I'm losing interest in this "rehash my vacation" series of weblogs. There are other things I'd like to discuss. Such as Proust. Rather than spend the next several days relating our adventures, I'll compress everything into one day. It'll probably read better this way, anyhow.

We had a great time in Alaska, that the scenery is overwhelmingly beautiful, that the place is sparsely populated, but that life on-board a cruise ship is not my thing (the food mundane, the space confining). The best part or the trip were our stops in various towns.

Ketchikan
Our first port of call is Ketchikan.

Our former roommate, Eila, spent a year or two teaching high school English in Ketchikan. She hated it. She thought it too provincial.

For a cruise ship visitor, though, the town has a certain charm. A certain charm, that is, once you get past the ring of shops around the dock. As with all our ports of call, Ketchikan's docks are flocked by a gaggle of run-of-the-mill tacky tourist shops, filled with t-shirts and mugs and magnets and other pieces of junk. Each port has myriad jewelry stores, too, for some reason. ("Buy Tanzanite! the best gemstone investment in the world!")

Kris and I bypass these stores, wander north along the harbor into the residential area. We spend some time in a museum gift shop.

The excursion we've selected takes us as far from town as possible, down to the end of the only highway, onto a gravel road. At the bottom of a steep stairway is the George Inlet Lodge. We think we've signed up for a crabbing trip, but it turns out the crab pots are only ceremonial. We listen to the (interesting) patter about the history of the area, the geographical features. When we arrive at the crab pots, we pull them up and then take turns holding the crabs inside. Not what I'd expected. (I'd expected actual crabbing.) When we return to the lodge, we're treated to a mid-afternoon crab feast. Yum.

Interesting facts: Ketchikan, with 8000 residents, is Alaska's fourth-largest city (after Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau). There are no real lawns in Ketchikan (and many other parts of southeast Alaska), and the ballfields are built from sand and dirt, not from grass. Grass does not grow well in this climate, buried as it is under so much snow and ice for a greater part of the year. Ketchikan is an island city, and it seemed that most of the traffic to-and-fro was by float plane.

Links: Ketchikan Daily News, Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce, map of Ketchikan.

Juneau
The natives like to boast that the capital of the forty-ninth state is the only one in the country not accessible by road. The natives are conveniently forgetting our fiftieth state, Hawaii. Even so, it is strange that the highway that runs through Juneau only extends about twenty-five miles from start-to-end. (If this highway were extended twenty-five miles north to Skagway, Juneau would lose its claim to be inaccessible by road; Skagway connects to everywhere else.)

Most of our time in Juneau was spent on a whale-watching tour. We boarded a sight-seeing boat with about fifty other tourists, and headed out into Saginaw Channel. There we spent a couple of hours viewing the antics of several Orca, one of which seemed to be hovering within one hundred feet of a small fishing boat. Richard took many photos, and I took as much video footage as I could before my battery died. Still, it's hard to get a good shot of a whale. By the time you notice the beast, it's almost gone. And they're so distant, that their flukes appear quite small in any image.

After watching whales, we stopped to visit Mendenhall Glacier.

Interesting facts: The formerly dark and evil E. Alanna Malone lives in Juneau, and I had hoped to see her on this trip. However, when we reached Juneau, I was perturbed to learn that I hadn't bothered to transfer her contact information into my iBook's address book. (I had just assumed it was there.) Ppfftt.

Links: Juneau Empire (an on-line news source), map of Juneau, and another Juneau site.

Skagway
With a name like Skagway, you'd expect this town to be crusty. And it is.

During the winter, Skagway only has a population of a few hundred. During the summer, in the presence of tourists, that population booms to a few thousand. Skagway was a launching point for gold-miners at the end of the nineteenth century. They'd leave from here to trek up into the hills of the Yukon where they'd search for gold.

Now the only gold to be found lines the pockets of the visiting tourists, who marvel at the fact that the only reason this town exists is to market Tanzanite. And mugs. And t-shirts. The same Tanzanite, mugs, and t-shirts available in the other ports of call.

Can you tell I was not impressed?

Still, we did see some cool things.

The salmon were running during our cruise, and this was very apparent in Skagway. The fish were leaping in the city pond, they were leaping in the creek, they were leaping in the rivers we passed on our excursion.

