Landfall: Seward and Anchorage

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 than four hours on a bus, even if we didn’t have a chance to explore Seward.

The terminus for the cruise is Seward rather than Anchorage, quite possibly because it would take an extra day to sail around the Kenai Peninsula to get to Anchorage (thereby upsetting cruise line economics). Tides at Anchorage may also make landfall problematic. It’s easier to dock at Seward and move people to Anchorage overland; additionally, many passengers probably opted for the Kenai Peninsula packages.

The train we were on is a specially built sight-seeing train run by Alaska Railways. The cars had two rows of booths with seats facing each other and a table in between. In the middle of the train was a dining car, though there was waiter service to the regular passenger booths. We only had a light breakfast with the early departure (the Neptune Lounge for suite passengers was opened and stocked with its usual array of fruit, lox and pastries), and did get some expensive chilli and salad on the train. This was a sightseeing train: the car roof was high and glassed, like a bubble. Passengers could take in the amazing scenery as the train made its way up from Seward.

Seward and Anchorage

For the most part, the windows weren’t conducive to taking good photos, no matter what the guides say, though I suppose with snapshot cameras, the glass isn’t a limiting factor. I stood out on the open air vestibule between cars a lot of the time along with a few other people (the vestibule is also the smoking section): no glass between your camera and the scenery, and you can stick your head out a little to take shots facing forward or back or to look for gaps in the treeline to get the distant mountains. The woman with the D70 from the Sitka tendering operation was also there; she didn’t have her camera, but was birdwatching with some binoculars. One camcorder-toting idiot took this freedom too far. We were in the car right behind the locomotive, and, as we were passing through a series of tunnels, he thought it’d be a good idea to climb out of our car onto the narrow walk used by the train personel to get from the passenger cars to the motormen’s cabin. He was there for a few minutes before one of the conductors looked back from the cabin and noticed him.

The car’s waiter acted as tour guide, calling out particularly interesting mountain vistas with peaks rising next to mirror-smooth lakes and inland glaciers seen through gaps in the trees. The whole car was on the lookout for moose when we came to the swampy areas that moose like to hang out in. We got a few pictures through the windows with the train on the move, starting here. Near Anchorage, we saw a glimpse of Dall Sheep in the cliffs above the tracks. When I was sticking my head out the vestibule, I saw a bear near the tracks just ahead of the locomotive. I didn’t get a good shot in; at best, there was a blurry smeared dot that I can claim is a bear’s bottom as it was ducking into the bushes.

Taking pictures from a moving train reinforced the need for fast telephoto lens, with wildlife potentially popping up out of the brush. The train isn’t going to slow down and stop bouncing around for you. I wouldn’t have been able to get the moose shots without the fast lens to freeze the action.

Being a bit of an idiot, I didn’t charge up my D70’s batteries before this trip. In fact, I hadn’t charged it up since the day before Juneau, when I made sure to have full batteries for the glacier helicopter ride. DSLRs use relatively little power — you’re using optics rather than an electronic viewfinder to compose the shot — that I had close to 800 shots on a full charge before the batteries drained. (You sometimes forget the thing uses batteries, as you can go a month with the camera left on before you need to recharge.) Of course, I now had a dead battery amongt impressive scenery. Luckily, the woman with the other D70 was there and offered a loan of the battery from her camera; she wasn’t using it. As thanks, when we got to Anchorage, I dumped a copy of everything I had on my memory cards to her husband’s laptop: she made many of those pictures possible. (Being a relatively new user of her camera, I don’t believe she came with enough memory, only a 1GB CF (one of those 80x Ultra IIs!) and a couple smaller cards. We had blown through that amount of storage on a single day at Mendenhall Glacier or at Sitka shooting otters. They also didn’t seem to have any facility to transfer files from the cards to the laptop as extra storage; we were using my PCMCIA CF adaptor to do the transfer. I suggested they pick one of those up, as they were planning on coming back to Alaska before the end of the year. It’s a digital camera, and you should shoot prolifically: a 1GB card is only 7 rolls of film when shooting RAW, and you should think about taking an order of magnitude more shots, especially with wildlife, especially on wobbly platforms like trains and boats.)

The train spends the last few hours of the route on the shore of the Turnagain Arm, a part of the Cook Inlet just south of Anchorage (thought to be potentially the mouth of the Northwest Passage during one of Cook’s voyages of discovery). We met up with the highway, which runs a bit closer to the water than the rail at this point. This part of the landscape features forests of dead trees, clawing to the sky like skeletal remains. These trees are an artifact of the 1964 Anchorage earthquake: salt water flooded the plain near the Arm in a tsunami, killing the trees. And the salt preserved the trunks that would have otherwise fallen and rotted after these decades. As it is, the Arm has huge tides due to geography; the narrowness of the Arm also lends itself to tidal bores, which come on a predictable schedule. The Anchorage visitor’s center has a brouchure offering tours just to see them.

