Recently we returned from a trip to Alaska. The trip consisted of two parts – a 7-day cruise on board Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s cruiseship “Radiance of the Seas” from Vancouver to Seward and a 9-day pre- and post-cruise extension.
Our itinerary was quite traditional, described many times in English and Russian forums, so I will review it briefly and a little later.
Let me start with our personal Alaskan top list.
As a rule, travelers are mostly impressed by unique places which cannot be compared to any others, and which don’t exist anywhere else in the world (or are so difficult to get to that they might as well not exist anywhere else).
One such unique place is Katmai National Park, where we went for 1.5 days to watch brown bears in their natural habitat.
The Katmai Peninsula is a home of a few hundred bears, about a hundred of them permanently live in the area of Brooks Falls. Local rangers can recognize about 40 of them by sight. The busiest seasons in Brooks Falls are July and September, when the salmon go to their spawning grounds in the Naknek lake through the Brooks river, attracting many bears – which, in turn, attract even more tourists.
To get to the National Park you need to take a flight from Anchorage to King Salmon (Pen Air provides a few flights a day in the summer season), and from there it’s a 25-min hydroplane trip to Brooks Lodge.
The lodge is owned by Katmailand company, and consists of a few buildings – log houses for the guests, a canteen, cabins for food storage and for fish processing (yes, you can come here for fishing), and a so-called “bear school” where the rangers teach all newcomers forest safety. Safety there means being quiet and keeping away from the bears. If they approach, you should move slowly (no running) without turning your back on them, disappearing in the bushes and letting them pass. There they explained to us the difference between a grizzly and a brown bear, which is almost non-existent. Bears that live less than 100 miles away from the ocean are called brown bears.. They eat a lot of fishwhich is why they’re usually bigger than grizzlies.
A 2-km trail takes you from the lodge to the observation deck located just in front of the rapids where the bears catch salmon.
We arrived at the lodge early in the morning, stayed overnight and went back to Anchorage the next evening. I think that’s the best option, though you may stay just a few hours of a few days in Brooks Falls. We met some photographers who had been waiting day and night on the deck to get that perfect picture of a salmon jumping right into a bear’s mouth.
From our experience, the best time for bear watching is from 2 p.m. until late evening when there are less people on the deck and more bears on the falls (we saw a maximum of 8 bears, but we stayed there in late July, almost at the end of the season).
The waterfall was busy – bears catching fish and fighting with their competitors, the bigger ones pushing away smaller ones, and the losers waiting aside.
The second must-see in Alaska for us was a 9-hour boat ride from Seward to Northwestern Fjord, which belongs to Kenai National Park. There are few cruises a day (weather permitting), from the so-called small boat Seward harbor starting at 9 a.m.
To be honest, we were super lucky with the weather. Sunny, no wind, sometimes a little foggy – very beautiful. The fjord waters are abundant with life – killer whales, humpback whales, seals, rare birds – all this makes it seem like a real piece of wild nature, untouched by humans.
And the third highlight of our journey was a hike to Mendenhall Glacier. There are different companies offering tours to Mendenhall from the Alaskan capital Juneau, where our ship was docked for 9 hrs. We booked a private 7-hour tour with a guide, where most of the time was spent on the hike itself. The time remaining for Mendenhall sightseeing is usually about 30-40 minutes (the company also provides you with ice cleats, helmets and ice picks). It took us surprisingly short time to get to the glacier and the guide decided to show us the caves, which, as we understood, are usually not part of the tour. Once you walk through the arched entrance you get into the blue cave – and see this.
All the pictures have no filters, everything is like in real life.
As for the rest of the program
… the cruise started in Vancouver and included the following ports of call: Ketchikan, Hoonah, Juneau, Skagway, finishing in Seward. From Seward we rented a car and drove through the area around Anchorage, popped into Denali via the Denali Highway, went back to Anchorage and took a flight home.
Here are some more photos – a hydroplane flight from Ketchikan to Misty Fjord
The cruise ship sailing along the Icy Straight.
The ship approaching the largest glacier in North America – Hubbard Glacier
On the way to Denali National Park.
Alaskan sunset.
