The previous entry is the Dalton Highway and Coldfoot.
June 8
We were still above the Arctic Circle, so it was bright daylight when we left Coldfoot to travel the remainder of the Dalton Highway to Fairbanks early in the morning. This leg of the journey would be less interesting than the one on the North [...]
The previous entry is Prudhoe Bay.
June 7
At that time of year, you can only tell whether it’s early or late in Prudhoe Bay by looking at the clock. The featureless overcast and shadowless landscape annihilates the sense of space and time. After leaving Dead Horse, the highway stretches off unendingly into the flat [...]
The previous entry is Seward and Fairbanks.
June 6
Prudhoe Bay and the town of Dead Horse are at the far end of the Alaskan road system, some 250 miles of gravel road beyond the last service station at Coldfoot Camp (summer population, about 30) on the Dalton Highway. Until a few years ago, access [...]
The previous entry is Hubbard Glacier.
June 5
Debarkation was at 6AM. We actually had been scheduled to leave closer to noon, but opted for this earlier time. The noon passengers would be conveyed to Anchorage from Seward by bus; the 6AM passengers would go by train. Four hours on a train sounded better [...]
The previous entry is Sitka.
June 4
For the Skagway glacier paddling excursion, the tour guide noted that there’s one ultimate answer to any question about why something is the way it is in this part of Alaska: the glaciers did it. Why are there seals here? Because there’s a lot of fish, which are [...]
The previous entry is Skagway.
June 3
In retrospect, Sitka was the first time we went explicitly looking for wildlife rather than geological formations and coincidentally coming across wildlife. The Sitka shore excursion was “Sea Otter Quest and Raptor Center”, in fact, but first we first had to go through a procedure called “tendering” before getting [...]
The previous entry is Juneau.
June 2
Skagway was where I saw how important that extra stop or two on the 80-200mm f/2.8 lens is worth: when you’re on a pitching boat and want to take shots of wildlife, you really do need a very high shutter speed, especially with a 450mm film-equivalent focal length on the [...]
The previous entry is Ketchikan.
June 1
This was the first day that we went totally nuts with the picture-taking, running through one 1GB card and well into the second one. We had an exciting shore excursion scheduled in the morning — a helicopter landing on the Mendenhall Glacier just outside of Juneau — along with [...]
The previous entry is Sailing the Georgia Strait.
May 31
Ketchikan is where we first glimpsed bald eagles making lazy circles above the forested shore across from our balcony. I have no pictures of those eagles: they were gone before I got my camera ready. (On NPR yesterday, I heard them mention Ketchikan and caught [...]
The previous entry is Vancouver.
May 30
The passage from Vancouver to Ketchikan on the southeastern tip of Alaska takes more than 24 hours, so the first day on the ship was a day at sea. We spent the morning exploring the ship: the round-the-clock food is on the Lido Deck, the gym is on the [...]