Alaska! The last frontier! North to the future!
I used to think that returning home was harder than being gone and now I’m questioning that. Traveling has opened our eyes to many different things, people, cultures, and we wouldn’t trade that for the world. When returning home to your circle you’re guaranteed those people know your heart. You cannot expect that from people you’re just getting to know and meeting new people is a HUGE and important part of this adventure! I find my brain and heart at odds about what to do with this knowledge. Entering our third year on this adventure, August 26th, I find myself at a turning point and needing more from this experience.
I mentioned in my last post that our time in Alaska put this need on my heart. My emotions during our time in Alaska definitely ran the gamut and luckily I am well versed in the fact that multiple things can exist at the same time. I want to do more, provide more, and make more of a difference. I want to not only tell you about the places we are and what we do there, I also want to be more intentional about giving back to those people and places. I want to give back to them the way they have given to us. This post is my attempt at doing that and living my truth even more. Throughout our adventure we are discovering how similar we all are, and how different. I find myself returning to my desire to be the light I want to see in the world and make a change. I want to be intentional about this because I fear that if I don’t I may become cynical. I find myself getting frustrated by the copious amount of people we come across who are so insular they can’t see outside themselves. So unaware. Even though my learning tells me those people don’t matter, resigning to that mentality doesn’t align with my truth. I want to be the change I want to see in the world and I want to learn more about what that means and looks like to me.
Anchorage was a jarring experience for me. Before going to Alaska I had an image of what Alaska looks like. My experience in Anchorage was not that. It didn’t help that it rained the whole time. I was also impacted by the vast unhoused community that is there. When we were in Australia and New Zealand we saw everyday citizens, men and women, check-in on unhoused people. We heard them saying “just making sure you’re OK”, without any fear or hesitation. I feel that they did that out of general, cultural, concern for other humans. I wondered, is it because they don’t have the fear of getting shot there like we do in the states? Is that because not as many citizens have guns there? In Toronto we were impressed by how many people we saw hold others accountable for saying or doing offensive things. Is it because being shot for holding someone accountable isn’t the default response? I want to live that way. I want to be able to check in on a stranger, hold someone accountable and call out misdeeds that I don’t think are right , and I want to feel safe doing it.
My experience, being raised in the United States, has conditioned me to turn the other cheek to a stranger, not because I don’t care but because I’m afraid of how they might react. Not only because I’m female, although that is a huge part of it, also because in America, approaching a stranger in need, even if your heart is in the correct place, even if it is out of genuine concern and a desire to help the greater good and make the world a better place, you could get shot. I don’t know if this reflection was sparked by all the unhoused and mentally ill people we saw in Anchorage? The rudeness of several of the people we interacted with there? The low level pent up aggression you can feel just being in the US? Or, if it is because we’re in the US for a longer period of time than we’ve been in almost three years? Is this the culture of the US now? Please help me reconcile this conundrum.
I posted on my personal Instagram account that the land portion of our Alaskan tour left me wondering what we got ourselves into. I wasn’t sure if tours, to this extent, were for us. I could see the benefit of taking a tour and I didn’t think we’d do it again, at least the land portion. We only booked our flight to Alaska two months prior to going, which isn’t a lot of time in advance, so we decided to take a tour as the “easiest” way to see everything we wanted to see, especially since we had never been and hadn’t done a ton of research. It was really hard for us, going from doing what we wanted to do when we wanted do it, to not having any control of when we did anything, while simultaneously being surrounded by so many unaware people! Needless to say I said the serenity prayer several times during the land portion!
In spite of all of that, I’m grateful that we had one full day in Anchorage before we started the tour, mainly because we got in late the night before after having a 13 hour travel day from Toronto, and it would have been hard to wake up and get on the charter bus right away. We took advantage of our time there, in spite of the rain, and enjoyed our trolley tour. Here are a few of things that we learned on our trolley tour:
- We learned about the 9.2 earthquake that happened on Good Friday in 1964. Only nine people died! Our driver told us a story about a basketball game that was supposed to take place at the gymnasium at the high school that day but a local faith group petitioned to have it be postponed to another day. If that game had taken place everyone in attendance would’ve been killed because the gymnasium collapsed during the earthquake!
- There were several comments about how Minnesota is known as the Land of 10,000 lakes but Alaska has over 3 million lakes over 20 acres in size. So many they can’t even name them all.
- There’s a road kill lottery in Alaska for the 500+ moose that die in car accidents every year. It is a way to make sure that no animal is wasted.
- There are over 150,000 moose in AK. 8000 taken in hunts each year.
