The Inside Passage – To Alaska and Back

Sunrise over Baranof Island, Alaska

 

The Inside Passage, a waterway which passes places such as the Queen Charlotte Islands, Prince of Wales Island, Ketchikan and Glacier Bay, brings to mind romantic notions of hardened seamen, gold-rushes, explorers, shipwrecks and icebergs. These dramatic, isolated notions, that seemed to us ready only to retired captains of industry aboard luxurious cruise ships and frontiersmen with nothing to lose, is made eminently accessible by the BC Ferries and the Alaskan Marine Highway. This system of public ferries offers affordable and semi-comfortable transport through the Inside Passage, linking Seattle with the handful of towns of Southeastern Alaska and even some of the most remote towns in the Aleutian Islands in the middle of the Bering Sea. The ferries are very much public transport, each holding a cafeteria, numerous viewing lounges, private cabins, games-room and often a movie theatre. You are permitted to camp on the outside decks or roll out a sleeping bag in some of the lounges. The most populated routes run twice a week in the off-season and the least populated towns are visited once a week or even once a month for those in the Bering Sea. We learned to identify the numerous fishing vessels plying the Inside Passage, read about the adventurers of the goldminers who during the rushes used the Inside Passage, observed the historical cannery operations and the legacy of hand-loggers who prized the old growth forests wrapping the steep glaciated walls of the Inside Passage.

Lish onboard

That great, early conservationist and newest family hero, John Muir, undertook numerous trips up the Inside Passage between 1879 and 1890, and we'll defer to his descriptions rather than try to mimic his lyrical style:

The islands of the Alexander Archipelago, with the straits, channels, canals, sounds, passages, and fiords, form an intricate web of land and water embroidery sixty or seventy miles wide, fringing the lofty icy chain of coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook Inlet; and, with infinite variety, the general pattern is harmonious throughout its whole extent of nearly a thousand miles. Here you glide into a narrow channel hemmed in by mountain walls, forested down to the water's edge, where there is no distant view, and your attention is concentrated on the objects about you – the crowded spires of the spruce and hemlocks rising higher and higher on the steep green slopes; stripes of paler green where winter avalanches have cleared away the trees, allowing grasses and willows to spring up; zigzags of cascades appearing and disappearing among the brushes and trees; short, steep glens with brawling streams hidden beneath alder and dogwood, seen only where they emerge on the brown algae of the shore; and retreating hollows, with lingering snow-banks marking the fountains of ancient glaciers.... But now scenes are brought to view with magical rapidity. Rounding some bossy cape, the eye is called away into far-reaching vistas, bounded on either hand by headlands in charming array, one dipping gracefully beyond another and growing fainter and more ethereal in the distance. The tranquil channel stretching river-like between, may be stirred here and there by the silvery plashing of upspringing salmon, or by flocks of white gulls floating like water-lilies among the sun spangles; while mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over all, blending sky, land and water in pale, misting blue. Then, while you are dreamily gazing into the depths of this leafy ocean lane, the little steamer, seeming hardly larger than a duck, turning into some passage not visible until the moment of entering it, glides into a wide expanse – a sound filled with islands, sprinkled and clustered in forms and compositions such as nature alone can invent; some of them so small the trees growing on them seem like single handfuls culled from the neighboring woods and set in the water to keep them fresh, while here and there at wide intervals you may notice bare rocks just above the water, mere dots punctuating grand, outswelling sentences of islands.





While the scenery is undoubtedly the main feature of the trip for us, we were also absorbed into the culture of Southeastern Alaska, gaining an insight into a people who are somewhat unfairly represented to the rest of the world by the crazed Momma Grizzly (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/04/daily-show-takes-on-palin_n_670027.html), Ice-Road Truckers and King Crabbers. It was a big change-up in our trip, being separated from our trusty Prius and the protective bubble that it represents. We were no longer a traveling couple with our own agenda, but a part of a community moving on a common path, experiencing the same weather and scenery, and sharing plans and experiences along the way. These are some of the people we met:

• Mike and Scott, a bridge team participating in a four-day tournament staged on the ferry as it wove its way from Juneau to Prince Rupert and back via Sitka, Petersberg, Wrangell and Ketchican. These guys were way into their bridge, and were taking on some real battle-axes in their quest to capture the precious master points that are the currency of prestige in the bridge world. They played from 9am through 9pm, and during breaks would come up to our camping spot at the back of the top deck to watch the scenery and share a sneaky beer. When not playing bridge, one works for an NGO called Oceans and is passionate about protecting the last real wilderness in the USA, and the other works for the museums of Alaska, a job that involves traveling to all of the far-flung reaches of this massive state to advise and monitor the preservation and presentation of its rich cultural history.
• [Name withheld], a fascinating man who never donned a jersey throughout the trip from Juneau to Prince Rupert, notwithstanding that the temperatures were below freezing at times and the winds were upwards of 40 mph. He is a diver and fisherman, who specializes in collecting sea cucumbers that are sold to markets in China. Upon learning that we're from Western Australia, he told me that he had spent two marvelous weeks in Broome while he was a soldier in the Vietnam War. He was shot up and was scheduled to fly to Japan for surgery, but instead bordered a plane to Broome and went AWOL for two weeks, snorkeling and scuba diving before turning himself in at the base on Gardiner Island, south of Perth, from where he was flown back to Cambodia and not even missed by his platoon.
• Many school groups who were touring other schools for swimming meets and musical performances. One memorable night we were serenaded by a group of teens who formed a 5-person chorale that rendered a diverse repertoire from the Star Spangled Banner to Living on a Prayer and Don't Stop Believing.
• We made firm friends with a Kiwi who'd been living in Juneau for 17 years and currently runs a bike-rental business there. We also bonded with the bar-keeps at the Alaskan Hotel, where we were staying in Juneau and on the ferry back to Prince Rupert. We met a a trucker who preferred to use the ferries than grind out the miles on the Alaskan Highway and who also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the every disaster on the BC Ferries. We met characters in book stores and a family who was relocating from Vancouver (regularly voted the most livable city on earth) to Whitehorse in the Yukon (far less regularly voted such).