The excursion we chose was rated as "moderately physically challenging". This seems odd as the only exercise was gripping the brakes on a bicycle as one coasted down 3000 feet over the course of eighteen miles. Kris and I took the White Pass and Yukon Railroad out of Skagway, up into the mountains — many spectacular vistas poorly captured on shaky video — just across the border into Canada. Then our group boarded mountain bikes and we spent an hour descending back into Skagway. The only real challenge was to keep the bike's brakes from overheating! (The ride was great fun, by the way; I doubt I'll ever get to do such a descent again.)

Interesting facts: Formed in 1900, Skagway was Alaska's first incorporated city. During the height of the gold rush, 20000 people lived here; now there are 500 permanent residents. Over 600,000 cruise boat tourists visit the city every year, and they all walk down Main Street looking at the tchotkes, wondering, "Is that all there is to Alaka?"

Links: Skagway News, Skagway Chamber of Commerce, map of Skagway.

Sitka
All of southeast Alaska is gorgeous. You're probably telling yourself, "Yeah, yeah — shut up already." Well, it's true, and Sitka is the most gorgeous place of all. Lush, green hills and mountains soar from the main island. Smaller islands — just as lush — are scattered about the harbor.

Kris and I hadn't planned to participate in an excursion in Sitka, but we were finding them to be the funnest part of the cruise. Plus, there was a kayaking excursion; since Kris refuses to camp, any chance I get to spend time with her in the outdoors is exciting to me. We chose to Kayak.

A jetboat ferried us to a boathouse in a small bay. After brief instruction, we were placed in a two-person kayak, and we joined our group for a three-mile paddle around the bay. The waters were calm and clear. As we skirted the shoreline, we looked beneath the surface at the seastars, the fish, the plant life. At the end of the bay, we were awed: the water seemed to boil as great schools of salmon skirted just below the surface, many of the fish leaping, leaping, leaping from the water. Amazing.

"Wow!" said Kris, after the trip. "That was the best excursion yet."

"Maybe you should try camping," I told her, but she only glared at me. I oughtn't push my luck.

Interesting facts: The residents of Ketchikan lie. According to official numbers, Sitka is the fourth largest city in Alaska (with nearly 9000 residents). Kethikan is only the fifth largest city. Sitka was discovered by the Russians in 1741, and of all Alaskan cities, it retains the largest Russian flavor. Its residents consciously cultivate their Russian heritage.

Links: official site, map of Sitka.

College Fjord
On our final day of cruising, we did not stop at any port. Instead, we cruised up College Fjord, a dead-end bay (as are all fjords) into which empty several glaciers. At the very end of the fjord sits the majestic Harvard Glacier.

Imagine a glacier as a river of ice. These vast sheets of highly-compressed snow behave in much the same way a river would; there are even visible rapids on the surface of a glacier when it skims a shallow, rocky surface.

Hundreds of feet high and a couple of miles wide, Harvard Glacier is a truly massive sheet of ice. On a hot day, like the one during which we visited it, the glacier calves icebergs into the sea. Huge, house-sized pieces of ice fall from the face of the glacier, displacing enough water to create waves that jostle our ship.

Though my battery is low (the battery is always low on this camcorder), I realize that the best chance to get footage of a calving glacier is to focus on a spot that has recently calved. I'm doing just this when Richard asks me to move for a moment; he's going to take a snapshot for some other passengers. The couple poses, but just as Richard snaps the shutter, I see the glacier begin to calve.

"It's calving! It's calving!" I shout as I leap into the photo, and I'm at the rail filming what I can. Richard has to snap another shot for the couple.

Later, Kris and I agree that Harvard Glacier was the best part of the trip.

Anchorage
Southeast Alaska is beautiful; south-central Alaska not so much. "This reminds me of Bend," I told Kris, referring to the high desert of eastern Oregon. The region isn't desert, of course, as it receives much rain and snow every year, but the terrain is rocky and mountainous, and the trees are not nearly so lush and dense as in the southeastern part of the state.

Our ship has docked in Whittier, a small village an hour southeast of Anchorage. The U.S. Navy once had a base here; it was the only coastal ice-free deep-water port they could find in the U.S. Now Whittier serves as a terminal for cruise lines.