- We learned a funny story about a moose the Anchorage citizens call Buzzwinkle because he would wander around the neighborhoods eating fermented crab apples off of peoples trees and get a little bit inebriated. You should check out videos of him online.
- We learned about the underground home in Anchorage. I have never heard of anything like it. You can read more about it here: https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/2019/08/11/inside-the-quirky-underground-house-that-lies-beneath-lawn-skylights-in-anchorage/
- In 1915 the citizens put the name of the city to a vote. The name Alaska City won the vote until they found out that the Postal service ignored it because they had been calling the city Anchorage all along.
On Monday, July 12th, we officially began the land portion of our tour. We boarded our charter bus from the Hotel Captain Cook in the morning and began our trip for our first destination, Mt McKinley Princess Wilderness Lodge. We learned that the Princess company owns several lodges around Alaska, as well as the train that we took from Denali to Whittier. On our first charter bus ride the driver made a joke about how if you’re on the left side of the bus the mountain is called Denali and that if you’re on the right side of the bus the mountain is called McKinley. Interpret that as you will, the name has been changed several times. One of my complaints about the land portion is that we didn’t have very much time to do any of our own exploring once we got to the lodges. The first lodge was nice and it had one of the treehouses that was built by the Treehouse Masters which was pretty cool. The food options were pretty tasty and we were able to take a walk where we got a view of the river. That was about it before we had to have our luggage ready for pick up and an early departure the next morning.
The next day we got back on the tour bus and drove to Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge. We were really excited to explore Denali National Park, hopefully do some hiking and see some wildlife. Unfortunately by the time we arrived we only had enough time to grab a quick bite to eat before we were scheduled to go on the Natural History Tour through the park that was pre-booked for us. It was a good way to learn about the park and I was really excited to see my first Moose in the wild, but we weren’t left with any time to do any other exploring.
The third day of the land tour we boarded the Princess Rail for our 10 hour journey from Denali to Whittier where we were meeting the boat. The train was by far my favorite part of the land tour. Mainly because our host and bartender were so incredible, and also because we were able to see remote areas of Alaska that you can only see by train. Highlights were Hurricane Gulch, “The Hurricane Gulch Bridge is a 918-foot long steel arch railroad bridge that crosses Hurricane Gulch, Alaska. It is located at milepost 284.2, counting from Seward. At 296 feet above the Hurricane creek, it is both the longest and tallest bridge on the entire Alaska Railroad,” and all the glaciers. My favorite fact was from Ken, our host, was about the Nanana River. The Nanana River comes from Nanana glacier. Glacier fed rivers are cloudy and spring fed rivers are clear. The Nanana River flows north. The Nanana glacier has another river called the Tanana river and that flows south. That means that the glacier is perfectly positioned on the water divide. Ken calls it the Nanana Split. Hilarious! We were also serenaded by Katie our bartender who has a beautiful voice and sang the Alaskan State flag song for us. The time flew by and we learned SO much.
After reflecting on the land experience I realized it was very much like “New Student Weekend” (NSW). For those of you who don’t know what that is, before you move into the dorms at the University of Minnesota you have an opportunity to participate in NSW, which is kind of like camp, where the people in your cabin/camp are also going to be living in or near the dorm that you’re going to be living in. It is a way for you to meet people before you start university. Several of the people who were on our charter buses, tours, and train cars, we kept running into, so by the time we boarded the boat we already had made some friends.
When we boarded the boat on the 15th we were ready for some alone time. We are SO grateful to our travel agent who helped us plan the trip for encouraging us to splurge on a room with a balcony. I can not imagine if we had tried to save money by getting an interior room or one with just a tiny window, mainly because we had no clue. The first two days were cruising days where we didn’t get off the boat, and if we weren’t able to take in the sights of Hubbard Glacier and Glacier Bay from the comfort of our own private balcony, it 100% would not have been as enjoyable. Can you imagine trying to fight people on the public balconies for views?! No thank you! We needed a wee break from people at that point and we were grateful to be able to get it! I learned while we were on the boat that Princess is one of only two cruise lines that have permission to turn around in front of Hubbard Glacier so both sides of the boat were able to get a view of it. I thought that was cool because then it didn’t matter what side of the boat you were on.
