2008
Escape the cruise-ship docks and see the state at its unspoiled best
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A summer day in Sitka, the town where I grew up. The place was full of cruise-ship passengers taking pictures of St. Michael's, a perfect onion-domed Russian Orthodox church encircled by the main road. Others were heading up Castle Hill—the spot where the transfer of power over Alaska, from Russia to the United States, took place in 1867 at that bargain price of two cents an acre. Without thinking, to avoid the crowds, I grabbed my friend's hand, and we slipped into an alley. "Trust me," I told her.
And moments later a view of the sweep of Sitka Sound opened like a command performance just for us.
More than 800,000 cruise-ship passengers come to Southeast Alaska every year. The tiny town of Skagway—home to about 900 residents—can have 8,000 visitors on a single summer day. And all those people fresh off the ships are doing the same thing and going to the same places. They're getting a kind of programmed, canned Alaska, not the wild state of a lifetime of travel dreams.
So I wondered: in the ports of Sitka, Skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan—the most visited places, where locals avoid entire sections of town when the ships are in—how easy is it to get from the cruise dock to the real Alaska? To go where the air smells like wet bears and you can have a thousand acres of land to yourself? Turns out anybody can be in the real Alaska in about ten minutes, if you know where to head.
Routes…
Leave the boat, see the state
Sitka
To do: Step into the 19th century at the Russian Bishop’s House
How to find it: 907-747-0110; www.nps.gov/sitk
Juneau
To do: See art at the Alaska State Museum
How to find it: 907-465-2901; www.museums.state.ak.us
Skagway
To do: Relive gold fever at Klondike Gold Rush National Park
How to find it: 907-983-2921; www.nps.gov/klgo
Ketchikan
To do: Watch carvers create canoes at Saxman village
How to find it: 800-770-3300; www.visit-ketchikan.com
Sitka
Destination: Indian River Trail
Go for: Rugged forest solitude
Directions: Follow the shoreline from the docks, and go past Sheldon Jackson College. You'll be on Lincoln Street, which ends at Sitka National Historical Park. Enter the park and follow paths to the back entrance. Cross Halibut Point Road; the trailhead is right before the Alaska Raptor Center (800-643-9425).
Minutes from dock: 10 to the trailhead
My first steps on the Indian River Trail, which goes 4.5 miles into old-growth rain forest, are haunted by the squeaky-toy cries of bald eagles from the nearby Alaska Raptor Center, built to rehabilitate injured birds. A dozen yards into the forest, I'm in another world. Trees drip like water clocks, ravens argue, and the trail skirts marshy areas where a dozen kinds of shelf fungi fight for space on fallen logs. I'm in the Sitka the native Tlingit (pronounced KLINK-it) lived in when they called this place Sheet' ká—"the land behind the islands."
"Hey, bear," I call out, just in case, at each blind corner. Alaska forest rule: A surprised bear is an unhappy bear. I'm not being as watchful as I should be. I'm distracted by the light, which is just as I remember it: falling as gently as the rain itself, the forest glowing like the inside of a lightning bug.
A couple of hours later, I limp back into town, my boots caked, a big smile on my face. I pass the Russian Bishop's House (see "Routes" box)—a wreck once needing to be bulldozed, now the best restored bit of Russia in the state—and then the old Blockhouse and graveyard, supposedly haunted by the ghost of Princess Maksoutov (though she's never appeared for me). And on Katlian Street, two minutes from a thousand cruise-ship passengers, I go to the Pioneer Bar and, sitting with locals under pictures of Sitka's fishing fleet, raise a toast to my own Alaska.
Skagway
Destination: Yakutania Point
Go for: Your own private seal show
Directions: From the docks, go north on Broadway to First Avenue, then left until you reach the Skagway airport fence. Follow the fence until you reach the front of the terminal. Straight ahead is a footbridge that takes you over the Skagway River to the point.
Minutes from dock: 10 to the footbridge; another 10 to Yakutania Point.
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Skagway lies in a valley the Alaska Natives traditionally ignored—locals will tell you the name translates to something like "only white people are stupid enough to live where the wind blows so much." Four blocks wide, 24 blocks long, the town looks like a stage set for a good western: bright, false-front buildings; a train depot where you can hear the power burst of a steam engine as the White Pass & Yukon Route Railway prepares to move north. So many people show up for a taste of the town's gold-rush past that, as my visiting friend points out, traffic on Broadway runs eight lanes: four lanes of tourists on the sidewalks, two lanes of cars in the streets, and the locals walking in the gutters.