Whittier's most notable feature — other than the fact that it is the only coastal ice-free deep-water port in the U.S. — is the 2.6-mile Whittier tunnel carved into the heart of a nearby mountain. For fifteen minutes every hour, traffic is allowed to pass north. For fifteen minutes every hour, traffic is allowed to pass south. If you miss your traffic light, you end up waiting forty-five minutes for your chance to pass through the mountain.

Between Whittier and Anchorage is the Turnagain Arm, so named because the waters are so shallow here at low tide. When Captain Cook sailed into the Turnagain Arm, the tide was high and he made good progress. Then the tide receded. For miles and miles, the water flowed out, and his ship was stranded. Until the tide returned. For miles and miles, the water flowed in, and he retreated. He named the reach the Turnagain Arm as a warning to future ships. The tidal bore here is extreme, and the difference between high and low tide can be as much as thirty-six feet. Several rescue operations occur in the Turnagain Arm each year as unsuspecting tourists walk out on what they expect is just a muddy flat, only to be deluged when the tide returns.

Anchorage sprawls. It's a medium-sized city — perhaps 250,000 residents — but it spreads over a disproportionately large area. After a week immersed in the natural world (and a cruise ship), it's strange to see civilization again. Strange to see Wal-Mart. Strange to see 7-11. And not strange in a good way.

In Anchorage, I buy a copy of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, the real-life story of a young man who decided he could live off the land near Denali, and paid for his hubris with his life. (This is an important lesson to me; after a week in southeast Alaska, I'm dreaming of moving up here and living off the land myself.)

As we're eating lunch, I call Nick and learn that Toto is deathly ill. He's taken her to the vet with a temperature of 105 degrees. She's not eating. She's not moving. The vet thinks there's something wrong with her liver. Suddenly I can think of little else. Kris and I have half-way hoped that Toto would somehow vanish so that we could replace here with a nice cat, but the truth is she's my daemon, my familiar. I love that cat, and would hate to loser her. I just wish she weren't such a pain-in-the-ass all the time. (Toto's making a fine recovery now, and is just as cranky as usual. "I don't know what's wrong," the vet said when I picked Toto up on Saturday. "Her demeanor has deteriorated over the last few days. She's very cranky." And I knew that meant she was well.)

On our final evening in Anchorage, we finally get the sort of meal I had been expecting on the cruise ship. We dine at ORSO Ristorante, a sort of Anchorage-equivalent of Portland's Higgins. I order a deliciously complex Osso Buco (lamb-based, not veal) with polenta and kalamata olvies. It's good to eat well again.

Other than that, Anchorage fails to impress.

"You know what's amazing?" I said one night after dinner. "This cruise ship is probably about the same size as the Titanic."

"No way," someone said. "The Titanic was huge. It was much bigger than this ship. It was the biggest ship of its day."

I granted that maybe this was true, but silent resolved to google the facts upon our return, and to post them, whether I was right or wrong.

The R.M.S. Titanic was 883 feet long, 92 feet wide, and 104 feet high (drawing 35 feet below the waterline). It weighed 46,328 tons.

The Carnival Spirit is 963 feet long and weighs 88,500 tons.

Basically, our cruise ship was quite comparable to the Titanic in many ways. (Both had a capacity of about 3500 passengers and crew, by the way.) This page has an interesting comparison of ship sizes. (With this sentence which, as a non-science major, puzzles me: "Some Large tankers are so long, they need to take the earth's coriolis force into account for navigation." Can somebody please explain?)

The largest ship in the world today is T.T. Jahre Viking: 1503 feet long, 226 feet wide, drawing 81 feet below the waterline. It weighs 565,000 tons.

I borrowed the video camera from Jeremy and Jennifer for this trip, and I picked up seven video tapes. "I've got one for each day," I told Kris' mother, only half-joking. In the first two days of the cruise, I've already filled two video tapes. Most of this is scenic stuff, stuff that I'll speed up in iMovie, and compress from hours to just a couple of minutes.

And that's it for the main Alaskan entries. There are still a couple of bits and pieces left, but now I can get on with my regular weblogging life...

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — The Best-Laid Plans   I thought it would be fun to train to run a half-marathon with Sabino. But then the running pained my bum knee. Argh!