I feel the need to state at this point that I am not getting any money for talking so much about Princess. It is just the company we went with. I had only taken one other cruise prior to this back in high school. It was a Royal Caribbean monstrosity that I had no clue about. To give you an example our boat, the Island Princess, had a capacity of 2,210, the Royal Caribbean mega ships can hold 7,600 people! I didn’t know what to expect. Throughout this experience, even though for the most part it was good, I was WAY out of my comfort zone! I am the “activities director” of our adventure. I have mentioned before, my job is recon, so that when Dave isn’t working I have a menu of activities that I have researched so that he can basically choose his own adventure. We were both very excited to go to Alaska for our first time and we didn’t know what to expect. I think there was a low level of pressure that I put on myself in that uncertainty, again because it is SO different from anything we had ever done. Even with our travel agents help it was really difficult to get any information about even what our package included. We knew that we didn’t book any extra excursions for port day but that was about it. That being said Princess was very organized and I realized quickly I didn’t have to worry about being left behind. Another one of my unwarranted concerns. It was basically the blind leading the blind. 🤣
One thing that helped was connecting with my friend who had been on a similar cruise with a different company and stopped in the same three port cities we stopped at. She was able to give me tips for things to do and see in each city. This helped us to not be worried about not booking additional shore excursions. That was priceless knowledge which I am very grateful for. I’m so glad we didn’t book anything extra. After cruising for two days straight my body was wondering what I was doing going from 20,000 steps a day to maybe 2,000! By the time we arrived in Skagway, our first port stop, I was ready to explore. It was awesome to be able to go where the spirit moved us, see and do what we wanted, and not having to worry about anything other than getting back on the boat in time.
Juneau was our second stop. We knew that we wanted to go see Mendenhall Glacier so once we got to port we found a local tour company that would give us a ride there. It was perfect. We left at 9am and had a couple hours to do a little hiking. We were able to see the glacier and Nugget Falls, which my dad would call a cascade. 😉 The transportation was a trolley style bus and the driver gave us some fun facts about Juneau. One of them was that there are between 15,000 and 30,000 eagles in Juneau. And on the drive to the glacier and back we saw tons of them perched on the light posts along the Mendenhall River watching for and catching salmon at low tide. Then we were back in town in time to see the second half of the World Cup Finals between Spain and Argentina, GO SPAIN! It was a great day.
Our third port stop was in Ketchikan on a rare warm sunny day! “Ketchikan gets about 100 sunny days each year. Because it is one of the rainiest cities in North America, it usually gets around 1,292 hours of total sunshine annually. For the remaining days, you should expect to see clouds or rain. It rarely gets above 70 °F in Ketchikan. You can expect about 5 to 40 days per summer to reach or exceed this mark, depending on the year. Most summer days stay in the 60s.” The day we were there it said it was only 72 °F but it felt warmer. Ketchikan is an adorable fishing town that has a creek that runs through it where you can view the salmon. We only saw a couple when we were there but it was fun to walk along the creek and see the salmon ladder. We also visited the Totem Heritage Center and the Tongass Historical Museum.
One thing that I found cool was that all three ports that we stopped at you can only get to by boat, plane or birth canal. It is mind blowing how remote and untouched so much of Alaska still is. There are only four states that don’t have billboards, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont. You can definitely tell what a difference that makes in your capacity to really take in the beauty!
I came to learn by the end of our cruise that on our boat there were 893 crew, 48 nationalities, and that the Captain was from Italy. Every single staff member we interacted with from our steward, to the bartenders, the activities directors to the bathroom staff, were incredible! Everyone was friendly, and kind and helpful. Some of the staff that we interacted with on multiple occasions remembered our names and our drink orders. The service and the cleanliness was top notch. Even though we left the land portion feeling like we probably wouldn’t do it again, we left the cruise portion feeling like we could. It’ll be a very long time because it certainly wasn’t cheap, and we are glad we did it! We hope to return to Denali National Park some day and have more time to explore, and hopefully actually see the mountain, which I know is a rarity. We are very grateful for everything we learned, the perspectives we gained, the lifelong friends that we met. It is amazing how a joint experience like that can bring people together.
For now, we’re excited to be in Vancouver for a month as we both needed a couple days to recover from all the time around people after getting off the boat. We’re grateful to be back here after two years and to have this extended period of time to settle in, explore and get back into a routine. I am hoping to find some volunteer opportunities and already have an informational meeting set up for tomorrow! I also signed up for an Urban Futures walking tour on Thursday. It is organized by a PHD student at the University of British Columbia. I’m excited to learn more about how Vancouver has achieved the acclaim of having “the smallest carbon footprint of any major North American city.”
Thank you for taking the time to read this post and walk along side of us during this journey. Thank you for your support and encouragement throughout this whole process. We truly couldn’t be thriving the way we are without you. Sending you all a universe of love wherever you are!
❤️Alison and Dave