The train runs right into the Anchorage airport, with various cruise line personnel on hand to guide people to their next mode of transportation. A number of people were taking flights straight out. Others were on their own, and their luggage would meet them at the Holland America desk in the airport. The rest were gathered to a variety of buses to take them to a variety of Anchorage hotels. We were booked in the Anchorage Hilton overnight before our tour continued to Prudhoe Bay.

We met up with our tour director, Judith, for the first time. She would lead our group from the flight to Prudhoe Bay and back again, being our guide for the overland portion of the tour. We got pegged into her mind as the “newlyweds from Ohio on their honeymoon.” (We had been introducing ourselves as from Ohio. When I first heard this, I was a bit jarred, even though we’ve been in Cleveland for a while already, and perhaps still think of New York as where I’m from.)

We had time to wander around downtown Anchorage for a bit before our room would be ready. There was a strip of tourist shops a couple blocks from the hotel. One of the convention centers in the area was used by Holland America as the check-in point for people heading out on the Anchorage to Vancouver cruise, presumably an itinerary in reverse of the one we were just on. We saw our first real Starbuck’s near the convention center.

Besides the tourist stores, we found a very good bookstore with a nice used books selection across the street from the big downtown mall (J.C. Penny’s and other big department stores were there). I had brought two books with me to read, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, the first of the Dark Tower books, and The Smartest Guys in the Room, about the fall of Enron. I had blown through The Gunslinger and knew I was going to finish the Enron book in a couple of days. Luckily, the bookstore had a mass market paperback of The Drawing of the Three on hand for a buck. I picked that up. A week later, before our flight back to Vancouver, I would come back to the bookstore, trade in that paperback and pick up a trade edition of The Wastelands for a couple bucks. It’s a great bookstore, if only because it was there when I needed it to restock on my vacation reading.

We also ran across a real camera store. Yipee! I could correct a couple of photo equipment deficits that showed up on the trip so far. Most importantly, I had a choice of picking up a 67mm circular polarizer for the 18-70mm lens, or a stepdown ring to use the existing 77mm polarizer that was mounting on my big telephoto. I decided to go for the stepdown ring, figuring it was only $12 and I could pick up a properly sized polarizer from B&H or Adorama after we got home. This wasn’t the best move, as it proved hard to unscrew the polarizer from the ring to get it back on the 80-200mm lens, but at least I had could not take effectively polarized landscape shots with a wide-angle. They also had big Nikon lens there, but there was no call to drop money for such equipment. As said, it was a real camera store and not just a place selling film and development services to transient tourists.

A note on Anchorage architecture: most of the buildings look like they were built in the 1960s or 1970s. This would jibe with the fact that the earthquake destroyed much of the older city, and architecturally less interesting but seismically stronger ones rose in its place. Later on, we’d find out that there were standpipes all over the place, driven into the silt underneath the city in an effort to drain it. When the next quake comes, the silt will be less likely to liquify.

There was an ulu knife factory not far from the hotel. I’m not sure what the attraction of these knives are, but they’re apparently in every tourist shop in Alaska, usually with a video monitor showing disembodied hands chopping away at vegetables on a specialized cutting board with a bowl-shaped depression hollowed out of it. The idea is that Eskimos have used them for centuries and that you get the weight of the hand right above the food you’re chopping. I found it kind of gimicky, and did not see the demonstration hand work as fast on, say, garlic, as I can with my French-style blades and relatively proper technique. If knife design lineage is important, I can always go down to Chinatown and pick up a Chinese cleaver. But they’re popular: the regional airports have signs from the TSA saying that ulu knives must be in checked luggage, and I overheard an 80-year-old former Marine on our tour chat with someone about how he’s had an ulu for years and now he’s bought two others as gifts. I suppose it’d make a decent pizza cutter, though.

After we were able to check into the hotel, we rearranged the bags again. We could keep bags in the hotel during the next week for the overland portion. The ability to bring luggage to Prudhoe Bay and later to Denali was limited, and we wouldn’t see the formal dinner clothing anyway.

It was Sunday, and Anchorage has a farmer’s market/crafts fair in one of the downtown parking lots over the weekend. We wandered around a bit, and bought a yummy reindeer hotdog (prepared Polish style, which I think means that it’s grilled and not boiled) (we were hungry after the light lunch on the train). We realized that we’d forgotten about these two complimentary bottles of wine Holland American had given us as part of our cabin, as well as the packages of smoked salmon we had bought at Skagway. I probably left them at the airport train depot. Near the souvenir shops, we passed an ice cream parlor and got a cone of “bear tracks” flavor. We found out that the proprietor was from Rochester, NY, and had been living in Alaska for the past 30 years. He likes the Northeast for the fall folliage, but nothing else. Later, we ate dinner at the Glacier Brewhouse, arguably our first sitdown meal outside of the ship that we had in a week (the salmon bake doesn’t count). As noted, the ship’s food was very good, but it was nice to order from a real menu again. I had a root beer, and, like the food, it was great.

The next entry is Prudhoe Bay.

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