"Which is why we go this way," I say, leading her to the Skagway River. Two blocks from Broadway, nobody's around but a couple of locals walking their dogs. "In winter, when I lived here," I tell her, "I'd come down every day. A bunch of seals hung out over by those rocks, and they'd be the only things moving in the entire town."
We head to Yakutania Point. A tiny spit of land where trees cling to rocks right down to the water's edge, it is where the Lynn Canal—the longest, deepest fjord in North America—divides from Taiya Inlet, like fingers held up in a peace sign. Above the still water, mountains give way to glaciers. And then the seals, all black fur and goggle eyes, come out to show that it's business as usual in their Alaska.
Juneau
Destination: The Last Chance gold-mining district
Go for: A thousand-foot waterfall
Directions: This one's easy—take a cab from the dock. For info call 800-587-2201 or go to www.traveljuneau.com.
Minutes from dock: 7 by taxi
Juneau is probably the most inconvenient state capital in the country. The Mendenhall Glacier drools into the middle of the city, an extended finger of the Juneau Icefield. In summer the sky echoes with so many flight-seeing helicopters that it feels like a scene from Apocalypse Now. But in winter, with Juneau hemmed in by mountains and glaciers, no roads out, a lot of Alaska's official business gets done simply because the legislators can't escape.
Usually when I bring people to Juneau, I take them to the Shrine of St. Therese, a chapel so close to the water's edge I once saw a whale mere yards off the church steps. But that would violate my ten-minutes-from-the-dock rule. Instead we're going to the Last Chance gold-mining district. After driving past T-shirt shops and carts with strangely addictive reindeer sausages, we follow a curve onto a wooden bridge set above a sheer drop-off. Ferns fight the car for open space.
"Seven minutes," my friend says when I kill the engine. Like so much of the state, Juneau was founded on gold, and the heavy machinery—a thousand ways to dig into the earth—remains. Wild irises push through old sluices. We pick salmon berries from bushes growing around railcars rusted a brighter red than the berries themselves, then head to the river that rumbles like a fish tank on overdrive. At the top of the valley a staggered waterfall drops a thousand feet.
"I've been all over the state," I say. "The very best parts look like this. Steep mountains, endless green, more water than you knew the world holds. And you get it all to yourself."
Ketchikan
Destination: Totem Heritage Center
Go for: Powerful indigenous art
Directions: A simple cab ride from the dock. For info on the center call 907-225-5900 or go to www.city.ketchikan.ak.us/departments/museums/totem.html.
Minutes from dock: 8 by taxi
Even by rain forest standards, Ketchikan is wet—more than 160 inches of precipitation a year—but that's okay: to truly understand this landscape, you have to understand water. The rain makes the forests so thick that if you lose a trail for an instant, you'll never find it again.
The traditional artworks of Southeast, the highly geometric paintings and carvings of the Tlingit and the Haida, are testaments to the water's all-powerful role. Ketchikan is the place to understand this art: the state's three best totem pole collections are here, at the Totem Heritage Center, Totem Bight, and inside the Native village of Saxman, a square mile contained within the larger Ketchikan borough. Totem poles, carved from cedar trees, aren't religious objects. They tell stories, ranging from family histories to myths to my favorite—tales of a great flood, usually shown by a bear perching atop a stark pole, seeking high ground.
And that brings me back to the water, because everything in Southeast comes back to water. I grab my snorkel, slip into a wetsuit, and head to the ocean, just south of town. Beneath the skin of the state, sea stars—like starfish on steroids, purple and red and orange—spread a dozen arms across rocks. Urchins wave their spines, and an abalone reminds me of the one my mother used to keep in
our aquarium.
Ten minutes to Alaska. Anybody could have done this, requiring only the most basic of city maps—a diner place mat would almost work—a few short walks in Sitka and Skagway and, in Juneau and Ketchikan, a taxi ride that costs less than a souvenir T-shirt.
I surface, clear the snorkel, fill my lungs again. Warm in my wetsuit, I let the water cover me while I listen for the breath of whales, the clack of eel teeth. The distant rumble of cruise ships heading out. As for me, popping my eyes above the water like a seal, I am home, home, home.
Edward Readicker-Henderson's newest book is a collection of travel stories,
Under the Protection of the Cow Demon (Walkabout Publishing, 2008).
Tips for picking the right Alaska cruise
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